Ettore and Rika's Marriage

Ettore and Rika Balletto’s marriage is portrayed as a bond Ettore experiences less as a choice than as an addiction: desire has become possession, and acceptance has replaced any realistic prospect of leaving. Their affection is real but does not produce agreement or domestic ease. Under mounting financial pressure, their arguments over Pinta’s schooling and safety show how intimacy, parental responsibility, and dependence coexist uneasily in their household.

The Terms of Their Attachment

Ettore returns from Milan to Como after a week away, missing Rika and Pinta while anticipating a stormy homecoming. Decisions must be made, he expects Rika to dislike them, and he regards her dislike and eventual acceptance as incompatible. His account of their thirteen years together makes the marriage’s central contradiction explicit: he does not consider himself weak, yet he believes leaving Rika is impossible. He sees her as beautiful, willful, and self-centered, and reasons that she will not change. Acceptance is possible; departure, in his mind, is not.

The language Ettore uses for this attachment is the language of addiction. He wonders whether he regrets the years they have spent together, but cannot answer while still inside the relationship, just as an addict cannot assess a drug’s effects while continually taking it. He rejects the possibility of a clean break or substitute remedy. The comparison conveys his sense of captivity, but also his participation: he calls himself a willing, complacent addict rather than depicting himself only as someone acted upon by Rika.

His account of the marriage’s development sharpens that ambivalence. Early on, he says, it was primarily physical: a tactile satisfaction and conscious abandonment. Later, what held him was the knowledge that he possessed Rika, together with the pride of having a wife who drew envy and respect from other men. The shift is not from passion to indifference. It is from bodily gratification to the status and reassurance he takes from possession. That perspective describes Ettore’s understanding of the bond; it does not establish that Rika shares his terms for it.

A Formal Household Under Strain

The family’s dinner table gives domestic form to the distance between the spouses. Ettore and Rika sit opposite each other across a wide mahogany table, with Pinta between them, while a maid serves. The meal is described as stylized and formal rather than warm, and Rika treats meals as a kind of ceremony. On this evening, the carefully ordered setting also holds the expectation of confrontation: the couple have agreed to postpone their discussion until Pinta has gone to bed.

Rika initially receives her husband affectionately. She makes him a large martini and listens with decent interest to his account of his trip to Rome. Yet, while Pinta is out of the room, she has already raised the girl’s unhappiness and insisted that something must be done. Ettore agrees to discuss it after dinner and says he has made up his mind. The contrast between the welcoming ritual and the delayed argument shows how their household can maintain appearances of care while containing unresolved conflict.

The practical dispute extends beyond parenting. Ettore tells Rika that Pinta must return to school and that Rika must reduce her extravagance. When she challenges the latter demand, he explains that the business is doing very badly: government disorder and competition from the Far East will contribute to a large loss, and he is heavily indebted to banks. He specifies the scale as four hundred million lire. His objection is therefore not simply a rebuke to Rika’s tastes; it is a warning that the family’s spending and expectations no longer fit its financial position.

Rika’s response makes plain how little such a warning changes their immediate habits of intimacy. She asks for cognac. Ettore pours it, stands behind her, and reaches across to set down the glass; his hand moves from the glass to the back of her neck beneath her hair. She covers his hand with her own, squeezes his fingers, leans her head against his shirt, and kisses his eyes and mouth. She reassures him that Vico Mansutti will think of something. In bed, she soothes his body and, for a while, his mind. The tenderness is consequential, but temporary: Ettore reflects that she spoils him particularly after lovemaking, and that afterward he feels weakened rather than restored. Reconciliation eases his distress without answering the financial problem that prompted it.

Pinta and Their Competing Responsibilities

The couple’s daughter is loved by both parents, but Ettore’s own description suggests an uneven emotional bond. He says his love for Pinta is definite but narrow: Rika absorbs the strongest colors of his feelings, and he does not initially see the girl as fully separate from her mother. Pinta is a daughter loved in Rika’s shade. This admission complicates the marriage’s possessive structure: even Ettore’s relationship with his child is first understood through the emotional dominance Rika holds in his life.

Their disagreement about Pinta’s schooling develops from a shared recognition that her current circumstances are not working. Ettore insists that a governess is not enough: Pinta is eleven, falling behind, and should return to school. To his surprise, Rika agrees. She has spoken with Gina about a school just outside Geneva, where Aldo and Marielle are being sent and where instruction is in Italian. She proposes that she spend time in Geneva, see Pinta at weekends, and have Ettore fly over as well. Her plan joins concern for their daughter to her own boredom in winter and to Ettore’s frequent absences or stays in Milan.

Ettore’s objection is economic rather than a rejection of schooling. The Rome apartment is mortgaged, he tells her; selling it would send the proceeds to the bank, which would not lend again, particularly for property abroad. Geneva is prohibitively expensive, with property prices twice those in Rome, and the small place they could afford is one Rika would not tolerate even for a weekend. The proposal thus exposes the gap between the family’s needs and its means: Rika imagines a life organized around being near Pinta, while Ettore sees the debt and housing costs that make that life unattainable.

Safety intensifies the disagreement. After a long, cold silence, Rika says Pinta must not be put at risk and invokes the Macchetti child, taken in broad daylight outside his school in Milan. She accuses Ettore of failing to think about their daughter and demands that he find a way. He answers that the Macchettis are among Milan’s richest families, whereas the Balletto family is not rich, and argues that kidnappers would know this. His tone is bitter because he knows his financial problems are becoming known in the city’s financial circles; Rika is not persuaded. Their argument is not reducible to indifference on one side and care on the other: both discuss Pinta’s welfare, but Rika emphasizes the danger of exposure while Ettore counters with the family’s lack of wealth and limited means.

Intimacy, Absence, and the Marriage’s Limits

The narrative also places the marriage in a household where the parents’ movements leave Pinta in the care of others. During one week when Rika and Ettore are in London, Pinta is at home; after she injures herself on a steep slope while trying to see a nightingale’s nest, Creasy examines her and arranges for her to be taken to Como for an X-ray. Maria is told to remain at the house in case Pinta’s parents call, and Bruno is asked to stay with her. The episode does not explain the London trip or assign blame for the accident, but it gives practical context to Rika’s fear about Pinta’s vulnerability and to the family’s reliance on household staff when the parents are away.

Taken together, these scenes depict a marriage that can move quickly between affection and confrontation without resolving the conditions that produce either. Rika welcomes Ettore, touches and comforts him, and shares his concern that Pinta needs a different school; she also presses for a costly plan he says the family cannot afford and refuses to be reassured about kidnapping risk. Ettore both longs for Rika and frames his attachment as possession, while trying to impose financial limits and make decisions about their daughter. The evidence presents no final resolution of the marriage. Its significance lies instead in the tension between Ettore’s belief that he cannot leave, the tenderness that keeps him attached, and the practical disagreements their shared life continues to generate.