Irene

Irene, the sister Marco Carrera loves and tries to understand when the rest of the family cannot, is remembered as both a rebellious model of youth and a source of deep alarm. Her suicide, preceded by signs that go unnoticed, leaves Marco with grief that returns at the threshold of his own death; her place in the family story is shaped as much by his enduring tenderness toward her as by the tragedy that takes her away.

Identity and Place in the Family

Irene is the daughter of Letizia Delvecchio and Probo Carrera and the sister of Marco and Giacomo Carrera. A later account identifies her as having died by drowning in the early 1980s. Within the family, however, her identity is never reduced to that outcome: for Marco, she is an intelligent and tormented older sister whose independence and intensity make her a personal ideal. He sides with her and loves her even when her conduct hurts those around her.

The siblings’ relationship is marked by unequal knowledge. As children, Marco and Giacomo first hear their parents openly arguing about Marco’s unusually slow physical development, but Irene has already been listening from the start. She is the one who knows what the quarrel concerns while her brothers only join her behind the bedroom door once the shouting begins. The episode establishes her as watchful and alert to what the family keeps hidden, though the story later turns painfully on what she and the others fail to see in one another.

A Sister Marco Admires

Marco recalls Irene as his “polar star,” a figure whose intelligence and rebelliousness offered him a model of life and youth. He does not simply endorse her every action: the family experiences her as difficult, and her troubles accumulate into a shared burden. But Marco resists the household’s drift toward treating her as a misfortune to be managed. He continues to understand and justify her, and his attachment survives her “many wickednesses.” His loyalty is therefore not an uncomplicated portrait of her as faultless; it is a bond that holds together affection, frustration, and recognition of her suffering.

A glimpse of Irene’s argumentative independence appears in a dispute over driving. She insists that she must go to Abetone, Bolgheri, or a party at Impruneta and argues that she can drive with a learner’s permit because her friends do. Her father refuses, and she persists. Marco has heard this kind of exchange repeatedly in the preceding weeks and has consistently taken her side. The small domestic conflict conveys the force of her will, but in retrospect it also stands beside signs of a distress much more serious than ordinary family rebellion.

Warning Signs and Family Blindness

Before a family dinner, Irene’s exhaustion is visible in her withdrawn appearance and disrupted routine. She moves through the house wearing Walkman headphones, and the music she has chosen is Gloomy Sunday, the song widely known as the “Hungarian song of suicides.” She listens to a recording by Lydia Lunch repeatedly, while the cassette continues to play in her red Walkman. The narration presents the song as an alarm that has been sounding for days, yet nobody responds to it as one.

Letizia, too, fails to recognize how depleted Irene is. The account imagines that noticing might have given her a reason to stay home, offer Irene food, or ask whether she wanted to talk; it does not claim that any single conversation could have prevented what follows. Instead, the missed opportunity exposes a household in which attention is elsewhere and Irene’s condition remains unseen. Marco leaves absorbed in his plan to meet Luisa Lattes; Giacomo is preoccupied with his suspicions about that meeting; and the family house is empty as Irene goes out. The juxtaposition makes the crisis a story of missed recognition, not a simple explanation in which one song or one family member accounts for her death.

The novel also gives Gloomy Sunday a history beyond Irene’s private listening. Its reputation for having led listeners to suicide spread alongside its success, bringing censorship and restrictions on its circulation. In 1941, Billie Holiday’s version added a verse absent from the original, framing the preceding events as a dream. Set beside Irene’s repeated listening, that history makes the song a culturally charged warning. It cannot, by itself, explain her despair; rather, its presence sharpens the contrast between a signal that appears legible in retrospect and a family unable to read it in time.

Marco’s Memory and Grief

Marco’s enduring devotion to Irene becomes particularly clear in his memory of a roadside crisis. He once sees her lying on the ground after fainting, with a young traveler trying to revive her. For the brief interval before he understands that she is not dead, he looks at her with desperation, pity, anger, helplessness, horror, and tenderness. The narration links this look to the one he later directs at her corpse in the morgue at Cecina, seven years afterward. What first seems a momentary fear becomes, in retrospect, an image that has anticipated his bereavement.

That memory reaches further back to a childhood wish. At not quite five, on the night of San Lorenzo in Bolgheri, Irene was asked—along with her mother and others—to make a wish after a shooting star. She wished that Irene would not commit suicide. The later narrative places this early wish beside Marco’s adult memory of her death, giving his grief the shape of a fear that had surfaced long before he could understand it. The connection is not presented as proof that her fate was inevitable; it shows how loss reorganizes memory, making an old, incomprehensible sentence appear to have carried knowledge it could not then contain.

The family’s wider response to Irene is framed through a series of troubles associated with her: falls, accidents, fractures, quarrels, depression, drug use, and psychotherapy. These experiences have produced a patient, generalized compassion around her, but Marco remains exceptional in refusing to let compassion become distance. The contrast helps explain why her death is so consequential to him: he has not merely lost a sister but the person he continued to defend against the family’s sense that she was a burden or a source of misfortune.

Death and Continuing Significance

Years later, Irene’s suicide is one of the losses Marco includes among the blows that shape his understanding of his life. After Adele’s death, he asks why he survived a plane crash, lost a sister, endured a terrible divorce, and buried a daughter. He comes to believe that these accumulated losses have prepared him to protect Miraijin and deliver her to a future he imagines as a new beginning. Irene is thus present within the purpose Marco constructs from grief, though that purpose centers on Miraijin rather than offering any resolution of Irene’s death.

When Marco prepares for his own assisted death, Irene enters his thoughts unexpectedly. He imagines that she would be proud of him, remembering that she killed herself when she was only a little older than Miraijin. Near the end, he names Irene alongside Adele, his father, and his mother as he thinks of the person he is leaving to the world. These returns make her more than a closed episode in the family past: she remains part of Marco’s intimate reckoning with death, responsibility, and the people he has loved.

Irene’s narrative role rests on a painful disparity between how much Marco sees in her and how much the household fails to notice before her death. The account honors his love without turning that love into an explanation or a cure, and it presents the warning signs without claiming they make the outcome mechanically predictable. Her story instead holds together rebellion and vulnerability, familial affection and failure of attention, and a death that remains irreversible even as its meaning changes in Marco’s memory.