Rika

Rika’s response to Creasy’s growing place in her household is shaped by two threats she recognizes at once: Pinta’s attachment to him and her own. After returning from New York, she insists that Ettore dismiss Creasy quickly. She explains that Pinta is becoming too fond of him, but the deeper urgency becomes legible through Rika’s memories of her own intimacy with Creasy. Her effort to remove him is therefore both a mother’s intervention and a response to feelings she cannot comfortably disclose.

Rika, Ettore, and Pinta

Rika is Pinta’s mother and Ettore’s wife. When Creasy’s employment comes under discussion, she tells Ettore that Pinta’s affection for him is becoming so strong that it excludes everything else. Ettore asks whether she suspects something sinister, but Rika rejects that possibility: Creasy sees Pinta as a friend, while Pinta sees him as a father. Her concern is not an accusation against Creasy; it is alarm at the depth of a bond developing inside her family.

Rika’s concern did not begin with the conversation after the return from New York. She had started thinking about the problem when Pinta chose a crucifix as Creasy’s birthday present. Pinta pulled her mother from shop to shop until she found the one she wanted. Rika had remarked that the gift seemed strange for a man like Creasy, but Pinta laughed and replied that he was a strange man who would understand. The incident gives Rika an early, concrete sign of how attentively Pinta is trying to know Creasy. What looks to the child like an unconventional present becomes, to her mother, evidence of a closeness that is taking on a parental shape.

The private source of Rika’s alarm

Rika’s stated concern for Pinta is genuine, but it is not her only reason for wanting Creasy gone. The narration identifies him as a double threat to Ettore: one through Pinta and another through Rika herself. The second threat emerges from her recollection of the night she spent with Creasy. It had altered the way she experienced desire, and her memories grew more vivid during the days that followed.

Rika distinguishes that experience from sex with Ettore and other men. She had known physical pleasure before, but with Creasy she remembers losing her usual control: the encounter absorbed her will rather than remaining something measured and contained. She recalls looking down at him in the dawn light, and the image of the gun hanging above him becomes entangled in her memory of their intimacy. She also remembers the aftermath, lying in his arms while her mind remained lost and his hands moved over her. The account presents this not merely as attraction but as a disturbance of the emotional control by which she had previously managed desire.

That memory persists after the return from New York. When Rika makes love to Ettore, she cannot keep her thoughts from returning to Creasy upstairs. His blunt fingers, scars, and the gun beside his head intrude on the marital intimacy. The contrast makes her alarm more personal than her explanation to Ettore allows: Creasy has become difficult for her to set aside, even in the room she shares with her husband.

The attempt to dismiss Creasy

Ettore points out that Creasy’s three-month trial period will end in another week and says he can simply decline to confirm the position. Rika rejects waiting. She urges Ettore to tell Creasy the next day, while also insisting that he pay him for the full period and give him a good bonus. She emphasizes that Creasy is not at fault, separating the fairness of his compensation from her insistence that he leave.

Ettore considers another week harmless and does not want to create bad feeling. Rika, by contrast, is agitated and presses him to act sooner. As a possible excuse, she suggests taking Pinta to Rome for a few days, allowing Creasy to leave before the trial period is quite over. The proposal shows her trying to turn private urgency into an ordinary household arrangement, while preserving the appearance of a reasonable departure.

The scene leaves the dismissal unresolved: Ettore has not agreed to Rika’s timetable, and the evidence ends with her still insisting. It also clarifies the limits of what she tells him. She gives him Pinta’s attachment as a genuine reason, while the narration reveals that Creasy’s hold on Rika is part of the danger as well. Her position is thus divided between protecting her daughter from an attachment she considers overwhelming and trying to remove the man who has unsettled her own control.