61	IF I WEREN’T GOD

I’m seventy, and I ought to listen to you, my dear Stefano, when you say, “Give it a rest, pull the blinds down, quit worrying.” I’ll pretend I don’t know that you more than anyone depend on me, make requests, even demands.

About Gianpiero, about Sergio—and about my mother, my sister, my aunt Angiolina—I no longer worry. But there are still so many people around me I care about. Maybe too many and maybe too much.

I always think I have to provide, provide for everybody. I am the provider. But that would make me God.

I think it is just and important to concern oneself with others. Charity. To redistribute privilege, even on a small scale. But I have a feeling rather of obligation than of pleasure and choice. And the suspicion that all this may conceal a vast presumption. I try to convince myself: you’re hardly God the father, but you act as if you were God the father.

Perhaps I ought to stop giving a hundred euros a month to the Moroccan in the street below my apartment to pay for his marchette—in the sense of pension contributions, not “hustlers.” Sometimes I say to myself: I’ll quit. But then I never do.

I will, though. Tomorrow I’ll quit. Quit playing God.