United States

The United States appears as both a point of origin for poker variants and a distant home from which Giacomo Carrera returns to join Marco Carrera’s final gathering. Through these brief but distinct references, it connects the rules meant to contain gambling losses with the international reach of the family’s last farewell.

Poker and the American Variants

In explaining the names of poker games, Marco says that “Texas” and “Tennessee” are Italian distortions of the same game’s American name. He distinguishes the Texas variant as the most popular and describes it as deliberately designed to regulate winnings and losses, so that players would not be ruined as they commonly were in Tennessee. The explanation gives the United States a specific place in the novel’s gambling vocabulary: it is the source of the names and the competing systems through which Marco interprets risk.

That system fails in practice on the night Marco plays against Dami Tamburini. Marco says that he went further from ruin than ever, while Dami began to lose and kept replaying in an attempt to recover his money. The contest narrows into a personal reckoning between the two men, and Marco says that in less than twenty minutes he won an extraordinary amount. The contrast between a variant designed to limit losses and the ruin that overtakes Dami makes the American reference part of the scene’s irony: rules can describe risk without preventing it.

Giacomo’s Return

The United States is also the place from which Giacomo travels to attend Marco’s final gathering. Twelve days before the gathering, Miraijin Carrera promises to arrange for the people Marco wants to see to come, and she succeeds despite the short notice. Giacomo arrives from America, joining Luisa Lattes from Paris, Marina Molitor and Greta from Germany, and Daniele Carradori from Lampedusa. Oscar, Miraijin’s boyfriend, comes from Barcelona; Rodrigo, the nurse who will physically carry out the assisted death, and three Spanish escorts are there as well.

The range of arrivals makes the house at Bolgheri unusually international. Giacomo’s journey gives the United States a concrete role in that final assembly: it is not only a distant setting invoked in Marco’s account of poker, but also the home across the ocean from which one of his family members comes to be present. In the closing gathering, distance is crossed so that Marco can share his remaining time with those who have mattered to him.