Luisa Lattes

Luisa Lattes is the love Marco Carrera thinks of as the first and last thing in his life, a relationship that begins in youthful intimacy, breaks under grief and distance, and repeatedly returns through letters and encounters. Its final movement is deliberately not a conventional reconciliation: Marco tells Luisa he cannot start their relationship again, yet when they meet late in his life, she kisses him and he kisses her back, allowing a moment of closeness without undoing the lives they have lived apart.

Identity and Introduction

Luisa enters the story both as a person and as an address: the letter to her is headed for Via Frusa 14 in Florence, and dated from Bolgheri on 11 September 1981. Marco’s salutation, “Luisa, Luisa mia,” immediately makes the correspondence intimate, but his repeated qualification that she is not his exposes the separation at the heart of that intimacy. In the letter, her name keeps returning to him like a hammering sound; he says he does not know how to stop it. The repetition conveys not merely affection but the way an unresolved relationship occupies his thought.

Marco admits to Luisa that he ran away after a catastrophe, overwhelmed by guilt and unable, for days, to feel like himself or anyone else. He connects his guilt to having been with her and happy with her while the disaster was happening, and says that he still believes himself responsible. He resists the consolations offered by other people, who call the event God’s will or destiny. His anger has also turned toward Giacomo Carrera, with whom he fought, and toward his parents, whose whereabouts serve him only as a way to be somewhere else. Luisa is thus addressed from inside a crisis that has estranged Marco from his family and left him unable to cross the distance between them: he says he did not even say goodbye.

Love, Distance, and Return

The later account of Marco’s marriage to Marina Molitor frames Luisa as the relationship that preceded it and continued to haunt it. The narrative presents the marriage as founded on a fiction and cautions against becoming attached to the apparent love story of Marco and Marina, since it changes into something else. Against that false beginning, Marco’s history with Luisa is a real attachment he never fully relinquishes. Even in the years when they are apart, he thinks of her practically every day, though he tells himself those thoughts are vague and resigned, about what might have been.

Their summer encounters in Bolgheri make that distance visible. Luisa reappears on the beach with her husband and, over time, first one child and then two. Marco sees her as increasingly distant from the person he had adored during the most tragic period of his life. The contrast between her presence and their separation is sharpened by the fact that they have not truly spoken since the days when their letters stopped. A failed attempt by Marco to reach her in Paris had also ended in his being mistaken for a fugitive with the same name, arrested, taken to Rome, interrogated, and released. The episode belongs to a history in which communication is repeatedly attempted but fails to bring the two into a shared life.

In Paris for a conference, Marco finally acts on a thought that had until then remained safely resigned. From the Hotel Lutetia he calls Luisa, promising himself that if she does not answer, cannot meet, or has changed her number, he will never call again. She answers on the second ring and comes to the hotel bar half an hour later. The encounter overturns his attempt to contain desire as a thought about the past: Luisa appears close and possible, and the long distance between memory and presence briefly collapses.

Their later correspondence records another rupture. In a letter dated 7 September 2001, Marco asks whether Luisa changed her mind because she had been offered a contract at the Sorbonne or because he had been too rigid and absolutist. He recalls two possible explanations she gave for leaving and says that, in effect, she left him twice, with two reasons and two languages. His bewilderment marks the relationship’s recurring pattern: closeness opens a future, then Luisa withdraws, leaving Marco to reconstruct the meaning of the departure.

Letters and the Hummingbird

After nearly four years without a letter, Luisa writes to Marco during a period of family illness and upheaval. Giacomo has returned to America, leaving Marco with a sense of absence; his parents are unwell, and he describes their illness and the reversal of their roles in a reply to Luisa. Her letter begins by saying she misses him and ends with an apology for having made a mess. It also mentions an Aztec belief that those who die in battle may be rewarded by reincarnation as hummingbirds. Marco spends a night turning over the possible meaning of her letter, then chooses to answer passionately rather than protect himself by interpreting or withholding.

In December 2018, Luisa writes again from Paris, this time about the word emmenalgia, which she has encountered in a book about Fabrizio De André. Marco replies that the hummingbird, emmenalgia, and the question of why they were not together cannot simply be left unanswered. Yet the letter is also a boundary: he says he cannot afford to begin a relationship with her again. He notices that she has moved, speculates about the reasons, and turns the contrast between movement and stillness into a reflection on courage. Their exchange therefore holds two things together: a long-standing intellectual and emotional intimacy, and Marco’s insistence that this intimacy cannot become a new shared life.

Marco describes his own life as a succession of changes that have bumped him, literally, into one life and then another, each demanding brutal adjustment. He says he wants to hold on to as many things as he can. Luisa, in his metaphor, is the lion or gazelle that gets up and runs; he identifies himself as the hummingbird. The distinction gives their separation a form beyond simple indecision: they stand for different relations to change, movement, and staying still. Marco can imagine that they might have been together if Luisa had been able to stop, but he does not treat that unrealized possibility as a plan he can now pursue.

A Chosen Mission and a Final Encounter

Marco’s final letter gives his refusal its clearest reason. He says he now has a mission that gives meaning to what he has had and not had, including Luisa: to raise the new man. The phrase refers to the eight-year-old girl sleeping under his roof, who will become a woman and whom he insists will become the new man. His first and last thoughts now belong to her, with his other thoughts in between also directed toward her. He tells Luisa that this is the only way he can live and that this will be his last letter. The declaration does not deny the scale of his love for Luisa; he says that for forty years she was the first and last thing he thought about every day. Instead, it names the change in his priorities and closes the correspondence in favor of his responsibility to the child.

That decision does not erase desire. In the late encounter, Marco’s heart begins beating fast when Luisa is there. He has prepared nothing to say and asks her what day it is. When she caresses his head, forehead, and face, she calls him “Mon petit colibri.” The hummingbird name, once part of their correspondence and their reflection on movement, becomes a gesture of touch. Luisa kisses him on the mouth, with her tongue, in front of Giacomo and the others. Marco takes her head in his hand and holds her to him. He says he had always wanted to kiss her, had wanted it since that place in another century, and had never dared to do it that day; she has done it for him.

The kiss is neither a promise to resume their relationship nor a reversal of Marco’s stated decision. Luisa rises, and Marco steps back to his seat with his head bowed. The scene turns from the intimacy of the kiss to his perception of the afternoon as full of light, life, and well-being. He acknowledges a life full of pain, but also the moments in which pleasure remains possible: a day, a few embraces, a kiss. Luisa’s significance finally lies in this double truth. She is the love Marco cannot make into a future, and the person with whom, at the end, he can still experience a moment of present-tense closeness.