Love inseparable from grief and fidelity

Love inseparable from grief and fidelity is embodied in Vittoria’s relationship with Enzo, whose death does not end her attachment to him. Recounted to thirteen-year-old Giovanna at the cemetery, their history joins passionate love to lasting sorrow, continuing devotion, and responsibility toward the family Enzo left behind. The encounter also changes the way Giovanna imagines love: she hears it described not as decorous adult sentiment, but as a force that can survive loss and unsettle the rules of her own household.

A love remembered in movement

Vittoria begins her account with the memory of meeting Enzo at a dance party. As music plays, she recalls that they danced together, and she dates their first meeting to seventeen years earlier, on May 23. The music makes the memory physical: she moves to the rhythm while looking toward the window, where she can see the car in which Giovanna’s father is waiting. The dance is therefore not merely an anecdote about the past; it is a present act of remembrance, performed in the shadow of another family’s disapproval.

After Vittoria pushes Giovanna away, Giovanna feels the sudden loss of warmth as a sharp, humiliating pain. She is struck by the idea that Vittoria has liked no one else since that dance and imagines that, while dancing with her, Vittoria may have relived her love for Enzo. The child’s response turns Vittoria’s story into a first model of absolute love: Giovanna wants to love in the same way, and imagines that the feeling itself might pass from Vittoria’s body into hers.

Grief that continues after death

At Enzo’s grave, Vittoria’s devotion is not represented as a memory she has put away. Giovanna fetches fresh water for the flowers and imagines Enzo’s ghost speaking to Vittoria through the cross-shaped openings in the tomb. Returning along the path, she sees Vittoria bowed over in tears, speaking to Enzo. Vittoria does not hide her grief from the girl; she wipes her face slowly, allowing Giovanna to witness it, then asks her to arrange one vase of flowers while she handles the other.

The scene unsettles the emotional discipline of Giovanna’s home, where feelings are supposed to be concealed. Seventeen years after the beginning of their love, Vittoria is still grieving openly, addressing the dead man at his tomb. Giovanna sees that fidelity here is not a claim that sorrow has ended, but a continuing relationship sustained through speech, ritual, and remembrance. The flowers and water give that attachment a practical form even as Vittoria speaks to someone who is no longer present.

Love, injury, and responsibility

When Giovanna asks why grief did not kill her, Vittoria describes suffering as something she still carries. She gives three reasons for having continued to live: the wish to keep thinking of Enzo, love and duty toward his children and their mother, Margherita, and hatred of Giovanna’s father. The account therefore refuses to reduce survival to one feeling. Memory, care, and anger all sustain Vittoria, though they do not cancel her pain.

Vittoria is direct about the harm her relationship caused. She admits that she took Enzo from Margherita and the children and says that, while her love remained intense, she would rather have died than give him back. Margherita was angry and reclaimed her husband, but when Enzo became ill she sent him back to Vittoria. The two women then accompanied him through his illness until his death. Vittoria’s account holds together the injury of betrayal and the later cooperation of the women who loved the same man; neither fact erases the other.

Her description of Margherita’s generosity gives the story a further dimension. After recognizing Vittoria’s love and suffering, Margherita allowed her to help care for Enzo’s three children. Vittoria, who worked as a maid in wealthy homes across Naples to help raise them, presents that care as a duty as well as an expression of love. She contrasts Margherita’s capacity for understanding with the respectability of Giovanna’s parents and their circle, whom she challenges to show comparable generosity. Love in this account is not only longing for the beloved: it also appears in labor and in the difficult relation between women whom the same relationship has hurt.

The story passed to Giovanna

Giovanna apologizes for making Vittoria recount the story on their anniversary. Vittoria says the conversation has made her happy, because speaking of Enzo recalls not only grief but also the happiness they shared. The distinction matters: remembrance does not suppress sorrow, yet sorrow does not exhaust what the relationship means. Telling the story lets Vittoria return to its joy without pretending that loss has disappeared.

Vittoria also speaks to Giovanna with an explicitness no adult in the girl’s household has offered her. Giovanna is startled, but she does not move away or cover her ears. She experiences Vittoria’s words as physically overwhelming and remembers them as impossible to erase. The encounter makes her desire inseparable, in her imagination, from the grief and fidelity that follow it: she finds herself wanting the pleasure Vittoria describes, while feeling that it would be incomplete without Vittoria’s continuing sorrow and loyalty.

That response establishes the concept’s formative role in Giovanna’s understanding of intimacy. Vittoria’s example is not an uncomplicated ideal: it includes the taking of a husband, suffering that lasts beyond death, work undertaken for the children, and a generosity made possible by Margherita. Yet its contradictions are precisely what give it force for Giovanna. Love appears as a bond whose happiness remains real after loss, and whose fidelity may be expressed not only by remembering the dead but by caring for those he left behind.