Renata

Renata is a young woman from Venice and Richard Cantwell’s beloved. Her decisive role is to make love a lived counterpoint to the Colonel’s military identity: she meets his declarations with warmth, but also brings into their intimacy the losses and resentments left by war. The novel gives her presence through both Cantwell’s admiration of her beauty and her own direct way of speaking about affection, disappointment, and the past.

Identity and First Appearance

Renata’s first prominent description emphasizes her youth, height, dark hair, and striking profile. Her hair is disordered by the wind, and her complexion is described as pale with an olive cast. This portrait is shaped by Cantwell’s attention: he greets her with an extravagant compliment, and the narration lingers on the qualities that make her beauty arresting to him. She arrives apologizing for being late and saying she thought she might miss him, establishing the meeting as something she has wanted to keep.

The contrast between her youth and Cantwell’s age is part of their relationship’s visible circumstances. He is a fifty-year-old United States Army colonel; she is presented as a young woman, but the supplied scenes do not establish her precise age. The difference does not prevent their closeness, though it helps explain why their speech sometimes turns to the names and roles they use for one another. The text does not reduce Renata to Cantwell’s description of her: her later remarks show a woman who can answer affection in her own terms and speak plainly about what she has endured.

Love and the Language Between Them

Cantwell tells Renata that he loves her, while she says she does not know exactly what his repeated declaration means but likes hearing it. Her response is neither a rejection nor a simple echo. It shows that the phrase matters to her even as its meaning remains something they are negotiating. Their intimacy is sustained through such exchanges: his language is emphatic and familiar, while she tests, accepts, and reshapes it.

The name Daughter becomes one of their affectionate forms of address. When Cantwell uses it, Renata approves, and his response makes clear that the word has emotional weight for him too. Elsewhere, she imagines the possibility of being his honey dog, but explains that she is, more simply, a girl from the town who loves him. She would rather be his straight girl. The exchange lets her acknowledge the playful language between them without allowing it to replace her own account of who she is or what she feels. Her affection is not merely an answer to his declarations: she states it directly, in a voice that is both tender and self-defining.

A Past Marked by Violence

Renata’s love exists alongside a grievance rooted in wartime loss. She says that those she cannot forgive killed her father and burned the family villa on the Brenta River. She also recalls seeing a German officer shoot pigeons in Piazza San Marco. These recollections join private bereavement to a public act of violence in a place associated with her home. Her resentment is therefore not presented as an abstract political position; it is connected to her father, the destruction of a family home, and a scene she herself witnessed.

Cantwell asks her to try to understand his own attitude: after having killed so many, he says, he can afford to be kind. When she asks how many he has killed, he gives the number as 122 sure kills, excluding possibles. The exchange places their histories beside each other without making them equivalent. Renata speaks from the losses inflicted on her family and the town; Cantwell speaks as a soldier whose own experience of killing shapes his response. Their attachment persists across that divide, but the conversation makes clear that affection does not erase what each knows about violence.

Acts of Attention and Care

Renata’s attentiveness appears in small, practical moments. When a second waiter brings an old U.S.O.D. blanket sent by Gran Maestro, she is speaking with the gondolier, whose hair is also being blown by the wind. The blanket enters a scene of shared company and movement through Venice, linking her to Cantwell’s circle without making her a passive recipient of its gestures. Her attention remains with the gondolier as the blanket is delivered, while Cantwell acknowledges the message from Gran Maestro.

At another meeting, Renata is waiting at the table at the exact time she had promised. In the hard morning light crossing a flooded square, she immediately asks whether Cantwell is all right, then asks whether he has gone to all their places in the market. The sequence joins concern for his condition to the ordinary shared itinerary of their life in the city. Her question about the market recalls that their relationship has its own familiar places and routines; they are not together only in declarations or scenes of heightened emotion.

Renata also recognizes gentleness in Cantwell. After a conversation with Ettore, she turns toward the Colonel, places both hands on his hand, and tells him that he has been gentle. The remark offers a counterimage to his military identity: the man who speaks of killing can also be perceived by her through tenderness. It is a brief exchange, but it makes her judgment of him more than admiration of his rank or appearance.

Affection Beside Conflict

The relationship is tested, though not dissolved, when Renata asks whether Cantwell still cares for her after he has fought. He answers that he loves her more than before, if that were possible; she says that seeing what happened has made her love him more as well. The exchange places his capacity for violence beside the bond they claim, rather than treating those sides of him as unrelated. Renata’s response does not explain away the fight or convert it into a general ideal. It records how she interprets this particular encounter within their relationship.

The novel’s portrait of Renata therefore rests on a productive tension. She is seen as beautiful by the man who loves her, but she also speaks as someone with memories and judgments of her own: she names her losses, responds to Cantwell’s language, cares about his well-being, and articulates her love directly. Her affection does not cancel the past that makes forgiveness difficult, just as Cantwell’s military history does not wholly define the tenderness she recognizes in him. In her scenes, intimacy is neither an escape from their histories nor a cure for them; it is the continuing exchange through which two people with different experiences remain close.