Lelia's suicide crisis

Lelia's suicide crisis is a failed attempt to end her life by jumping from the Posina Bridge into a deep watercourse, followed by a feverish recovery in Donna Fedele's care. The crisis is not presented as a simple, settled wish for death: Lelia cannot explain why she intends to die, yet as she prepares to leave she is overtaken by longing for love and gives a final message to the dead Andrea. Later, standing again above the water, she recognizes that the desire to die has passed and that she still expects love and happiness, however strongly she tries to renounce them.

Background and inward conflict

The crisis unfolds amid family upheaval. A letter reporting the opening of Marcello Trento's will names Lelia universal heir and notes that her biological father, Girolamo da Camin, has declared himself and announced his arrival. The letter also records a discrepancy: Lelia says she is twenty and a few months old, while Marcello had believed her older. This news supplies a family context for her distress, but the narration does not reduce her decision to a single cause. When Donna Fedele later explains the episode to the doctor, she describes Lelia as having left during severe moral agitation caused by family events.

In her room, Lelia writes that she is going to die without knowing why, and knows even less why she should live. She cannot find words for an apology or farewell, tears up the note, and dresses to go out. The restraint of this preparation is striking: she changes from the mourning dress lent by Donna Fedele into the gray dress she wore on arriving at the villa, and takes Andrea's silver-net handbag, which holds a few keepsakes. A small plate bears the name Leila, recalling a dispute; she repeatedly sets the bag down and picks it up before deciding to take it after all.

The night also reveals her divided relation to faith. Lelia moves the Journal of Eugénie de Guérin, lent by Donna Fedele, away from her bedside because she feels no kinship with its author's religious sensibility. She regards the prohibitions of the priests' God as indifferent to her, yet experiences a grateful, gentle impulse to pray to an Unknown with whom she feels at peace. The juxtaposition does not settle her beliefs; it records a moment in which religious convention has lost its hold while a less defined sense of spiritual relation remains.

The attempt and its interruption

At half past ten, Lelia looks from her upstairs window toward the plain of Arsiero, Priaforà, and Montanina. She imagines the Posina and the watercourse beside it, then fixes on the latter as the place where she will jump. She has set the attempt for midnight, but at a quarter past eleven decides not to wait. In the meantime she writes a message beneath Andrea's photograph, dates it 4 July, and leaves it where it will be noticed. She takes a length of curtain cord so she can bind her skirts before jumping, puts on rubber overshoes to move quietly, and leaves the broken pieces of her first note behind.

Her route is marked by concrete, practical thoughts rather than a disappearance into abstraction. Descending the stairs, she remembers dark posts in or beside the watercourse and worries that a fall straight down might leave her body smashed against them. She decides she must jump as far as possible. At the veranda, however, a person suddenly rises in her path. Lelia rushes past, overturning chairs, and runs down the garden steps. Donna Fedele calls from her window; Carnesecca identifies a woman fleeing and gives chase in the darkness.

Carnesecca catches Lelia on the grassy slope near the small gate. When he seizes her, she cries out and collapses as if dead. Donna Fedele, already descending the veranda steps in her dressing gown, understands what has happened and sinks onto a step in the rain when she hears that Lelia is safe. Carnesecca explains that he had come to spend the night on the terrace because he had found nowhere else to shelter. His unexpected presence, not a change of plan by Lelia, has interrupted the attempt.

Concealment, fever, and care

Donna Fedele has Lelia carried to a room with two beds. When Lelia regains consciousness, she is bewildered and resists the servants' efforts to settle her. Donna Fedele dismisses them, tells Lelia gently that she has been sleepwalking, and asks her to keep quiet because she herself feels ill and needs rest. She chooses this account to spare Lelia the humiliation of knowing that her attempt has been discovered; the narration makes clear that Donna Fedele does not doubt what Lelia intended.

When fever later makes Lelia sit upright, she cannot understand why she is in an unfamiliar room. Donna Fedele repeats the sleepwalking explanation. Lelia embraces and kisses her, weeping, while fever burns through her; the word describing her fall has become entangled in her confused mind with the fatal plan. Donna Fedele summons a doctor but privately tells him the necessary truth: Lelia left at night in severe distress, fell near the gate, and lost consciousness. She asks him to maintain the sleepwalking explanation when speaking to the patient, and he complies.

Lelia refuses both food and medicine, runs a high fever, and talks almost continuously about sleepwalking and sleepwalkers. Her preoccupation is not a confession but an effort, as Donna Fedele understands it, to supply evidence for the story she has been given. Only once does she turn to another subject: she mentions Marcello and grows tender as she looks at Donna Fedele. The fever declines by evening, followed by a period of dark silence. Donna Fedele, meanwhile, is herself unwell and had recently considered seeking medical attention. She nevertheless arranges to sleep beside Lelia, finding meaning in giving herself to the young woman and in honoring Marcello's continued love for his dead son, Andrea.

The bridge and the return of desire

The Posina Bridge remains charged with the night of the attempt. On a later passage, Lelia realizes she has never crossed it since without both repenting the promise she made to Donna Fedele and feeling a shiver of desire and revulsion. This time she stops to look into the watercourse. Against her expectations and her stated resolve to renounce love, she discovers that she no longer wants to die. What rises in its place is an instinctive expectation of love and happiness, one her reason and generous intentions to give them up cannot extinguish.

The realization is physical before it becomes a settled decision: Lelia leaves the parapet palpitating, and the surrounding world seems to echo her newly awakened desire. She longs to leave the road, hide among the trees, and give form to the feelings that have rushed upon her. A path blocked by logs and brambles, followed by the encounter with carts and people, checks the impulse. She is then frightened by the force of what she has felt and resolves to write Donna Fedele a clearer, firmer refusal, hoping to bind herself to her no and never. The return of desire is therefore not presented as a completed recovery or a new commitment; it unsettles her renunciation even as she tries to preserve it.

Later decisions and protection

Later, while Lelia is with Massimo Alberti in Valsolda, Donna Fedele insists that she cannot remain there and must leave with her. Massimo reports that Lelia has written to her father and is awaiting an answer; Donna Fedele initially expects a refusal, then accepts that it may not be negative. She is also glad to learn that Massimo hopes to obtain a post as a local doctor in Valsolda, but maintains that Lelia must depart with her. Lelia protests: she hopes Donna Fedele will rest there and dreads returning to Velo, though she is only months away from adulthood.

After discussion, they plan for Donna Fedele to rest, see a doctor the following morning, and, if permitted, travel with Lelia to Torino. A cousin is to meet Lelia at Santhià, while Eufemia continues with Donna Fedele; letters sent for Lelia to San Mamette are to be forwarded. Donna Fedele yields on the question of paternal permission, judging the proposed refuge safe and knowing how strongly Lelia abhors a return to Velo. These arrangements do not erase the earlier crisis, but show its consequences in the form of sustained protection, negotiation over where Lelia may stay, and Donna Fedele's sense of responsibility toward the young woman she has chosen to care for.