I don’t want to believe this story. It seems designed to make me pity her. Yet there’s an embarrassment in her face that suddenly makes her look very young, like a child who has admitted to a misdeed. “Are you going to try again?” I ask.

“Maybe sometime,” she says. “Maybe after my career.”

“That might be a long time,” I say.

“Probably not,” she says, her eyes set on something in the distance. “I’ll have a few good years, and I’d better make enough money to retire on. I don’t know what other job I could do.”

I consider this. “So what will you do with yourself afterward?”

“I don’t know. Go to Morocco with my father. Have kids. Whatever people do.”

I think of those pictures of my uncle in couture evening gowns, his skin milky, his waist slender as a girl’s. His graceful fingers hold roses or railings or billets-doux. His hair hangs long and thick, a shiny mass down his back. He now wears turtlenecks and horn-rimmed glasses; there are veins on the backs of his hands, and his beautiful hair is gone. I wonder how this can happen to Aida. She seems eternal, the exception to a rule. Can she really be mortal? Even when she fell off the bridge and chanted fever-songs, I knew she would survive to see international fame. In the glossy pages of Signora Cellini’s magazines and those of women all over the world, she will never, never change.