Canada

Canada enters the narrative through family relocation rather than as a directly described landscape: Bianca and Marta move to Toronto, where their father had lived and worked for years. The move places them with him and leaves Leda at a distance, making Canada the setting for a changed form of motherhood—one sustained by calls, practical requests, and unresolved attachment.

The Move to Toronto

When the daughters move to Toronto, Leda is surprised and embarrassed by her response. Rather than feeling upset, she feels light, as if only then had she definitively brought them into the world. For the first time in almost twenty-five years, she is no longer conscious of the anxiety of having to care for them. The house becomes neat and nearly uninhabited; shopping and laundry no longer occupy her, and she sees no need to replace the woman who had helped with the household work. The change is not simply a release from daily care. Toronto is where the girls’ father had lived and worked for years, and they now live with him. Leda’s relief coexists with the fact of separation: Canada marks a new arrangement in which the daughters’ everyday lives unfold beyond her household and her direct supervision.

Contact Across Distance

Leda’s remaining obligation, as she understands it, is to call once a day to ask how the girls are and what they are doing. On the phone, they speak as if they are on their own, although they live with their father; they continue to keep their parents separate in conversation by speaking to Leda as if he did not exist. Their replies vary between cheerful evasion, irritable pauses, and an artificial manner they adopt around friends. The calls also preserve familiar demands. Bianca contacts Leda especially often, asking whether blue shoes will go with an orange skirt or requesting papers left in a book, and turning to her as someone who can still be blamed for anger and sorrow despite the distance. The calls are usually hurried and can seem false to Leda, yet their continued frequency shows that geographic separation has not ended the daughters’ reliance on her.

Language and Estrangement

Canada also becomes audible through the telephone. Bianca and Marta imitate Leda’s Neapolitan cadence and expressions from there, teasing the accent that surfaces in her speech and in her Italianized formulations. They are also ashamed of how she speaks English, a language central to her profession, and tell her she is not very good at it. Their judgments unsettle her confidence in the linguistic life she has built away from Naples. For Leda, the daughters’ distance is therefore both geographical and generational. She recognizes that they have gone far away and belong to another time, even as their calls and mockery keep her connected to them. Canada concentrates this double movement: separation loosens the daily demands of motherhood, but it does not dissolve the family bond or the painful awareness that the daughters are growing into lives beyond her reach.