Lelia's self-destructive thoughts

Lelia's self-destructive thoughts are not presented as a firm decision to die, but as a dangerous refuge she imagines she could choose when other ways out seem closed. Their clearest expression is her solitary night in Parco di Velo, where she enters a cold stream and comes close to surrendering herself to its current. Yet the encounter ends not in death but in a sudden, overwhelming return to life: she leaves the water, escapes the park, and tells Teresina that she will not go back.

Origins and Conditions

The thought of leaving the world first came to Lelia when she was fourteen. It remained with her as a private possibility, returning and receding over the years, including during her love for Andrea Trento. The narration distinguishes this longstanding fantasy from a settled purpose: even when Lelia previously exposed herself to danger, she did not believe that she would die.

On the night she closes the windows of her room, the lilies and tuberoses fill the space with a powerful scent. She wakes with a heavy body and a constricted forehead, her nose, mouth, and throat saturated with the perfume, and rushes to open a window. The episode makes the threat bodily and immediate, but its uncertain intention matters: she had approached a possibility recklessly, not formed a clear plan to end her life. Her thoughts therefore occupy an unstable space between self-endangerment and the wish to know that an escape remains available.

The Night in Parco di Velo

After judging the marriage arrangement proposed by Massimo Alberti, Lelia considers the family members to whom she might otherwise turn. She cannot seek shelter with her father or mother without accepting circumstances she finds intolerable. The old thought of leaving the world rises again. About fifteen minutes after she believes Marcello Trento and Massimo have retired to their rooms, she slips out of the villa and garden and makes for the wooden gate below Santa Maria ad Montes.

At first, the walk is careful and tense. She fears that her light steps might be heard on the gravel, but once she enters the park's deep shadows, her alarm falls away. Moving over freshly cut grass and through the darkness, she feels removed from ordinary life. She lies on a warm slope, where the scent of the earth and the night loosens her resistance to love. This change does not resolve her conflict; it makes the park a space in which opposed impulses briefly coexist, as the wish to disappear gives way to an embodied, sensual attachment to the world.

She then rises reluctantly and follows a path toward a stream running among acacias. Hearing the water without seeing it, she begins to undress, stops when she recognizes what she is doing, tests the water with her hand, and continues. She keeps her last garment on. The stream is shallow, with gravel beneath roughly two palms of water, but cold enough to make her shiver. Lelia lowers herself into it slowly, eyes closed, and lies back as the current passes around her.

Reversal and Return

The water seems less cold as Lelia settles into it. When she opens her eyes, the moonlight has spread across the trembling surface, the banks, and her clothes. Acacia flowers fall onto the stream and its edges. Rather than continue toward death, Lelia sits up, presses her arms across her chest, and weeps. The episode becomes a moment of intense, wordless feeling: the night and flowering trees, rather than an explicit argument or decision, interrupt the movement toward self-destruction.

She climbs out, dresses as best she can, and hurries back through the park. She does not look toward the moon above Monte Paù. At the wooden gate she feels like someone saved from a shipwreck. Teresina, who has been waiting in the entrance porch, receives her with relief, unaware that Lelia's soaked clothing explains her trembling. Lelia denies having been frightened and says she will not return. The statement closes this particular excursion, but it does not establish that the underlying thought has permanently disappeared.

Dependence, Shelter, and Meaning

The circumstances surrounding Lelia's later choices show why a private escape could seem to her more available than an ordinary refuge. After Marcello's will is opened, she is named universal heir, while Gerolamo da Camin announces that he is her father and describes her as a minor. Lelia says she is twenty and a few months. Her inheritance gives her a formal claim to the estate, but it does not immediately free her from dependence or settle where she can safely live. Gerolamo's visit to Donna Fedele shows him hoping to regain a place in his daughter's life, while also considering his control of the Trento assets and the terms he might obtain from her when she comes of age.

Later, when Lelia is with Massimo in Valsolda, Donna Fedele insists that she cannot remain there and proposes taking her onward to Turin, with a possible stay at Santhià if Gerolamo permits it. Lelia dreads returning to Velo and still has months to wait before she is of age. Donna Fedele ultimately makes arrangements to take her to her cousin's house, accepting responsibility for the decision. These later negotiations do not prove that Lelia again intends to harm herself. They do show the persistent practical problem beneath the earlier crisis: she is searching for a place to live while the adults around her, her age, and her family circumstances limit her choices. Her night in the park gives that pressure a stark form, then reveals its counterforce in the sensory world she had gone there to leave.