Irene Carrera's depression and suicidal crisis

Irene Carrera’s depression and suicidal crisis is presented as a prolonged, increasingly visible distress that the people around her repeatedly fail to recognize. In August, after social plans fall away and her psychoanalyst is unavailable, a song associated with suicide plays on repeat while the family carries on with its ordinary concerns. Marco alone understands the immediate danger when Irene leaves for the Mulinelli, a stretch of sea linked to previous drownings. The episode makes the difference between a signal being present and being heard central to the crisis, without reducing Irene’s condition to any single cause.

A crisis developing over time

Irene’s family has witnessed years of shifting moods: scenes and rebellion, periods of silence, apparent recoveries, bursts of affection and optimism, and returns of sadness, anger, and deliberate behavior that drew attention. The recurrence of these changes has had a paradoxical effect. Although they had prompted concern before, the family’s alarm threshold has risen; what should register as distress has become familiar enough to be absorbed into the household’s expectations.

Irene has been seeing Zeichen, a psychoanalyst in Florence. But in August, like other psychoanalysts, he is away. He has left a number Irene could call if she needs help, yet it is a long foreign number with an unfamiliar prefix, a practical barrier that discourages her from using it. The passage places that obstacle alongside the family’s misreading of her behavior: support exists, but it is not readily accessible at the moment she is most isolated.

The summer’s failed plans deepen that isolation. A trip to Greece with two friends after her final exams falls through when one friend cannot go. Ireland is imagined as an alternative but never planned; suggestions of a few days in Versilia, where her friends say they enjoy themselves, do not take hold. By mid-August Irene is back at the family house in Bolgheri, where she has spent every summer, and from which she had hoped that year to escape after completing her exams with the highest mark. One friend’s withdrawal is enough to undo the plans and bring her social inadequacy into sharp relief. The narrative describes that isolation as both a consequence of her depression and one of its causes, rather than offering a simple, one-way explanation.

The household and its missed signals

The setting compounds Irene’s sense of being stuck. Her father cooks and reads, her mother sunbathes and reads, her younger brothers are intensely athletic, and local friends gather at the area’s infrequent discos. The family’s worn Vaurien sailboat and the familiar summer routine belong to a place Irene had expected to leave. Meanwhile, her parents continue discussing Marco’s impending treatment each evening, despite a truce against arguing about it. Irene secretly listens. The family has concerns of its own, but the narrative shows how those conversations occupy attention while her distress remains largely unaddressed.

On an August evening, after a sparse dinner of leftovers, Irene says she is going to the beach to secure the Vaurien in its shed because a storm is expected. The explanation is out of character: concern for the boat belongs more to her father than to Irene. Her father accepts it without noticing anything unusual. Her mother is occupied with dishes, and Giacomo is drying them; neither tries to stop her. Marco, nearly fifteen and still appearing younger because of a hormonal deficiency, recognizes the danger in her departure. The difference between his recognition and the rest of the family’s inaction makes this moment a pointed instance of attention arriving from an unexpected quarter.

The danger is not abstract to Marco. The Mulinelli lies in front of the family’s hut, where turbulent water and currents have been associated with four earlier drownings, all understood in the family’s stories as suicides. As Irene leaves with an old hemp rope over her shoulder, Marco realizes that she is going there to enter the water. He does not announce his fear or wait for another family member to act: he slips out through the kitchen door after her.

The warning in the music

Another account of the same evening makes Irene’s exhaustion legible through details that those around her fail to interpret. Her eyes look sunken, her gaze broken, her step ghostlike as she moves through the house wearing her Walkman headphones. Most strikingly, she has been listening for days to “Gloomy Sunday,” the Hungarian song of suicides, in Lydia Lunch’s acid, whispered recording. Irene has made a loop from the song on both sides of the cassette in the red Walkman her brothers gave her for Christmas.

The passage explicitly treats the repeated song as an alarm that has been sounding for days, while also stressing that nobody hears it. This is not evidence that a song caused Irene’s crisis; its significance lies in the way it makes distress available to notice and yet remains unheard by the family. Irene’s exhausted appearance and the music’s unbroken repetition accumulate as warning signs, not as a single explanation for her state.

The contrast is sharpened by the evening’s competing plans. Marco is absorbed in a secret meeting with Luisa, and Giacomo, having received a refusal from Luisa earlier that day, calls the Lattes home to check whether she has gone out. He learns that she has, then hangs up without speaking further. Their attention is turned toward separate anxieties and desires; the house is effectively empty of anyone attending to Irene. Letizia, too, is preoccupied and dissatisfied, and does not perceive Irene’s exhaustion. The narrative’s force comes from this ordinary dispersal of attention: the warning is not hidden, but it does not become a shared understanding.

Recognition, responsibility, and the wider frame

Marco’s response is immediate but does not make him a complete interpreter of Irene’s longer struggle. He understands what her departure that evening means and follows her, while the adults and Giacomo do not intervene. That distinction gives the crisis a relational shape: Irene is not simply alone in the house, but the one person who recognizes the acute danger is her younger brother, who must act without first securing help from the rest of the family.

The account also resists assigning responsibility for Irene’s condition to one missed call, one failed holiday, one family member, or one song. It lays out a cumulative situation: recurring symptoms that have become familiar, social connections that feel inadequate, plans repeatedly abandoned, a therapist absent for the summer, and a route to contacting him made difficult by an unfamiliar international number. The family’s ordinary routines and concerns do not erase these pressures; they help explain how the signs can be present without being collectively understood.

The later account of “Gloomy Sunday” supplies a cultural context for the name Irene’s family would associate with it. The song’s international reputation rests on a legend that it led listeners to suicide, a reputation that produced censorship and bans. In 1941, Billie Holiday’s version added a verse absent from the original, framing the preceding events as a dream. This history echoes the song’s role in Irene’s scene, but it does not establish that listening to it caused her crisis. Its narrative importance is the terrible clarity of the signal: a song regarded around the world as a warning against despair repeats in Irene’s headphones, while the people around her fail to understand what they are hearing.