Paris

Paris is a recurring setting in Marco Carrera and Luisa Lattes’s long, interrupted relationship: a city from which Luisa writes, to which Marco travels, and where a call reopens a love they had treated as irretrievably distant. Their Paris encounters turn separation into clandestine intimacy, but the relationship’s later letters also use movement and immobility to measure the different lives they have made.

Correspondence and Distance

On March 15, 1983, Luisa writes to Marco from Paris using her father’s typewriter. The letter begins by imagining his uncertainty over who is writing: she has put only her initials on the envelope, and wonders whether he will look for the signature or recognize her at once. Her playful suspense gives way to the plain fact that she is the one writing, and that she has not appeared since the move to Paris. The city is therefore present first as an address across which a familiar voice returns after an absence, not as a fully described landscape.

The letter’s form makes distance tangible. Luisa addresses Marco directly from Paris, while the envelope and signature become part of the exchange’s small drama: he must identify the sender before he can receive the message. In later years the correspondence continues to connect Paris with the possibility of reunion, but it never erases the intervals of silence or the separate lives on either side of the letters.

A Call at the Lutetia

Years later, Marco is in Paris for a conference and staying at the Hotel Lutetia. He has thought of Luisa over the intervening years, but those thoughts have largely remained resigned reflections on what might have been. Each August, she reappears at the beach in Bolgheri with her husband and, over time, children; each summer makes her seem further removed from the young woman he had adored. In Paris, however, he suddenly experiences her as close and possible. During a break in the conference, he calls her at the Lutetia.

Marco tries to frame the call as a last test: if the number has changed, if she does not answer, or if she cannot meet, he will not call again. The test fails almost immediately. Luisa answers on the second ring and arrives at the hotel bar half an hour later, seeming to him exciting and intact, as if she has come directly out of the past. Paris has converted a distant possibility into a face-to-face encounter, but it has not made the past simple. The two had not properly spoken since they stopped writing, even before Marina entered Marco’s life; an earlier attempt to reach Luisa in Paris had ended in Marco’s mistaken arrest at the Italian-Swiss border and his detention and transfer to Rome. That episode had helped persuade them that a hostile fate would thwart every attempt to be together.

After their meeting, a walk along Rue d’Assas and an apparently innocent conversation lead them back into a passionate relationship. They begin seeing each other repeatedly, often arranging their meetings around conferences Marco can attend within reach of Paris. As the affair develops, the practical concealment becomes more elaborate: at first they sleep in different hotels, then take separate rooms in the same hotel, until they share a room in Lyon. Paris is the point from which this renewed relationship is launched, even when its later encounters take place elsewhere.

The Vow and Its Contradiction

The reunion does not simply restore the earlier romance. Both Marco and Luisa are now married and have children, and their meetings involve deception. The narrator describes their encounters as having lost any innocence they might once have possessed. Their growing closeness also remains shadowed by the belief that the relationship cannot be allowed to reach its fulfillment without overturning their lives.

That contradiction takes its clearest form on June 24, 1998, in Lyon, not Paris. During the football World Cup final, while France plays Denmark, Marco and Luisa spend the night in room 554 of the Collège Hôtel, eating a club sandwich on the bed and watching an old Jean Renoir film on Arte. Afterward, as celebrations continue outside, they make a vow of chastity. They listen together to Sinéad O’Connor’s version of “Sacrifice,” sharing one Walkman earphone each, and persuade themselves that refusing to make love means they are betraying no one and destroying nothing. They have kissed only once, seventeen years earlier, on the night Irene drowned at the Mulinelli, and they swear that they will never make love.

The vow is less a resolution than a form of self-denial that lets the relationship continue while claiming to contain it. Paris had made their return to each other possible; the promise made elsewhere reveals how difficult they find it to live with the consequences of that return. Their story repeatedly separates physical opportunity from permission, and the vow turns that separation into an explicit pact.

Paris in the Later Letters

In a letter dated September 7, 2001, Marco asks Luisa whether she changed her mind because she was offered a contract at the Sorbonne or because he had been too rigid and absolutist. He recalls her leaving through two different explanations and describes the preceding year as one in which they were together, broke their self-imposed rules, and reached the heart of what they wanted: to be together. Yet when the time came to return to ordinary constraints, he says, they became lost among practical reasons they had not needed to confront during the years apart. His letter presents their failure not as an inability to endure distance, which they had managed for decades, but as an inability to make a shared life work when it became possible.

Marco also describes the force behind his pursuit. The previous year, he says, he was desperate, a survivor wandering around Europe to spend weekends with his daughter. Rome, Florence, Munich, and Paris had become equivalent destinations because he felt he had nothing more to lose. The statement makes Paris one point in a broader geography of his movement, but it also clarifies that his return to Luisa took place within a period shaped by desperation and family separation, not by uncomplicated romantic freedom.

In 2018, Luisa is living at 23, Rue du Docteur-Blanche, in Paris. Marco replies that he will answer her because their discussions of the hummingbird, emmenalgia, and why they were not together cannot simply disappear. At the same time, he draws a boundary: he does not intend to start writing again and cannot afford to begin another relationship with her. Paris is once more the address from which their connection speaks, but this time Marco’s answer insists that correspondence need not become a renewed partnership.

Movement, Stillness, and Separation

Marco’s 2018 letter notices that Luisa has moved again and speculates about why, including whether she has separated from the Jewish philosopher or moved for work. His questions are presented as guesses rather than established facts. From Luisa’s repeated changes of home and relationships, he turns to a larger contrast between movement and stillness: contemporary life, he argues, prizes change for its own sake, treating those who move as courageous and enlightened and those who stay as fearful or dull. He is pleased that Luisa has recognized the courage and energy required to remain still.

The city’s recurrence gives that contrast a concrete shape. Luisa’s Paris addresses belong to a life of repeated movement, while Marco’s response stresses the meaning of staying put; neither position is reduced to a simple moral verdict. Their letters let the two compare the changing paths they have taken without pretending that comparison can undo their choices. In 2018, Paris still holds their exchange, but it no longer promises a meeting or a shared future. It becomes the setting for an acknowledgment of enduring thought and a refusal to restart the relationship.