God the Father and earthly fathers

God the Father and earthly fathers are set against each other through Giovanna’s troubled reading of the Gospels and her mother’s account of Andrea. Rather than discovering in scripture the faith she associates with Roberto, Giovanna finds a frightening image of divine authority: a Father who watches suffering without preventing it. Her mother, meanwhile, describes Andrea as a brilliant, childlike man whom she continues to love despite having misunderstood him. Together, these portraits unsettle the idea that fatherhood, whether heavenly or human, guarantees protection or justice.

Reading the Gospels

After her father kisses her forehead and says they will talk later, Giovanna decides that she cannot discuss her reading with him. She had begun the Gospels hoping that their stories would lead her toward a love of God like Roberto’s, and she feels an urgent need for such faith. Instead, the books resist the shape of consoling fables. Their people have real jobs and belong to recognizable places; their stories strike her as ferocious and disturbing. As she finishes one Gospel and begins another, her agitation grows.

The God she encounters is a Lord who watches human beings choose between good and evil. Giovanna experiences this surveillance not as care but as a servile condition, with frail people kept below a distant authority and left exposed to hunger, illness, terror, cruelty, pride, and betrayal. The language of a heavenly Father therefore carries a threat: it places suffering under a father’s gaze without showing that gaze bringing relief.

The Father in Heaven and the father on earth

Giovanna’s objections gather around the Gospel story of Jesus. She resents that God creates vulnerable beings and then allows them to suffer; that the son, though able to perform miracles, does not use them to improve the human condition; and that he submits to death while his cry for help receives no answer. Even the resurrection fails to reassure her. She fears the prospect of a mutilated body returning to life and questions whether eternal life among the resurrected is a reward or another form of horror.

These doubts bring the divine father uncomfortably close to the human one. Giovanna compares the heavenly Father to the unloving father described in Matthew and Luke, who gives a hungry son stones, snakes, and scorpions instead of bread. She imagines that speaking openly to Andrea could lead her to say that God is worse than her own father. Unable to accept the moral logic that suffering is imposed by a benevolent authority, she finds herself defending God’s creatures, including the worst among them. Their harsh condition makes the great feelings they sometimes manage to express seem all the more valuable.

A mother’s account of Andrea

Giovanna’s sympathies extend particularly to her mother, whom she sees as having been used by Andrea and then answered with sentimental flattery that took advantage of her capacity for deep feeling. Her mother nevertheless describes her former husband with a mixture of disappointment and attachment. She tells Giovanna that Andrea is younger than his daughter, that he will remain a child forever, and that his extraordinary intelligence leaves him absorbed in his games. Without someone watching over him, she says, he gets hurt. She also admits that she once mistook him for a grown man.

The account does not erase the mother’s love. She recognizes that she was mistaken, yet holds on to her attachment; Giovanna looks at her with affection and wants to love as steadfastly, but not a man who does not deserve it. Andrea’s childlikeness thus has a double meaning in their conversation: it helps explain his vulnerability as the mother sees it, but it does not cancel the harm Giovanna believes he has done. Her wish to love differently is an answer to the example she has inherited, not a rejection of her mother’s feelings.

Faith, desire, and unresolved authority

When her mother asks what she is reading, Giovanna says she is reading the Gospels because a man she likes knows them well. She denies being in love and says she only wants to be his friend, since he already has a girlfriend. Her answer connects the religious reading to a personal attachment, but it does not mean that she has adopted Roberto’s faith. The Gospels remain a source of agitation, and the person who prompted her to read them is also someone she approaches indirectly, through the wish for friendship.

The parallel between God and Andrea makes Giovanna’s religious uncertainty inseparable from her experience of human authority. She cannot comfortably call a watching, permissive God a loving father when she sees both divine and earthly fathers as implicated in the vulnerability of those dependent on them. Yet the passage does not resolve that conflict by replacing faith with certainty or by dismissing love altogether. Instead, Giovanna takes the side of the suffering creatures and measures paternal authority against what it permits them to endure. Her mother’s continuing devotion shows the emotional cost and persistence of attachment; Giovanna’s reservation marks her effort to imagine a different judgment.