We are at Marco's house. We are sitting within the house but outside, too. We are sitting in a great square hole in the middle of Marco's house, a courtyard open to the air, surrounded on all sides by roof and rooms. The earth colored tiles on the roof slope downward on all sides. They cover a square porch that surrounds the courtyard, making it difficult to tell where the roof of the porch ends and the roof of the house begins. Marco's house is like an onion: garden, porch, rooms, porch, courtyard. He has a word for this place, but I have forgotten it already. He is trying to explain it to me, but I am not paying attention.

"It makes plenty sense," he tells me. "You see where the suns falls now? We are in shade." We are; our backs are against the welcome cool of white rock that makes around much of the edge of the courtyard like a bench, or perhaps large steps. He points to our left. "In the mornings, the sun falls there," he says. "Never here. It is always cool here."

"Do you see the gutters?" I look, then, at the lip of the roof and see none. I am about to tell him so when I think about it instead. It has become a puzzle to me. "The water falls off, straight off," he says. "Fush!" He makes a movement with his hands. He pats the stones we are sitting on. "It falls here, and then down to where our feet are. You see the lip? You sit in my gutter!" He laughs loudly at this, and I can tell he's told others this story in this way. He points at the corners of the courtyard: "the drains are there, and there, and there and there," he says. "It is very easy to clean the leaves out of them."

"It is very quiet here," I tell him. He nods to me, and then lets us rest a little against the end of the day. The sound of the small fountain in the corner steps carefully to the front, and somewhere up in the square of blue and white above a plane goes invisibly past, betrayed in its passing only by a low trembling of the air.

"We should eat," he says, and pulls me to my feet with two hands. We stop for a moment under the roof but still outside to linger, looking back out from this cool and shaded place into the slant light of the old day, still bright against the white walls.

"I would like to see it when it rains," I say. I know this will add some days, or maybe weeks to my stay here.

"Alright," Marco says, testing a new word. "That is alright."