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magazine called Lightnin', and its publisher had been the Reverend Elmer Williams. Father Salvaggiani had really been Monsignor Campanati, at that time a kind of wandering chairman of the Association for the—was it the Propagation of the Faith? His elder brother, Raffaele, had indeed died of gangster violence in Chicago, but as a loud and annoying voice of decency and incorrupt politics. I had been in Chicago, staying at the Palmer House, but not to write about brave crusaders against cruel racketeers. I had come to see the Manet and Monet and Renoir collection of the Chicago grande dame Mrs Potter Palmer, so much I remembered. To write about it? To buy from it? Sell to it? This had disappeared from my mind. I saw clearly still the agonised face of Raffaele, whom I had, though with certain qualifications, admired but who had never much cared for me. This had everything to do with my homosexuality, which, in the manner of decent Latins, he believed was a matter of free election in brutal sinfulness. Carlo was never so censorious. He never saw my homosexuality in, as it were, action; he was not inclined to be interested in stories retailed about me. The sins of libido he knew of were strictly limited to the heterosexual sphere and were two in number. If men desired little boys or each other, that was because they were deprived of the company of women. Or perhaps, though rarely, they might have been set upon by exorcizable demons of buggery. As for those with a holy vocation who had chosen the celibate way, God's grace sustained them like quinine, and that was that. Of such is the kingdom. I Campanati were a highly moral family, except for the youngest boy, Domenico, whom my sister married. The only daughter, Luigia, became a very martinetish mother superior.
           Which hospital had it been? Had the miracle, if it was a miracle, been after all so spectacular? Was the disease in my story the same as the disease in fact? Might it not have been some disease not quite so lethal, its course reversible under the influence of a powerful benign will united to the wavering will of the sufferer? I had, of course, no real need to puzzle all this business out; I was under no obligation at all to help turn Carlo Campanati, a good but greedy man, into a saint. But there was this niggling matter of the truth. The term truth did not flood my eyes as did faith and duty and sometimes home, but a man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth, and, though my days in the service of language were over, I could not deny the other, timeless, allegiance. But I was less concerned now with that deeper truth, the traditional attribute of God, which literature can best serve by telling lies, than with the shallower truth we call factuality. What had happened in Chicago? I was not sure.
           There were records. There had been witnesses. They could be found, consulted, though with trouble. But the real question for me was: how far could I claim a true knowledge of the factuality of my own past, as opposed to pointing to an artistic enhancing of it, meaning a crafty falsification? In two ways my memory was not to be trusted: I was an old man, I was a writer. Writers in time transfer the mendacity of their craft to the other areas of their lives. In that trivial area of barroom biographical anecdotage, it is so much easier and so much more gratifying to shape, reorder, impose climax and denouement, augment here, diminish there, play for applause and laughter than to recount the bald treadmill facts as they happened. Ernest Hemingway, as I remembered well (but what do I mean by remembering well?), reached a stage where, even though he had virtually ceased to produce fiction, he was totally in thrall to its contrivances. He told me, and he was only in his fifties at the time, some years my junior, that he had slept with the beautiful spy Mata Hari and that she had been "good though a little heavy in the thigh." I knew,