Giovanna returns to Milan and refuses to share Roberto’s bed

Giovanna returns to Milan under the practical pretext of retrieving Giuliana’s missing bracelet, but the journey also carries a desire she cannot initially admit to herself: another chance to be alone with Roberto. When he offers his bed, she declines and sleeps on the couch. Her refusal is not a simple rejection of desire; it marks the distance between being physically wanted and being recognized as a person whose thoughts and conscience matter.

The bracelet and the second journey

On the train back from Milan, Giuliana woke Giovanna with frightened eyes and showed her bare wrist: the bracelet was missing. She searched her purse and suitcase without finding it. Giovanna tried to reassure her that she had left it at Roberto’s house, but Giuliana insisted she had put it in her purse. At a telephone, Giuliana called Roberto; he confirmed that he had found the bracelet in the kitchen. Her relief was immediate, but it gave way to fear that once she left, Michela might take her place beside him. Giuliana also dreaded going home to Vittoria’s interrogation.

The missing object gave Giovanna a plausible reason to return to Milan, but her later account makes clear that the errand concealed a more complicated intention. She knew she wanted to go back at once, yet she did not acknowledge that desire to herself. Instead, she treated the trip as necessary to comfort Giuliana, retrieve the bracelet, and tell Roberto that he should marry Giuliana before it was too late. She also cast herself as the adult friend’s protector, willing to draw Vittoria’s anger onto herself. Those explanations were not wholly false; their force lay in how neatly they hid Giovanna’s own longing.

Giovanna bought another ticket and called her mother to say she would stay an additional day in Milan, disregarding her mother’s complaint. She had not told Roberto she was coming. The dialogue she later imagined between them—an understanding that the bracelet would bring her back and make a shared night possible—was, she admits, a fictional reconstruction rather than a reliable recollection of what they said. What she remembers clearly is the blunt purpose beneath the pretext: she wanted the possibility of being with him in the bed where she had seen him with Giuliana.

Arrival at Roberto’s home

Giovanna expected Roberto to meet her at the station, as he had on her earlier arrival, but he was not there. When she called, he apologized: he had assumed she would come directly to his home and was working on an essay due the next day. Giovanna felt depressed but said nothing. She followed his directions by metro and arrived at his apartment, where he greeted her cordially. She hoped he would kiss her on the mouth; he kissed her cheeks instead.

Dinner had been arranged, with food prepared by the concierge. Neither of them mentioned the bracelet or Giuliana. Roberto spoke about the essay he was writing on compunction, describing it as training that pricks the conscience, like sewing through cloth with needle and thread to make a garment. Giovanna listened to the voice that had enchanted her and read the scene—the books, the desk, the shared meal, the conversation about his work—as evidence that she was necessary to him. The intellectual intimacy she desired seemed momentarily available, but it rested on her interpretation of an evening Roberto treated as ordinary company.

After dinner, Roberto handed her the bracelet as casually as an everyday object, without mentioning Giuliana, almost as though he had removed her from the evening. Giovanna could not adopt that detachment. She pictured Giuliana far away in Pascone, in the dreary house marked by the large photograph of Enzo in uniform, and remembered seeing her distressed in Roberto’s bathroom, restaurant, and bed. Having returned to the same room after witnessing Giuliana’s vulnerability there, Giovanna could not make the bracelet’s recovery feel like a self-contained favor. The object had brought her back, but its return sharpened her awareness of the person whose place she had hoped to occupy.

The offered bed and the refusal

As Roberto talked, Giovanna grew tired and frightened. She told him so, and he offered her his bed. The offer did not answer what she had said: her fear arose from the exhausting journey, Giuliana’s despair, and the possibility of making an unforgivable mistake, while Roberto’s remark followed his discussion of the difficulty of opening the sofa bed. Giovanna recognized the mismatch and answered that she would be fine where she was. She curled up on the couch, still in her clothes, retaining them as a kind of armor.

Roberto asked whether she was sure. She said yes. When he then asked why she had come back, she answered that she no longer knew. He stood looking down at her while she looked up from the couch, confused. He did not lean over or touch her; he said good night and went to his room. The scene ends without a sexual encounter, but not with desire extinguished: after settling on the couch, Giovanna still wanted to wait until he was asleep and slip into his bed, clothed, simply to be near him.

Desire, recognition, and the cost of the pretext

The episode makes explicit that Giovanna’s longing for Roberto is not reducible to the wish for sexual penetration. Before meeting him, she had not felt a need to be penetrated, and she had regarded the act as potentially vulgar. Seeing him in bed with Giuliana made his sexual body and capacity for penetration newly concrete to her; she had also returned to Milan knowing that sex might occur. Yet, lying awake, she understood that the need carrying her there was different. She wanted his respect and the chance to discuss compunction and a God who could be satisfied while people died of hunger and thirst. She wanted to be more than a pretty creature with whom a brilliant man could amuse himself.

That distinction gives her refusal its force. Giovanna does not claim that physical desire is absent; rather, she sees that the encounter she imagines Roberto expects would not satisfy her deeper wish. She falls asleep sorrowful, convinced that the intellectual and moral intimacy she wants will not happen. In her reading, Roberto believes she has returned for one kind of betrayal—the sexual one—while she has come seeking something more ferocious: recognition as a mind and a person, not merely as a body. The recovered bracelet resolves Giuliana’s immediate loss, but it cannot resolve the unequal meanings Giovanna and Roberto attach to her return.