Marco's return to gambling

Marco’s return to gambling is presented as his most consequential rebellion against grief: after years of keeping his passion for play beneath the respectable obligations of family life, he seeks out Dami Tamburini’s clandestine games. The tables do not promise to repair his life. With Miraijin asleep nearby, Marco instead finds in gambling a reason to go on—and, at last, a reason to stop in time.

The Reappearance of a Suppressed Passion

For years Marco had tried to keep gambling out of his life, treating it as a pleasure sacrificed to the demands of family. But the passion had never disappeared; it waited beneath the more respectable priorities he had chosen, repeatedly requiring effort to suppress. His return marks a reversal in that arrangement. Rather than continue sacrificing the game, he lets it back in, and the narrative identifies this as the rebellion that saves him.

The return is not framed as an uncomplicated recovery. Marco’s attraction lies precisely in what the game can expose in him: a willingness to abandon the self-image he has maintained and approach the disorder he once kept at a distance. Gambling becomes a chosen counterforce to mourning, not because it erases loss, but because it gives him a form of intensity strong enough to coexist with it.

From Tennis Invitations to Hidden Games

Marco’s route back to gambling runs through his renewed life in Florence and his tennis partnership with Dami Tamburini, a wealthy Sienese heir with interests in Brunello di Montalcino, property between Florence and Siena, a mineral-water source on Mount Amiata, a family bank, and a foundation devoted to twentieth-century iconography. Marco had donated his mother’s photographic archive to that foundation. After he and Dami won a charity doubles tournament, Dami began inviting him to dinners at his villa in Vico Alto; as their tennis partnership continued, the invitations became more regular.

The dinners initially appeared to be elegant social occasions rather than gambling nights. Adele, who was still alive at the time, worried about the invitations because Dami was known for turning his home into a clandestine gambling den. Marco reassured her that the dinners he attended were not about gambling. Yet when he hinted at his own history as a player and his wish to revive it, he began receiving a different kind of invitation.

That first gambling evening did not resemble the ruinous world Marco sought. Its guests played roulette and Chemin-de-Fer casually, often among people he already knew from the dinners; the atmosphere was relaxed, and Miraijin’s hammock in a study was accepted with tenderness. The contrast clarified what Marco was looking for. Casual play did not satisfy him: he wanted the danger and potential loss that the respectable gatherings excluded. From the existence of these safer games, he inferred that there must be a more serious, more secret kind.

The Clandestine Table

The more dangerous evenings were protected by layers of concealment. The casual games served as a cover for the real ones, while secrecy around the invitations kept their existence hidden. The circle included officials and other influential guests whose position could help shield the gambling den from police intervention. Dami had not simply introduced Marco to a private pastime; he had led him into a carefully obscured world that Marco had inferred and actively wanted to find.

At these games, participants used aliases whether or not they knew one another outside the room. Dami called himself Drago; other players adopted names such as Desperado, Lady Oscar, and Rambo, while unfamiliar gamblers remained known to Marco by their chosen identities. A notary was present to handle transfers of property when needed, and a doctor could provide assistance in emergencies. The arrangements made the stakes tangible: this was not merely the sociability of the earlier dinners, but a setting where losses could have serious consequences.

Marco accepts the atmosphere and the means by which he has reached it. The games satisfy his desire to cross the boundary between a controlled, respectable life and the possibility of losing more than he can afford. Their significance for him rests less in winning money than in the surrender of his carefully maintained self-image: he seeks the exposure and risk that the safe, public-facing games had withheld.

Miraijin at the Edge of the Game

Marco brings Miraijin with him and leaves her in a study in her hammock. She usually sleeps while he plays. When he checks and finds her awake, he stays beside her and rocks the hammock until she falls asleep again, then returns to the game. Her presence is not incidental to the episode: it accompanies his return to a compulsive pleasure while repeatedly calling him away from the table.

Marco wins often at roulette, Chemin-de-Fer, and Texas Hold’em, but victory is not the measure of his success. The child gives him a reason to leave at the right time, something gamblers ordinarily fail to do. He is not looking for a single win large enough to set his life in order. He is looking for a reason to continue living, and the obligation to check on Miraijin supplies a boundary within the very activity that could otherwise erase one.

Hanmokku and the Meaning of the Return

Marco’s battle name is Hanmokku, a name that fixes his re-entry into gambling as a new, recognizable phase of his life. The alias belongs to the hidden table, where ordinary identities give way to chosen ones and risk becomes explicit. Yet the name does not make Marco’s return a simple transformation into a gambler without ties: Miraijin remains nearby, and his visits to her interrupt the game.

The episode therefore holds rebellion and restraint together. Marco recovers a pleasure he had long denied himself, but the point is not to win his way out of grief or regain control through money. The game offers him an encounter with risk; Miraijin gives that encounter a limit and a reason to end. His return is consequential because it makes gambling serve, however precariously, not an escape from life but a reason to continue it.