“Sfinge”—Lelia's recurring image

“Sfinge”—Lelia's recurring image is the name Massimo Alberti gives to an enigmatic picture of Lelia: hair slightly disordered, eyes lowered, and an expression that seems to conceal more than it reveals. First formed from a photograph before he has truly met her, the image returns in the living girl's gestures and influences how he reads her reserve. Its meaning remains unsettled, poised between apparent coldness and the emotional intensity that her music makes audible.

Formation of the Image

Before arriving at La Montanina, Massimo has seen Lelia only once, from a distance, and knows her chiefly through two photographs shown to him by his friend Andrea Trento. One depicts a carefully groomed eighteen-year-old looking toward the camera with a smiling, almost conversational expression: «va bene così?» The other presents a markedly different figure, with slightly disordered hair and her head inclined forward so that her eyes cannot be seen. The contrast gives Massimo not one stable likeness but two possible selves.

The second portrait grips him. The lowered gaze could belong to someone conscious of grave guilt, someone facing a sad destiny, someone concealing love, or simply a young woman absorbed in thought. The narration preserves these alternatives rather than resolving them. Compared with the first face, this one seems younger in appearance yet deeper in soul: a girl of fifteen who is morally and intellectually as mature as a woman of thirty. Even the decision to make such a portrait strikes Massimo as evidence of an unusual, forceful intelligence. The image is therefore not just a description of features; it is an interpretive puzzle built from the difference between the two photographs.

Massimo is captivated, but does not tell Andrea that this strange, tempting creature, with her air of a pensive and sad sphinx, might suit his character and make him happy. For many days the figure returns insistently to his imagination. When Teresina leads him toward the villa, the two photographed faces flash through his mind again, and the question of which Lelia he will encounter begins to form—though he decides not to indulge it. The recurring image thus precedes the relationship: Massimo approaches an actual person already burdened with possibilities he has drawn from her portrait.

Music Against Stillness

At night, Massimo hears piano music from the villa and recognizes the possibility that Lelia is playing. What reaches him does not confirm the sorrowful, closed-off figure he has imagined. He hears an improvisation of striking expressive force: pain, but also a thirst for love and joy. The music shifts through lament and prayer into renewed tenderness and ardor. Its movement gives the sphinx image a counterpoint: the face with hidden eyes seems unreadable, while the playing exposes an intensity that Massimo can hear but cannot yet explain.

This contrast does not simply prove that his imagined portrait is wrong. The music still carries grief, and the alternation between sorrow, prayer, and passion makes Lelia no easier for him to categorize. Instead, it widens the gap between visible composure and inward force. The image works through that gap: it attracts Massimo precisely because it withholds a definitive account of the person he hopes it represents.

The Image in Lelia's Gestures

The imagined sphinx becomes a brief, startling presence in person when Marcello Trento says that Lelia has sacrificed herself for him and his poor wife. Lelia reproaches him with «Papà!» and runs toward the dining room. At the threshold she stops, turns, and stands with her hands on the doorposts. Massimo recognizes the feared face: the marble sphinx with lowered eyes. The vision lasts less than three seconds; then Lelia raises her eyes and gives a forced smile before saying that she must go so Marcello can have breakfast. The brief duration matters. The image appears as a momentary reading of her posture, not a permanent mask: the lowered gaze and rigid stance are followed by a change in expression and an ordinary practical remark.

Later, on a narrow path, Lelia answers Massimo coldly and steps aside to let him pass. She waits motionless, eyes lowered and marble-like. He thanks her and passes without looking at her, trembling with anger and wondering what she has imagined about his intentions. He interprets her behavior as deliberate hostility, even considering whether she thinks he means to court her. Yet her earlier music and the fire in her gaze remain in his mind, making that explanation inadequate. The sphinx-like stillness is legible as distance, but not as its cause; Massimo can observe the gesture without knowing what it means.

Repetition and Uncertainty

A later exchange makes the distance between the remembered performance and Lelia's present behavior particularly clear. When she asks whether Massimo means Norma, she tries to find the passage at the piano, strikes a wrong note, and attempts others at random. She murmurs «non la so» and takes her hand from the keyboard, only to try again distractedly and fail a second time. Massimo is about to say that she knew it the night before. The scene places the passionate music he heard beside her inability, or unwillingness, to reproduce it now; it offers no explanation that would settle the discrepancy.

Still looking at her palm, Lelia then asks whether his Benedetto was a heretic. That abrupt question adds another turn to the encounter without clarifying the enigma. The recurring sphinx image gathers force from such incomplete readings: the lowered eyes and stillness invite interpretation, while music, a forced smile, failed notes, and an unexpected question unsettle each interpretation in turn. For Massimo, the image is at once an idealized portrait and a recurring obstacle to understanding Lelia. Its significance lies less in revealing a hidden answer than in sustaining the tension between what her composed face seems to say and what her changing actions allow him to imagine.