no matter how much he desired, as it would be his very death and the death of all he loves. An Ebreo has no choice but to reconcile himself to survival and all the awful demands, choices and emotional scars that come along with it. The forever sadnesses, as Nonno called them, which forevermore stain the heart and mind.

Though Nonno never spoke of it, he had come to believe that there were two types of sadness: temporary sadness and the forever kind. Temporary sadness may burn very hot at first—for years even—but, over time, it was a sadness that the mind could reconcile and a pain the heart could forgive. Forever sadness, on the other hand, was that sadness that created in the heart permanent embers: cinders of anguish that smoldered away in perpetuity and could at anytime burst into flame, igniting a pain nearly as fresh as the day it first arrived.

The awful truth that life had taught Nonno was that forever sadness was born of guilt: that the pain that forever blistered his heart was not caused by randomness or the force of God, but by cowardice—that if only one had acted with greater courage or cunning the outcome could have been different. This was why the death of his granddaughter, of all the sadnesses that Nonno endured, and there were many, lay heaviest upon his heart. For he could have chosen differently; he did not have to let his granddaughter become a courtesan, especially one to the Duke of Tuscany.

As Nonno now lifted the tray of food and headed toward his grandson, he saw there, glowing before the fire, a young man in the throes of sadness, a sadness, Nonno feared, that would last forever.

“Eat, Davido,” said Nonno, as he set the tray of food on the footstool near where his grandson sat. “You must eat something.”

Davido did not respond. He sat before the fire, comatose, still in his blood-and-tomato-stained shirt. The fire crackled before him, throwing glimmers of light across his beaten face. His cheeks were red and raw, his right eye and lips puffy and swollen.

Nonno stood there for a moment waiting; assessing the room, the fire, his grandson, the situation, his own memories. “Do you think,” said Nonno, breaking the extended moment of silence, “that I was not young once? That I do not know this pain you are in? I do, Davido, I do. More than you will ever know. But you must remember, child of my child, life is long and the winning is in the living. Now eat.” Nonno pushed the tray a bit closer to his grandson. “You will need your strength. We leave for Pitigliano in the morning.”

Nonno began to leave, but then stopped. He didn’t want to say it, to so state the obvious, but perhaps his grandson needed to hear it from him. “You are an Ebreo, Davido, and she is a Cristiana.” And then he turned and shuffled from the room, knowing that after that, nothing more need be said. Nonno was only twenty or so feet away, opening the door to his bedroom, when he heard the tray come crashing to the floor. Nonno paused for a moment, contemplating what he should do. Then he stepped inside his room and shut the door. Some things, he knew from experience, can only be dealt with alone.

Michelangelo was in his mid-sixties when he met and fell in love with a beautiful and charming fifteen-year-old boy named Cecchino dei Bracci. When Bracci suddenly died a year later, it was said that Michelangelo fell into such a fit of despair that he wrote more than fifty love poems dedicated to the boy and sculpted the boy’s elaborate tomb—from marble—in less than a month, an unheard of feat. Certainly, the spasm of creativity that now impelled Davido was hardly on par with that of Michelangelo, but it was driven by the same despair. That horrendous feeling that something holy and sacred, something that one values more than his own life, has been ripped from him, and the mind, in a confused and desperate effort to maintain sanity and provide an outlet for the grief, erupts in a torrent of creativity.

And so it was that Davido lay upon the warm stones before the fire in absolute anguish. In his fit, he had knocked the tray of food over, slid from his chair and collapsed to the floor. What a coward he considered himself. He had just stood there while that monster