Lelia enters Velo Park at night

Lelia enters Velo Park at night during a crisis of isolation, but the episode is not a straightforward suicide attempt: she has no settled purpose to die. Her movement toward the park gives physical form to an old fantasy of leaving the world, while the moonlit stream interrupts that fantasy with an experience so intense that she flees back to the villa. The scene turns on the distance between wanting an escape and choosing death, and on how close Lelia comes to crossing that distance.

Circumstances and Departure

About fifteen minutes after she believes Signor Marcello and Massimo Alberti have gone to their rooms, Lelia leaves the villa and garden. She heads for the wooden gate leading into Parco di Velo from the public road, below Santa Maria ad Montes. Her mind is fixed on a proud judgment of Alberti, who has come from Milan with a wealthy marriage plan. She imagines that, if her parents were not dishonest people, she might take refuge with one of them. But she cannot live with her father’s lover or be supported by her mother with money from the old Austrian man. Neither parental home seems to her an honest refuge.

In that impasse, an idea that first came to her at fourteen rises again: leaving the world. It has returned and receded during the years since, including during her love for Andrea, but has never become a firm resolve. The account recalls that she had once shut the windows of a room full of lilies and tuberoses, liking the reckless possibility of danger rather than intending to die. When she woke with heaviness in her limbs and the flowers’ acrid perfume filling her nose, mouth, and throat, she opened the window. Now, too, she tells herself that a refuge is available whenever she wants it; the thought that she can act whenever she chooses is enough. Yet her hand trembles as she pushes the gate.

Into the Park

Once inside, Lelia passes into a clearing among the trees, where the entrance seems to open onto a realm of silence. On the gravel she had feared that even her light steps might be heard; among the trees, sound seems extinguished. She walks over freshly cut grass and loses her sense of alarm. The dark, pathless shadows feel to her like an escape from the world into a maternal darkness. She follows the murmuring of streams through hidden and open folds of the mountain, sometimes sinking her foot into grass saturated by concealed water.

The setting does not remain uniformly dark or still. The air is cool and damp in shaded hollows, warm on exposed slopes, and alive with wild scents and the wordless voices she attributes to the grasses. Lelia lies on one of the slopes, overcome by its warmth. The narration describes the night as maternal and Lelia as a small creature of it, kin to the surrounding things. In this suspension of ordinary thought, desire remains indistinct: the earth’s warmth softens the resistance of her pride to love, and she pulls up a handful of grass and bites it. The gesture gives her bodily relation to the landscape, while also marking a change in her inward state.

The Stream and the Moonlight

Lelia soon rises, reluctant both to stay on the scented slope and to leave it. She climbs into a long, dark hornbeam tunnel. A faint light marks its distant opening on one side; on the other, darkness seems endless, accompanied by falling water. She takes a path to the left, toward acacias and the little stream that runs and leaps there. Hearing the water without seeing it, she begins almost instinctively to undress. When she becomes aware of what she is doing, she pauses and tests the stream with her hand. Its coldness seems as though it might help her, and she continues, setting her clothes aside without looking where they fall while keeping on her last garment.

The stream is shallow: when she tests the bottom, she finds gravel and about two handbreadths of water. She steps in with both feet, shivers, closes her eyes, and lowers herself slowly with small gasps until she is lying in the current. The water runs around her and speaks in small, gentle sounds against her neck and chest; it begins to feel less cold. Then she opens her eyes and sits up in astonishment. Moonrise has spread a glow across the trembling water, its banks, and her clothes. The acacias move their silvery crowns in the wind, and blossoms fall onto the stream and its edges. Lelia crosses her arms over her chest and weeps, overcome by a nameless, painful sweetness in the moonlight and the fragrance of the wood. The scene has brought her into the water, but its culmination is not death: it is an intense, tearful encounter with the transformed landscape.

Return and Consequence

Lelia climbs onto the bank, dresses as best she can, and hurries down the way she came. Her heart beats violently. She does not look at the moon shining between clouds above Mount Paù; she exits the wooden gate with the feeling of someone who has survived a shipwreck. Teresina has been waiting in the small entrance porch to the garden, shivering with fear, and receives Lelia with corresponding relief. She notices the girl tremble but does not know that the shirt beneath Lelia’s clothes is soaked.

When Teresina suggests that Lelia, too, has been frightened, Lelia denies it and says she will not go back. The resolution is immediate and limited: she has returned from the park and rejects repeating this nocturnal excursion. The episode nevertheless leaves the danger legible. Lelia had gone toward a deep lake within the park, but the water she entered was the shallow stream among the acacias; the narration explicitly distinguishes her old, alluring thought of escape from an actual decision to die. The contrast between the dark park’s promise of departure and the moonlit water’s sudden beauty makes the scene a crisis that ends in retreat, not a completed attempt.