Miraijin arranges a final gathering for Marco

Miraijin arranges a final gathering for Marco in the transformed living room of the house in Bolgheri, summoning relatives and friends from across Europe for a short-notice reunion as he approaches death. The plan changes how Marco understands the end of his life: he first receives the invitation as an astonishing, almost impossible wish, then accepts it as something he can give to the people who will survive him. Their arrival makes the house a place of hospitality and deliberate celebration, even as Marco’s failing body and the purpose of the gathering remain present throughout.

An invitation Marco had not imagined

Twelve days before the gathering, Miraijin raises the idea in the living room at Piazza Savonarola, which has been turned into a hospital room. Marco has not heard from Luisa for many years and cannot remember exactly how many. He knows that he was the one who ended their relationship; in recent years she has written letters, but he has never answered. His estrangement from Giacomo has followed the opposite pattern: Marco wrote for years and received no reply, until he gave up. The two absences have different histories, but both make Miraijin’s proposal startling.

When Miraijin asks whether he would like them to come, Marco does not know how to answer. He recalls the Latin phrase Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, though not who said it, and remembers its meaning as an expression of his own sense that nothing is worth wanting. The phrase gives shape to his first response, but it does not settle the matter. Miraijin’s question has opened a possibility he had not considered: after a life already lived as it has been lived, he had never thought to improve its final days by bringing these people back together.

Miraijin shifts the meaning of the invitation by explaining that it is not only for Marco, but for herself and for those who will remain. She is thinking about people she has never met, or barely knows, as well as those close to her. She knows her grandmother, Greta, and Carradori only vaguely; Giacomo and Luisa are people Marco has told her about, not people she has seen. Still, she is concerned for them. Once Marco understands the gathering as a gift to the living, his helplessness recedes. He also recognizes something shameless and almost obscene in the idea, an attraction that belongs to its audacity as much as its kindness. He finally agrees, while doubting that anyone can come on such short notice. Miraijin simply says she will take care of it.

A house filled across distance

She does. Giacomo comes from America, Luisa from Paris, Marina and Greta from Germany, and Carradori from Lampedusa. Oscar, Miraijin’s boyfriend, travels from Barcelona; Rodrigo, the nurse who will physically carry out the task, is there as well, along with three Spanish members of the escort. The house at Bolgheri has never been so international. The list of arrivals gives practical form to the scale of Miraijin’s effort: people who have been separated not only by geography but by long silences are gathered in one place, with very little notice.

Guido, the nurse who had cared for Marco in Florence, cannot join them because his mother is disabled and he cannot leave the city. His absence is a relief in one sense: as a devout believer, he would not have approved of what is planned. Yet the reason he cannot come is painful and real, not a matter of indifference. He understands that Marco will never return to Florence. Marco’s decision not to resume treatment and his move to the sea at the end of May had already made the direction of his life clear, even if Guido had not expected the end to come so quickly. At their parting, Guido is overcome and begins to cry. The reunion therefore includes an absence that confirms its stakes: Marco’s departure has already begun to divide those who care for him from the life they shared.

Hospitality in the presence of death

Marco insists that the gathering must not collapse into a performance of suffering. Emotion is moving and difficult to contain, but he makes a point of hiding his own so that the occasion will not become a display of self-pity. If the plan is to mean anything, he believes, it must take the shape of a celebration: a vital, joyful experience, even if it cannot be wholly joyful. Miraijin organizes the guests as living people who will return to the corners of the world from which they came, and arranges for their comfort accordingly. Their rooms are carefully prepared; the meals include fresh fish, homemade pasta, and vegetables from the garden.

Marco cannot taste any of it. He has been unable to eat for months and receives nutrition through a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube placed in his stomach. Yet he still helps Miraijin prepare dinner and the following lunch as if he were hosting a reception. His participation makes the gathering more than an event arranged around him: even as illness has taken away an ordinary pleasure and a basic bodily freedom, he remains involved in the work of welcoming others.

The menu draws on knowledge Marco has kept for decades. He remembers Giacomo’s taste for seafood, Luisa’s for scampi, and Marina’s for buffalo mozzarella. These details come from a past roughly thirty years earlier, but Marco assumes that preferences endure, unless illness has imposed restrictions. In this case, he is the one who might have had to enforce a ban, sitting at the head of the table and consoling the others with his feeding tube. No one is denied a favorite food. The small decision to let everyone eat what they like becomes a measure of good fortune within a scene that cannot disguise how little time Marco has left.

The discipline of a gift

The gathering carries dangers Marco knows he must resist: cynicism, emotion, and victimization, with envy close behind. His habitual sarcasm belongs to the old world he represents, but Miraijin’s new world, as the narration presents it, has room for irony and not for cynicism. At the meals and even during the guests’ arrival, Marco is closely supervised so that he does not deflect the occasion with cynical jokes, surrender to emotion, or turn the contrast between his death and their pleasure into a grievance. The guests are eating prawns while he is dying; the gathering could easily be read as an unbearable spectacle. Marco instead holds to the thought that it is a gift he is giving them.

That gift places a demand on him. Their presence must become a beautiful memory, and he wants to make it possible for them to feel well there. His resolve to be perfect does not erase the sadness or make the scene uncomplicatedly joyful. It gives the final gathering its form: attention to rooms, food, old preferences, and the feelings that might overwhelm the people around him. Miraijin brings the separated guests together; Marco, by helping receive them and refusing to make his death the only subject of their time, helps turn their reunion into an act of care that can continue in memory after they leave.