Donna Fedele and Lelia Camin's friendship

Donna Fedele and Lelia Camin’s friendship is one of the novel’s central chosen-family bonds. Fedele recognizes the feeling and intelligence beneath Lelia’s guardedness, then turns that understanding into practical protection: she helps her face the prospect of loving Massimo Alberti, shelters her after she rejects her father, and later guides her away from Valsolda when remaining there is no longer tenable. Her care gives Lelia support, but also becomes a source of moral weight when Lelia sees how much Fedele has risked and suffered for her.

Recognition and trust

Fedele’s sympathy for Lelia begins in a difference of temperament. Don Aurelio is troubled by the young woman’s scepticism and by her argument that apparently generous acts may be driven by self-interest; her remarks seem to wound Marcello Trento’s decision to keep the memory of his dead son close. Fedele, by contrast, considers the painful circumstances in which Lelia grew up. Remembering her own imaginative and passionate adolescence, she can understand what Don Aurelio finds disquieting. She suspects that Lelia’s heart contains hidden reserves of feeling and is drawn to her intelligence, which she experiences as deeply permeated by emotion.

That insight informs Fedele’s support for a possible marriage between Lelia and Massimo. She is less anxious than Don Aurelio about the match, and when she speaks privately with Massimo, she first checks whether his feeling for Lelia is serious. She then offers her help, invoking her friendship with his mother and her knowledge of him. Fedele believes that Marcello will not demand that Lelia sacrifice her whole life to remain faithful to Andrea’s memory, and that he already feels great affection for Massimo. The harder question, she tells Massimo, is Lelia’s own struggle: she may return his feeling while resisting it out of loyalty to Andrea’s memory, concern for Marcello, or some private fantasy.

Fedele does not treat Lelia’s silence as proof that she feels nothing. When Lelia waits for her in the sitting room, umbrella in hand, she seems to understand that the proposed outing may be a pretext for a conversation. Later, beside the flowing water, Fedele tells her that she can see into her heart. Lelia denies it, but Fedele reads the denial as an implicit admission and continues carefully, asking whether anyone has said something against Massimo. Her friendship depends on this combination of attention and restraint: she notices what Lelia cannot yet say, without confusing understanding with permission to decide for her.

Shelter amid grief and family conflict

After Marcello’s death, Fedele becomes Lelia’s immediate refuge in a tangled dispute over family, age, and inheritance. The agent’s notice reports that Lelia is Marcello’s universal heir and that Teresina Scotz is to receive a small daily legacy. It also reports a telegram from Girolamo da Camin, declaring himself Lelia’s father, asserting that she is a minor, and announcing his arrival. Lelia, however, has told the agent that she is twenty and a few months old; Marcello had believed her older still. The discrepancy makes her status and her father’s claim part of an already painful bereavement.

Lelia refuses to see Girolamo and suffers a terrible crisis. Fedele takes her into her own home. Lelia does not attend Marcello’s funeral; confined to bed by a violent headache, she leaves Fedele to go in her place, where her father is present. Fedele thus offers shelter not by resolving Lelia’s estrangement, but by remaining beside her while it shapes what she can bear.

When Girolamo later comes to the Villino delle Rose, Fedele manages the encounter rather than pretending the past has been repaired. She warns him that his daughter may refuse a conversation, then has Lelia told that he has asked to see her. She had previously insisted, with considerable force, that Lelia receive her father if he asked. Lelia complies, standing rigidly as he kisses both her cheeks and offers her a packet of ten-lira notes, saying the money is hers and that he will account for it when she comes of age. The scene exposes the distance between the formal language of fatherhood and the trust a relationship would require. Fedele’s intervention gets them into the same room; it does not make Lelia welcome him.

Love, counsel, and the cost of protection

Fedele’s support for Lelia’s future with Massimo remains entangled with her own responsibility for bringing them closer. She has encouraged Massimo and recognized Lelia’s unspoken feeling, while Lelia has treated her affection and guidance as a source of safety. When Massimo’s letter reveals that his desire to die is bound up with a renewed, overwhelming passion for Lelia, her response is immediate and bodily: she clutches the letter and the rhododendrons in her lap, overcome by what it says. The happiness she imagines with Massimo is inseparable from the pathways Fedele helped open.

Later, in the dark hotel corridor, Lelia thinks of light and shadow falling in turn on water and on her own thoughts. She blames herself: Fedele is there, suffering and perhaps dying, because of her and her supposedly selfish love. Yet Lelia also recognizes that the older woman came not with reproaches but with kindness, and that her protection has helped make Lelia’s happiness possible. The maternal presence changes the room around her: even the chair on which she keeps watch feels more restful than the bed where she spent the previous night. Fedele’s care does not erase Lelia’s guilt; it teaches her to experience love as answerable to another person’s vulnerability.

Valsolda and the final exchange

When Fedele is ill in Valsolda, she refuses a doctor for the moment and turns instead to the practical question of what Lelia and Massimo intend to do. She accepts that Lelia’s letter to her father may not receive a negative reply and is glad to learn that Massimo hopes to obtain the position of district doctor there. Still, she insists that Lelia must leave with her. Lelia protests: she hopes Fedele can rest for several days and accompany her to Turin, while returning to Velo fills her with horror and only a few months remain before she becomes an adult. Fedele points out that Turin would leave her without support.

They settle on a plan that makes the friendship concrete in travel arrangements. Fedele will rest that day, see the doctor from Cadate the next morning, and, if permitted, leave with Lelia for Turin. Her cousin will meet Lelia at Santhià, while Eufemia continues with them; letters arriving for Lelia at San Mamette are to be redirected. Although she had asked for the father’s permission, Fedele yields on that point, judging the cousin’s home safe and Lelia’s dread of returning to Velo decisive. She also sends Massimo back to Dasio and permits him to see Lelia again only the next evening, in her presence. Her maternal role is real but not absolute: she feels the responsibility of it precisely because she is not Lelia’s actual mother.

The planned journey is overtaken by Fedele’s worsening illness. Lelia stays awake, listens at the door, and arranges for Massimo to be summoned; when he arrives, she gives him an account of the night and lets him take a separate room nearby. Waiting alone, she understands that Fedele’s suffering has altered her own love, giving it a new gravity through contact with painful realities. Fedele, meanwhile, asks whether Massimo and Lelia have agreed on what to do and insists that Lelia cannot stay there. Near the end of the narrated exchange, she asks the doctor and Eufemia to leave, calls Lelia to her bedside, and gestures for her to kneel so she can put an arm around her neck. Their friendship reaches its clearest form in this gesture: not simply counsel or rescue, but intimate care sustained even when neither woman can make the other’s troubles disappear.