Magic and fairy-tale explanations

Magic and fairy-tale explanations are the stories Giovanna invents to account for the bracelet and the wreckage of her family, and to bear what she cannot yet face directly. The enchantment is never confirmed as supernatural: it works instead as a temporary shelter from blame, then collapses under the ordinary evidence of betrayal. Its power lies in the way it lets Giovanna imagine herself innocent while exposing how thoroughly the adults’ lives have confused her sense of beauty, virtue, and belonging.

The bracelet as a magical cause

The bracelet had become difficult for Giovanna to think about without anxiety. Although she had put it away in a drawer and avoided opening it, she felt its glittering stones and gold still imposing themselves on her, as though the object carried the moods of the affair that had gathered around it. Her questions concerned more than its ownership: her father had taken away a gift from her aunt and given it to Costanza, who had kept and worn it for thirteen years. The narrator could not reconcile the object’s origin as Vittoria’s gift to her with its place in the life of her father’s elegant second wife.

That contradiction made the bracelet seem capable of holding incompatible worlds together. Vittoria was uneducated, poor, and vulgar in Giovanna’s earlier understanding; Costanza was cultivated, wealthy, and refined. Yet the bracelet had appealed to both, and its transfer from one woman to the other blurred the distinctions that Giovanna had relied on. It became, in her imagination, not simply jewelry but a charged object through which her father’s choices, the women’s differences, and the family’s injuries converged.

A refuge from blame

Giovanna’s obsessive brooding gradually helped her detach herself from her parents’ suffering. Their reciprocal accusations, pleas, and contempt had initially left her floundering, as if she were drowning; months passed before she could persuade herself that their conflict did not concern her. In the meantime, fairy-tale reasoning supplied a way to make the family’s pain less immediate and less morally complicated.

At night, she sometimes imagined that her father had removed the bracelet because, despite his opposition to magic, he feared it might harm her. Since it came from Vittoria, whom Giovanna pictured as an aunt-witch seeking to possess her and make her like herself, the theory restored her father as a protector. It recast the removal of the gift as an act of care rather than a choice entangled with his betrayal of Giovanna’s mother.

The comfort did not survive the next question. If her father loved Costanza enough to betray Giovanna’s mother and separate from her and Giovanna, why would he give Costanza a maleficent object? Giovanna’s half-sleeping fantasies multiplied possible answers: perhaps he liked the bracelet too much to throw it into the sea, or perhaps he wanted to see it on Costanza’s wrist before getting rid of it. In that version, the enchanted bracelet made Costanza appear still more beautiful to him and bound him to her, so that the attempt to protect Giovanna instead exposed her father to Vittoria’s supposed magic. Giovanna even imagined that Vittoria had foreseen the consequences, and that her father’s action had ruined the whole family.

Innocence and the return of contradiction

The fairy-tale explanation temporarily reduced not only her father’s responsibility but Giovanna’s own. If Vittoria’s magic had set the wrongs in motion, the drama had begun when Giovanna was a newborn, before she could have been guilty of seeking out and meeting her aunt. Giovanna could imagine herself as innocent, like the small children of Jesus, and treat the obscure force behind her actions as something that had been at work long before she understood it.

But the story could not erase the concrete history beneath it. Thirteen years earlier, her father had judged Vittoria’s gift beautiful, and Costanza, a refined woman, had confirmed its appeal by keeping and wearing it. Whether or not any curse existed, the bracelet’s beauty had crossed the very divide Giovanna wanted to preserve. The imagined magic briefly offered a clear cause for harm, but the object’s social history returned her to a less manageable confusion: vulgarity and refinement did not stay on their assigned sides.

An underground connection

As Giovanna’s old bearings failed, she imagined an underground tunnel linking her father, Costanza, and Vittoria, even against their wishes. Their claims to be different seemed less convincing than the suggestion that they were made of the same clay. The fantasy connected the bracelet’s movement between women to a larger likeness among the adults, whose actions had crossed boundaries their stated identities were supposed to uphold.

In this imagined chain, her father’s sexual grasp of Costanza recalled Enzo’s past treatment of Vittoria and, Giovanna believed, Margherita. The comparison folded separate relationships into one pattern of desire and injury. Her mother, left suffering, became the fairy-tale woman who filled jar after jar with tears until she lost her reason; Giovanna pictured herself remaining beside her, deprived of her father’s amusement and worldly intelligence, which Costanza, Ida, and Angela would receive instead. The fairy-tale image offered a dramatic shape to her fear, but it also revealed how the losses within the family seemed to Giovanna to travel from one relationship to another.

The concept therefore remains suspended between supernatural suspicion and psychological explanation. Giovanna never establishes that the bracelet has magical properties; her own accounts rise from distress, shift to soothe her, and then fail when the object’s history or her father’s choices return to view. Magic does not solve the family’s contradictions. It gives them a temporary plot, making Giovanna innocent and the bracelet causally powerful, before the unresolved mixture of betrayal, beauty, and resemblance breaks through again.