Todos los capítulos de Nanny For The Ruthless Mafia King : Capítulo 71 - Capítulo 77

The column had been running for eight months by October of the fifth year, and what it had made, beyond the individual pieces that were each complete in themselves, was a readership of the specific kind that Aria had not fully anticipated when she agreed to write it: people who returned not just for the subject but for the voice, who wrote to her through the publication's contact system to say that reading the column on the first Tuesday of each month was something they had incorporated into their lives the way you incorporated a practice that sustained you, not an event but a rhythm, something that arrived with regularity and that you could count on to say something true about the experience of being alive in the middle of your own ordinary life. She had not known, when she began it, that writing at regular intervals about the same general territory from different angles would produce something that a single book could not produce, which was the experience of time itself, the sense

The fifth book began in October of the fifth year, not with a plan or a structure but with a sentence, which was how all the previous ones had begun, each of them starting as a single sentence that contained the whole of what needed to be said without yet knowing how to say it. The sentence was: I have been becoming someone for five years and I am still in the becoming, and I think I will always be in the becoming, and I think that is the point. She had written it in the kitchen garden in September, in the notebook she kept for things that arrived before she was ready for them, and she had not known then that it was the beginning of a book. She had known it was true. She had known it was the most concentrated version of something she had been trying to say across four books and eight months of columns and five years of living inside the question. She had known it was the sentence she had been writing toward since the first morning in the kitchen with the blue crayon, when she had s

In September of the sixth year, on the anniversary of her arrival at the Rossi estate, Aria sat in the kitchen garden with her coffee and her notebook and counted what had happened. She had not planned to count it. She had come to the kitchen garden because it was September and September in the kitchen garden had its own quality now, the herbs going to seed, the wall warm in the morning light, the first suggestions of autumn in the air, and she had sat on the stone border with her coffee as she had done in every September since the first one and had found herself, without planning it, adding things up. Six years. Five published books, the fifth one finished in April and published in August, smaller and quieter and more personal than any of the previous four and received with the particular response that personal books received when they were honest: slowly at first and then deeply, fewer letters but heavier ones, the weight of each one indicating that someone had read it the way yo

In October of the sixth year, after fourteen months of work on the second section of the piano piece, Luca played the first two parts of it. He did not announce it with the formal declaration he had used for the first section's performance at his birthday party. He was older now and had refined his sense of occasion, understanding that some things were better offered than announced, better placed quietly in the middle of ordinary life than set apart as events. He simply appeared at the piano room door on a Tuesday evening when Aria was reading in the chair by the bookshelf and Damien was at the desk with his papers, and he said: I can play the first two parts of the second section. Do you want to hear them? They came to the piano room. He sat at the bench. He did not adjust it: he had grown into Damien's height setting over the summer, one of the small seismic shifts that happened in a child's body and that you noticed first not in the child but in the changed relationship between