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“I am sick of all the words, all the empty words! You talk about love but when it comes to this life here and now then it’s nowhere to be seen. Not even when Mom died did you say anything to comfort me. I have never heard you say anything nice about my mother.”

“You know as well as I how Alice died,” Ulrik Hindersten said, “but I choose not to talk about it. But if you want to, then go ahead.

“We loved each other,” Ulrik Hindersten said after a long period of silence, “you know that. I have not met anyone after . . .”

“I am talking about the hypocrisy,” Laura said. “On the one hand you valorize the Middle Ages, when you would find living then a hell. You have always wanted to be the best, despised by all colleagues and scholars. You have squashed students who have asked for guidance because you were afraid they would outshine you.”

Unconsciously Laura assumed Augustine’s role in close combat with Petrarch. She had read his Secretum and underlined long passages. Now everything was mixed up in a bitter concoction.

“A lack of inititative and indolence are names we today assign to modesty,” Ulrik Hindersten countered with a smile where Laura discerned a streak of pride.

The battle raged on for a month. Ulrik Hindersten’s “Vallis clausa” as he often referred to the little valley where they lived, was transformed into a battlefield. They clashed with increasing frequency. Ulrik was in his essence, this was his domain. Laura fought with the implacability and rebelliousness of youth, but she became worn down over time.

She started to imagine that Ulrik was fanning the flames of the conflict, that he loved it for its own sake but also because he wanted to make Laura in his image.

“You must be toughened,” he said.

“I don’t want to be like you!” she cried.

“You are like me. It’s you and me. You are my blood.”

“But also my mother’s!”

“I don’t think you should talk so much about Alice. You are stronger than that and you have the talents that are required.”

“She saw beauty. You only see the dirt. You don’t really see the olive trees, the cypresses and stone walls, they are only a stage set for a fantasy image. It is Petrarch’s landscape, nothing more. You don’t see the farmers who harvest the olives and struggle up the steep slopes to prune the grapevines, you talk to them but you have no words for their world. You laugh and they smile back but out of sheer politeness. You can’t even climb a ladder without a quote by Cicero or Seneca. You think you can capture everything on a page but the sweat on a farmer’s brow is a form of writing you can’t read. For them the ladder is a ladder, for you it’s a metaphor.”

Laura moaned out loud and rocked from side to side. The memories from Tuscany were ambivalent: the upsetting discussions but also the unparalleled closeness she had experienced with her father. It was as if the endless debates had brought them closer than ever before.

He revealed things about his childhood, details about the grandparents she had never heard before. Ulrik’s father, a high-ranking official at the National Customs Service, had been dead for many years. Laura had only a diffuse memory of a large man in a sick bed. Grandmother Hindersten had left the family when Ulrik was five years old. Why, and what became of her, was a taboo subject, but Laura did hear that she had gone to Denmark with a Dutch artist and had settled somewhere on Fyn. News of her death at the end of the seventies was received with indifference by her father.

She got up, stared at the mound of books. She realized that she could not set fire to them where they were, that it could spread to the house. She retrieved the wheelbarrow from the storage and started carting all the books over to the middle of the lawn.

It took a long time but Laura paid no attention to the fact that she was getting tired. To the contrary, she felt as if the soreness of her muscles freed her of a pain that had been too long in her life. The stack of books