CHAPTER 101: THE DRAWING WHEN YOU KNOW

The drawing Luca made of Aria while she knew he was drawing her was finished on a Thursday afternoon in December, three days after he had started it at the kitchen table on the Tuesday when he had said he wanted to see what the difference was between the drawing when you knew and the drawing when you did not know. He showed both drawings to her when the second one was done, laying them side by side on the kitchen table with the focused analytical attention of someone presenting the results of an experiment they had been thinking about for several days. She looked at them. They were both of her at the kitchen table. Both in December light. Both from approximately the same angle, slightly to the left of the table's center, which was where Luca usually sat. Both drawn with the same technical precision, the same quality of line, the same careful attention to the specific details that made the subject herself rather than a generalised version of herself. The differences were subtle bu

CHAPTER 102: THE TWELFTH YEAR BEGINS

The twelfth year began in September with the particular quality of a twelfth beginning, which was the quality of something that had been going long enough to have stopped being remarkable in the sense of requiring remark and had become simply itself, the way the flower bed's twelfth return was not an event but a continuation, not an arrival but the next instance of something that had been happening every year for twelve years and that was, in its twelfth year, the fullest expression yet of what it had always been going to be. Aria sat in the kitchen garden on the first morning of September and did not count. She had counted on the first morning of the tenth year, in the kitchen garden, with the particular urgency of a round number that invited counting. She had counted more briefly on the first morning of the eleventh year. On the first morning of the twelfth year she sat with her coffee and her notebook and simply was in the morning, which was different from counting and better, th

CHAPTER 103: THE EIGHTH BOOK FINDS ITS ENDING

The eighth book ended in January of the twelfth year, which was four months later than the three months she had predicted in December and entirely consistent with the pattern of her books, which always took longer than the prediction and always, once done, required exactly the time they had taken, the extra months not a delay but a necessary addition, the months in which the book found what it needed that the earlier version had not yet found. What it found in those extra four months was its ending, which had been the problem from the beginning, the book having known its beginning and its middle more clearly than it knew its end, the end having refused to announce itself with the clarity she had been hoping for and waiting for and occasionally trying to force and finding that the forcing produced nothing but the evidence that the ending was not ready to be forced. She told Clare in December that the ending was still not there. Clare said: What is the book waiting for? She said: I d

CHAPTER 104: MARCO'S THURSDAY

There was a Thursday in February of the twelfth year that was different from all the previous Thursdays in the household's long and rich history of Thursdays, and the difference was not in anything that happened but in the quality of the attention that the household, and specifically Aria, brought to it, the attention of someone who had been writing for twelve years about the ordinary things and who had, across twelve years of that practice, developed the particular form of receptivity that allowed the ordinary thing to reveal itself fully when it was ready, the way a photograph developed in a darkroom, the image always there in the negative, requiring only the right conditions to become visible. What the Thursday revealed was Marco. Not the Marco she did not already know, not some hidden version or unexpected depth that had been concealed from her across twelve years of Thursday dinners and household observation and the specific attentiveness she had brought to every person in the

CHAPTER 105: THE EIGHTH BOOK IN THE WORLD

The eighth book was published in April of the twelfth year, in the spring that was the twelfth spring of the flower bed's return, and the publication had the quality of all the book's publications across the twelve years, which was the quality of something going out into the world that had been made carefully and honestly and that would find the people it was made for through the channels that such books found people, which was the slow warm channel of one person giving it to another because they recognised in the other person the need for exactly what the book contained. The response began arriving in May, and it arrived from the specific people Clare had predicted it would arrive from, which was the people who made things, all the different kinds of people who had found their form and who were living inside it and who had been looking, some of them for years, for the articulation of what that experience was like from the inside, what it felt like to have the form become the thinki

All Chapters of Nanny For The Ruthless Mafia King : Chapter 101 - Chapter 105

CHAPTER 101: THE DRAWING WHEN YOU KNOW

CHAPTER 102: THE TWELFTH YEAR BEGINS

CHAPTER 103: THE EIGHTH BOOK FINDS ITS ENDING

CHAPTER 104: MARCO'S THURSDAY

CHAPTER 105: THE EIGHTH BOOK IN THE WORLD