The Jewels of Paradise

interrupted again to ask Dottor Moretti

“This writer makes the observation that it’s not hard to make a medicine that is more effective than a sugar pill.”

Cristina excepted, her sisters had little respect for priests, hated the Vatican as only Italians could hate it, and thought the Church should not be allowed to comment on politics.

Dottoressa Caterina Pellegrini was a woman in her thirties with a certain experience of life. To find herself sitting across from a man who confessed that his “secret passion” was the reading of history was not an experience with which she was much familiar.

No new ideas, no new politics, no influx of young people with houses and jobs, only paper on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and plastic on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday, God and the garbagemen rested. It would make a stone weep; so would the fact that most of her friends believed that it all ended up in the same place, anyway, and the whole thing was merely a scam to enable the company that did the collecting to raise the price.

Most of the other people at the table had learned Italian to facilitate their reading of opera libretti; thus few of her colleagues could hold a conversation in that language without descending into wild declarations of love, terror, remorse, and, upon occasion, bloodlust.