Andrea and Costanza’s long-term affair

Andrea and Costanza’s long-term affair is the hidden attachment that turns a friendship between two families into a crisis of marriage, loyalty, and inheritance. Its history reaches back before Giovanna’s birth, but its consequences surface through a family quarrel, Costanza’s return of a bracelet, and Andrea’s belated attempt to explain what happened. The account is not a simple revelation of adultery: Andrea describes a profound love discovered during a work trip, while denying that the two continued a physical relationship afterward, leaving Giovanna to reckon with both his explanation and the damage around it.

The concealed attachment

For years, Andrea and Mariano were close friends, and Costanza, Mariano’s wife, was part of the same intimate circle as Andrea and his wife, Nella. Andrea later tells Giovanna that he loved Nella from their school days and continued to love her, but that he had also loved Costanza since before Giovanna was born. At first, he understood that attachment as sibling-like affection: he saw Costanza as the sister he would have wanted, in contrast to his estranged sister, Vittoria, and likened his bond with her to his friendship with Mariano.

Andrea’s explanation places the change in their relationship on a work trip that mattered to both of them. After dinner with a larger group, the two continued talking, first in the restaurant and then in the street; they spent the night in his room, as they had once done among friends, but this time were alone together. Andrea says that they then recognized their love was not the affection of siblings but something else. He presents the realization as unexpected and difficult to explain, not as a relationship they had deliberately planned from the outset.

He insists that their discovery did not lead to an ongoing physical affair. According to his account, it was an intense, inescapable feeling, and afterward they did not continue. That distinction is central to the story but does not resolve its moral or emotional consequences: Andrea’s love for Costanza endured, and the relationship was concealed within a friendship and two marriages. He tells Giovanna that Mariano had other partners and confided his affairs to him, a history that had made Andrea feel protective of Costanza. That protection, he says, had seemed like an extension of friendship until his own feelings changed.

The bracelet and the hidden history

The bracelet becomes the material sign through which the concealed attachment enters Giovanna’s life. Andrea says it belonged to his mother, whom he remembers as never having loved him. After she died, he wanted the bracelet, and he struck Vittoria when she insisted that it belonged to her. When Giovanna was born, he told Vittoria to give it to the child; he then gave it to Costanza, whom he believed would like it and on whom he thought it would look beautiful. Andrea says that he had already assigned it to Costanza in his mind, even though it was presented as Giovanna’s.

The object’s passage between women makes the family’s hidden loyalties tangible. Costanza had kept and worn it for thirteen years before bringing it to Giovanna’s home and returning it. Giovanna’s mother clarified that this was a restitution, not a gift. Costanza left without smiling, and did not return to the house. The bracelet thus arrives as both a family possession and evidence of a history that the adults have not explained to Giovanna; what Andrea calls a symbolic act has, for her, the force of a concealed transfer and an unexplained loss.

Andrea himself describes the bracelet as one of those acts that appear to be actions but are really symbols. He says he thought giving it to Costanza would do her good, while acknowledging that good intentions can turn into harm without a person realizing it. His account links the object to his complicated feelings about his mother, Vittoria, Costanza, and Giovanna: what he considered an expression of care became part of the confusion and injury inherited by his daughter.

Exposure and consequences

The affair’s consequences become visible before Giovanna knows its history. At a family gathering, she watches Nella and Mariano: Nella barely participates and avoids looking at him, while he watches her and addresses her in an unusually gentle voice. When Angela asks for Giovanna to stay overnight, Nella hesitates. Mariano intervenes, promising to take Giovanna home the next day, and the adults negotiate with an urgency that Giovanna suspects has another meaning. That night, the remembered sight of her mother’s ankle between Mariano’s leads her to imagine what Vittoria would make of it. She decides not to report what she saw, fearing Vittoria would use it to condemn Nella and Andrea.

A violent quarrel between Andrea and Mariano soon follows. The men begin with familiar arguments about politics and other intellectual subjects, but the discussion turns into shouting. Costanza tries to leave; Mariano insults her, and Andrea runs after her. The children are frightened and confused, and the rupture soon changes their daily lives: Mariano disappears from the household on Via San Giacomo dei Capri, and Giovanna sees Angela and Ida less often. The girls discuss the quarrel by telephone without understanding its full cause, while sensing that the conflict concerns their parents’ intimate lives rather than the political arguments that preceded it.

Giovanna’s own understanding remains uncertain. She fears that Vittoria told Andrea about her suspicions, and imagines that the quarrel exposed Mariano’s behavior toward Nella and prompted Costanza’s departure. The return of the bracelet intensifies that uncertainty: Costanza’s remorseful manner, Nella’s strained appearance, and the adults’ careful handling of the object seem to disclose more than anyone will say. Giovanna prays for the family to return to its previous order, while recognizing that she cannot make the events fit a reassuring explanation.

The eventual disclosure comes amid another family confrontation. Nella tells Giovanna that Andrea has had another wife for fifteen years. Rather than receiving this as wholly new, Giovanna feels she has somehow always known it and briefly hopes that the family might accept the arrangement and resume its familiar routines. Her reply—that Nella, too, has another husband—shows how the children’s suspicions have already unsettled the ordinary categories of marriage and fidelity. The revelation names the long concealment without immediately clarifying every part of it.

Andrea’s account and its limits

During a later journey with Giovanna, Andrea tries to explain himself. He says he had anticipated that everything might fall apart and asks her not to treat her anger as something she must apologize for. He insists that he loves both Nella and Giovanna, and that he had been faithful to Nella for a long time even as he loved Costanza. His explanation is disordered by emotion, and Giovanna struggles to interrupt it; the scene presents the account as a father’s attempt to justify himself, not as an objective settlement of the family’s competing claims.

Andrea’s account also reaches beyond the affair itself. He says he knew that Mariano had betrayed Costanza with other women, and that his pity for her helped him understand his own attachment as protective and almost familial. He describes the work-trip encounter as the moment that understanding failed, then draws a distinction between discovering a love and carrying it into a continuing physical relationship. Giovanna receives his insistence, but his account cannot erase the secrecy, the rupture with Mariano, or the way the bracelet was taken from her and given to Costanza.

Afterward, Giovanna stops wearing the bracelet and puts it in her bedside drawer. Remembering it brings back questions she cannot answer: how Andrea and Costanza could have loved one another for so long without Nella or Mariano knowing, why Costanza retained the bracelet, and what Andrea intended when he gave it to her. She ultimately avoids pursuing these questions, overwhelmed by the adults’ capacity for concealed attachments and by her own role as their involuntary witness.

A crisis extending across two families

The affair is not contained within Andrea and Costanza’s private feelings. It crosses the boundary between two households, implicating Nella, Mariano, their children, and the friendship that once linked the families. Andrea’s protective explanation of his love for Costanza is inseparable from his betrayal of Mariano’s trust and from the distress left in both marriages. The children encounter that damage indirectly, first through gestures and silences, then through the adults’ argument and the sudden absence of familiar people.

For Giovanna, the affair becomes a lesson in the gap between what adults say and what their actions mean. A promise to take her home, a woman’s departure, a father running after her, and a bracelet returned as if it had always belonged to the child all acquire significance before she can understand them. Andrea’s explanation makes the story more specific, but not simpler: it supplies his motives and his account of events without restoring the earlier family order or eliminating the consequences of what he concealed.