Suicidio

Suicidio names a recurring crisis in which the wish to die is entangled with religious conviction, family estrangement, and the question of whether suffering can be endured. The novel sets Lelia Camin’s attempted suicide beside Donna Fedele Vayla di Brea’s earlier suicidal thoughts: one woman reaches the edge of action, while the other recognizes in her young friend a danger she once faced herself. Lelia is saved by an accidental interruption, but the episode does not resolve the conflicts that made death seem to her like an answer.

Religious Reasoning and Family Estrangement

Lelia’s suicidal thinking is not presented as a simple rejection of religion. In the past, she told Teresina that being forced to live with her father would make her ill. She described such a life as a condition in which she would hate him to the point of moral collapse. Her reasoning turned a religious prohibition into a frightening exception: although she understood that divine law generally forbade suicide, she imagined that God might nevertheless command it in her particular case. Teresina, seriously religious, was so alarmed that she thought Lelia might be mad.

Donna Fedele interprets the statement differently. She regards Lelia as strange, but chiefly as someone whose understanding of religion has been distorted by ignorance, intellectual anomalies, poor instruction, and bad examples. That diagnosis matters because it resists treating Lelia’s reasoning as either a sound religious certainty or a merely theatrical threat. Donna Fedele fears that the talk may have been unserious, yet Lelia’s long, dark silences make the danger harder to dismiss. Her distress is bound to a specific anticipated future: having to live with her father.

The family circumstances sharpen that fear. After Marcello’s will is opened, Lelia is identified as his universal heir; a telegram from Girolamo da Camin declares that he is her father and announces his arrival. Lelia, who is twenty and a few months, acknowledges the relationship. When Girolamo later visits, she receives him standing, rigid, and visibly shivering at his kisses. This does not by itself explain her suicidal crisis, but it gives concrete form to the estrangement she had described to Teresina: the father she fears is now present, while her inheritance and future arrangements place family power and personal dependence in the same field of conflict.

Donna Fedele’s Earlier Crisis

Donna Fedele’s confession gives Lelia’s danger a history and a human witness. At eighteen, Donna Fedele fell deeply in love with a man who was unavailable. He did not return her passion and silently asked her to renounce it. She then considered dying in a way that would not appear to be suicide, imagining a mountain excursion, a difficult passage, and an accidental slip so that her father would not suffer the added pain of knowing she had taken her own life.

The imagined accident was interrupted not by a stranger but by a change in her attachments and circumstances. Her father fell ill; because she had no one else, she turned again toward him, and her love for him revived. Her religious feeling also returned. During his convalescence he spoke to her gently about God, Christ, the soul, pain, and love. Donna Fedele says that her convent education had given her only a surface coating of religion; her father helped her believe inwardly and love her faith. The memory makes her response to Lelia more than a general duty of charity. She knows that suicidal intention can be hidden inside a plan designed to look accidental, and that religious language may either become entangled in despair or, through another person’s care, recover its meaning.

Lelia’s Plan and the Interruption

After Massimo Alberti leaves, Donna Fedele’s hopes diminish and her anxiety grows. Lelia has not directly confessed love for Massimo, but Donna Fedele reads her offer to leave the villa if her presence obstructs a hoped-for visit as revealing more than its literal words. She also remembers Lelia’s earlier statements about living with her father. When she discovers that Lelia has gone out alone, she is alarmed; the household does not know where she went. Lelia has left a message saying she went to Montanina to collect belongings and would return after six, apparently to avoid being in the way if Massimo came. Donna Fedele sends Teresina after her, but the message conceals the gravity of the situation.

That night, Lelia waits in the villa while rain falls and the wind rises. She sits at the piano and plays at random, asks that the veranda doors be left open, and repeatedly listens and looks into the darkness. In her upstairs room, she imagines the bridge, the rushing water, and the silent canal bordered by robinia trees. At half past ten she knows that she intends to go to the bridge two hours later and throw herself into the canal. She writes a brief farewell to Donna Fedele, cannot find words for an explanation or apology, and tears the note apart.

Her preparations make the intention unmistakable. She changes out of the close-fitting mourning dress Donna Fedele lent her and puts on the grey dress she wore when she came to the villa. She takes up, then leaves behind, a silver-net purse given to her by the dead Andrea Trento, with a small plate bearing the name Leila. Before leaving, she cuts a piece from a curtain cord to tie her skirts so they will not turn up before the jump, and puts on rubber overshoes to descend quietly. At first she worries that she might strike dark stakes in the canal if she fell straight down; the thought makes her plan more deliberate, not less. At eleven fifteen she decides not to wait until the hour she had set.

Lelia slips through the dark rooms and toward the veranda. She has forgotten the torn pieces of her note, but does not go back for them. As she opens the doors, Carnesecca rises suddenly in front of her. She knocks over chairs, bolts past him, and disappears down the garden steps. Donna Fedele calls from her open window; Carnesecca can only report that a woman has run away. Donna Fedele understands the danger and urges him to pursue her, telling him to treat her as a sleepwalker. He catches Lelia on the grassy slope by the small gate. She cries out at his touch and collapses as if dead. Carnesecca explains that he had come to spend the night on the terrace because he had found no other shelter. His unexpected presence, not a change of mind announced by Lelia, has interrupted the attempt.

Rescue, Concealment, and Continuing Stakes

Donna Fedele has Lelia carried inside and put to bed. When Lelia recovers consciousness, she is bewildered, and Donna Fedele tells her that she has had an attack of sleepwalking. She asks the servants to leave and shares the room with her, hoping to spare her the humiliation of knowing that her attempted suicide was suspected. Her concern is not limited to immediate physical safety: she wants to protect Lelia from the shame of a failed attempt without abandoning her to isolation.

Lelia develops a high fever, refuses both medicine and food, and speaks almost continuously about sleepwalking and sleepwalkers. Donna Fedele has told the doctor only what he needs to know: Lelia went out at night in a state of severe moral agitation caused by family events, fell near the gate, and lost consciousness. She asks him to preserve the sleepwalking explanation when speaking to the patient. Lelia does not betray the truth. Once, however, she mentions Marcello, and her face softens as she looks at Donna Fedele. The fever declines toward evening, followed by a period of dark silence.

Donna Fedele continues to keep a bed beside Lelia’s. Though she herself is ill and suffering, she finds a fullness in giving herself to the young woman, partly for Lelia’s sake and partly in memory of Marcello and the love he had continued to give his dead son. Her care becomes a practical answer to the solitude on which Lelia’s plan depended. Yet rescue is not a cure: later, Donna Fedele insists that Lelia cannot remain in Valsolda and arranges to take her toward Turin, with a possible stay at Santhià if her father permits it. Lelia recoils from returning to Velo and says that only months remain before she is of age and independent. The arrangements show that the danger’s familial conditions persist after the night itself.

Narrative Significance

The episode draws a sharp distinction between the appearance of an accident and an intention concealed beneath it. Donna Fedele once imagined a fatal fall that would disguise suicide as misadventure; Lelia prepares a jump with comparable deliberation, thinking about the canal, the stakes, and how to bind her skirts. Their parallel histories make the attempt legible to Donna Fedele even when Lelia does not confess it. The sleepwalking story is therefore both a protective fiction and a sign of how completely the truth must be hidden to keep Lelia near those who can help her.

The rescue turns on an ordinary contingency: Carnesecca has nowhere else to shelter and is on the terrace when Lelia comes out. The sudden encounter interrupts a carefully prepared plan, while Donna Fedele’s response supplies what chance alone cannot—attention, medical help, discretion, and continued companionship. The novel presents neither faith nor family obligation as an uncomplicated solution. Lelia’s religious reasoning has become distorted, and her fear of her father remains active; Donna Fedele’s own recovered faith, shaped by her father’s tenderness, offers a contrasting history rather than an instant cure. Suicidio thus links a private act of despair to the novel’s larger concerns with belief, dependence, inherited family relations, and the fragile forms of human intervention that can keep a person alive.