Leuven

Leuven is one of the cities where Marco Carrera and Luisa Lattes meet after renewing their long-interrupted relationship. Its brief mention places the city within the practical geography of their affair: Marco chooses conferences near Paris so Luisa can reach him, and their meetings move from separate hotels toward a shared room and a vow that they will not consummate their love.

Meetings After the Interruption

After an earlier attempt to reach Luisa in Paris ended with Marco mistakenly arrested at the Italian-Swiss border, both lovers came to regard their efforts to be together as subject to a ferocious fate. They stopped pursuing the relationship, but the unspoken feelings and unrealized actions continued to shape their lives. When they began seeing each other again, the narrative presents the renewed meetings not as a new beginning but as a return to a passion that had never properly ended.

A Geography of Secrecy

Marco arranged to attend only conferences within about four hundred kilometers of Paris, including Bruges, Saint-Étienne, Lyon, and Leuven, places Luisa could travel to meet him. The account names Leuven as one of these destinations without describing a specific encounter there. Its significance is therefore cumulative: each city belongs to the network of journeys that allowed two married people with children to continue their relationship in secret.

From Separate Hotels to the Vow

Their arrangements grew increasingly intimate. They went from sleeping in different hotels to taking separate rooms in the same hotel, and eventually spent a night together in one room in Lyon on June 24, 1998. During the World Cup final, while France played Denmark, they watched a Jean Renoir film and listened to Sinéad O’Connor’s version of “Sacrifice.” They sealed their relationship with a vow of chastity, believing that abstinence would let them preserve their love without betraying their spouses or destroying their families.

The vow did not make the relationship innocent. They had kissed once, seventeen years earlier, on the night Irene Carrera drowned at the Mulinelli, and promised never to repeat it. Now they could share a bed without kissing, caressing, or touching, but the narrative calls this restraint a form of masochism rather than a resolution. Luisa understood that renewing her passion for Marco was directing her toward a new life; Marco, by contrast, believed that he could keep his love for Luisa compatible with his marriage to Marina Molitor. Leuven belongs to the chain of meetings that exposes the limits of that belief.