Love and Self-Surrender

Love and Self-Surrender is a recurring pattern in the novel, not simply a declaration of romantic feeling. Love arrives as bodily intensity before it can be calmly explained; it can draw one person toward another, expose the limits of pride and self-command, and become a model for care. In the relationship between Massimo Alberti and Lelia, surrender offers the possibility of a shared life, but it does not erase either character’s religious doubts, moral fears, or the risks created by their circumstances. The novel also places romantic surrender beside acts of care and devotion, especially those of Donna Fedele and Marcello Trento.

Love as a Force Before Speech

Massimo’s account of his feelings reaches Lelia in a letter addressed to Donna Fedele. He admits that he does not wish to die because of religious doubt: were that his only trouble, he would rather live, serve the poor, and seek a companion with whom he could share love in both soul and body. What makes such a future seem closed to him is the renewed force of his passion for Lelia. He describes that love as a fever he had tried, briefly, to resist, but which has grown fierce enough to consume him. The letter therefore makes desire part of a larger crisis: his uncertainty about belief and his longing for an ordinary, loving life are bound together rather than resolved separately.

Lelia responds first through her body. As she reads, she feels a sudden rush of heat and darkness, clutches the rhododendrons in her lap, and presses them to her face as she kisses the letter. Her reaction precedes any measured reply. The flowers, the letter, and the remembered music of Schumann’s Aveu give her feeling tangible forms; later, she keeps the rhododendrons beside her bed and places one in a glass at the dining table. She plays the piece repeatedly, returning to the line that expresses burning passion and surrender. These actions make the revelation of Massimo’s love a physical event for her, carried through touch, scent, music, and movement.

A Hidden Love Recast as Surrender

The letter also changes the meaning of Lelia’s earlier resistance. In a message she writes to Massimo, she says she loved him before she knew him and recalls listening anxiously to the train that brought him to Montanina. She says she defended herself against love out of pride, and that the more she loved him, the more cruel and proud she became toward him. Her explanation is not an attempt to excuse herself: she accepts responsibility for the harm he believed she had done and says she came to put herself in his hands, not to demand anything from him.

That self-offering remains troubled by shame. Lelia fears Massimo may despise her for arriving impulsively and worries that she may make him unhappy or fail to become the person she promises to be. She connects her fear to the deception required to leave: she had misled her father, her devoted maid, and the woman who accompanied her to Vicenza, concealing her intentions with practiced composure. Love has brought her to Massimo, but it has not made her regard every means of reaching him as innocent.

The meeting gives her confession an answer in gesture before it becomes a settled arrangement. When Massimo realizes she has come alone, Lelia covers her face; he takes her hands, which yield, then tense again when she notices two customs guards passing on the path. Their awareness of being observed interrupts the moment, and their renewed closeness carries a trace of caution. In the woods, Massimo puts an arm around her waist; she turns toward him and kisses him. The kiss is gentle, and both experience it with a sense of reverence, as though something lasting has begun. When they walk back, Lelia asks whether she has acted wrongly. Massimo calls her his bride, and she tells him that she has always loved him. His promise of permanence answers her fear, but the scene presents commitment as a beginning, not as proof that every difficulty has vanished.

The Body, the Promise, and the Shared Future

The novel repeatedly gives surrender a bodily language. Lelia’s hands yield and resist; her eyes express what she cannot say aloud; after reading Massimo’s letter, she rises with renewed energy and descends the path with a buoyant step. At the reunion, Massimo is so overcome that he loses his bearings, while Lelia, initially ashamed and hesitant, becomes able to guide their movement toward the woods. Feeling passes between them through touch and posture before either can give it a full verbal account. Their physical responsiveness does not replace thought or choice: Lelia still watches for passersby, and Massimo worries about protecting her from malicious gossip.

That concern shapes their return from the woods. Massimo considers what people at the inn might say and resolves not to let a single hostile word damage Lelia’s reputation. After other women have seen them, he says he will introduce her to the innkeepers as his fiancée. The public description is meant to protect her, while the private promise carries the greater emotional weight. Lelia accepts the introduction as something done for his sake, recalling that even before this meeting he had acted for her. Love therefore becomes a responsibility toward the other person’s dignity, not merely the pleasure of possession.

Lelia’s dawn letter develops the promise into an account of what surrender means to her. She remembers returning to the churchyard after they parted and retracing the roads they had walked together, especially the woodland path where they first met. She has kept a leaf from a tree along the way and kisses it in private. The small relic makes memory something she can touch, while her repeated admission that she has loved Massimo from before his arrival joins present devotion to a much longer history of feeling. Yet she continues to fear that his kindness is pity and that she will not be able to keep her promises. Her surrender is thus both an acceptance of his love and an ongoing struggle with distrust of herself.

Love and Religious Longing

For Lelia, love also becomes a way to imagine belief after faith has weakened. In her letter she describes having tried to remain attached to the religion she learned at school, then to the religious outlook associated with the priest and chaplain of Velo. She became alienated when she saw religious authorities and people around her joined in what she judged to be a compromising alliance, and she concluded that she would rather have nothing than accept a faith she could not trust. But having nothing does not satisfy her. She asks Massimo for a faith she can inhabit in the woods of Dasio, beside the waterfall and the lake, or in a married room: a God who requires love and forbids hatred, rather than official intermediaries or practices she finds empty.

This request does not establish that the couple has reached a stable shared theology. It reveals instead how Lelia’s longing for Massimo and her longing for faith have become intertwined. She hopes that a love she can give herself to might open a path toward belief; she also imagines that Massimo’s changed relation to religion can make such belief possible. His letter, however, shows that his own position remains unsettled. The novel keeps the spiritual promise distinct from a completed resolution: love offers Lelia a way to ask for faith, but it cannot simply declare her doubts over.

Care Beyond the Lovers

The novel places this passionate exchange beside forms of self-giving that are quieter and less erotic. When Lelia is feverish after her night outside, Donna Fedele explains her condition to the doctor while protecting Lelia’s private feelings. She keeps a bed beside the young woman, although the doctor advises her to sleep alone, and understands her own suffering as part of a life newly filled by giving herself to Lelia. Her care is also tied to the memory of Marcello Trento and to the love Marcello continued to bear for his dead son, Andrea. Affection thus travels through remembrance and responsibility as well as through reciprocal desire.

Marcello’s final hours give that broader pattern a religious form. In the evening before his death, he prepares the servants’ wages and monthly aid for the poor, then restores two cyclamens to their earthen pots and carries them outside into the rain. After prayer, he suffers violent vertigo, recognizes that he is dying, and cannot finish the prayer he tries to say. Earlier, at the window, he had faced the dark sky above Mount Torraro with folded hands, feeling both sweetness and trembling at the thought of meeting the souls he longed for and standing before God. These scenes do not equate his devotion with Lelia and Massimo’s romance. They place romantic surrender within a larger moral world in which love may take the form of charity, care, remembrance, and readiness to entrust oneself to what one cannot control.