In Rome of a previous era, I once shared an apartment with a woman who said she acted on orders from a higher power. Never did she specify, let alone identify, this higher power, but she did have among her belongings what she called her “sacred settee,” a ferociously green piece of broken furniture that looked like the sawed-off end of a sofa. From this holy icon she would say prayers in Latin that to me at least bore no resemblance to anything I knew in Catholic parlance.

Raven-haired, she smelled at times like a damp, dead bird. Long-haired, I looked like Einstein or Freud on a youthfully unkempt day. We were the oddest of couples. She, an Italian from northern Trento employed in a boutique; I, an American journalist trying to make his way in an alien city, which Rome still was in 1976. Our tiny apartment was on Via Sistina, only a short walk from the offices of the newspaper where I was then employed. Her boutique was even closer, three doors down from our dank and dimly lit building whose corridors smelled of cooking gas and cat pee.

She was a creation of the kind I have never met before or since. Her “prayers” concerned the fate of the atmosphere and the well-being of her pussy, which I learned was not a cat. She was involved with at least three men at once and on several occasions asked me to stay out until very late because she would be “entertaining” one, two, or three of her male guests, a ritual followed by prayers.

For what? I asked once.

Forgiveness, she replied.

Madness?

Not then. Not in that Rome, described in Italian as a City of Miracles, another way of saying a city of excess, exaggeration, folly. There were no true social or legal rules. All was instead approximate.

My roommate’s sexual and devotional proclivities were much the opposite of mine, and she mocked me.

I was at the time in a state of romantic turmoil and had chosen to keep my sadness and confusion at bay by walking from the newspaper’s office near the Trevi Fountain to a tiny, narrow street about the width of two entangled lovers, appropriately called Vicolo del Divino Amore, the Nook of Divine Love. There I would unbutton my red coat and sit on the cobblestones, thinking about how to get my lost lover back. I never did, and over time the coat turned more than a little ashen.

That did not stop some hecklers from hissing comunista, since the Italian Communist Party was at its peak in 1976, the largest “Red” party in Western Europe. To wear anything red was to goad those petrified that the communists would eventually come to power — a possibility the United States vehemently denounced with openly meddlesome vigor. In the end, the so-called Italian Eurocommunists disappointed my possessed priestess by falling just short.

What a sentimental fool you are, said my roommate in words laced with cheerful vulgarity. She could not get enough of lewd anatomy and its vocabulary.

More than once she recommended I “just get laid,” and offered to oblige. Or she could send me to a good friend or two. My pining, she scoffed, was the behavior of a child, something her higher power apparently confirmed. I declined these gestures, still deeply in love. I also refused an offer that we take a walk down the street, where a tony brothel, once one of many, still did business. She knew this was true since she had worked there before holiness overcame her.

In all she said, I took her at her word because I had no choice and she spoke with a kind of resigned passion that suggested she’d come to be who she was because she’d gleefully given up all pretense. “Nothing so often betrayed can maintain a shred of illusion,” the brilliant but forgotten American author James Salter wrote of Rome, and by extension its inhabitants. How many times my roommate had been betrayed, I realized I could not count, but also I knew this very fact had come to produce her “faith” and settee.

If my memory of that year is correct, we shared the Via Sistina flat for seven months, from late May through the early part of the next year, at which time we were jointly evicted. The owner wanted the place back for her newlywed daughter and husband.

My roommate was livid. She’d be forced far from her store. “They’ll never get a good fuck here, and forget a baby,” she spewed. “I’ve cursed the place.”

She probably did, though I begged her to leave me out of her spells, despite my youthful sentimentality when it came to love and romance. She snorted invective but agreed.

And poof! I never saw her or heard from her again.

Until two years later, when a friend of mine, who knew my Rome history, suddenly fluttered his newspaper and asked me to look at an item in a smudged lower column.

It was a brief account of a suicide made noteworthy only because of the scrawls police had found on a wall, the most benign of which were published. “Madwoman,” read the account, dispensing with all nuance.

Nuance that I had come to know, learning, in the City of Miracles, to never place Rome and madness in the same sentence.