Margherita

Margherita, Enzo’s wife and the mother of their three children, is introduced through the story of a painful love triangle that might have made her only a wronged spouse. Instead, she becomes one of the book’s clearest examples of generosity under injury: after taking Enzo back in anger, she later allows Vittoria to return to him when he falls gravely ill, and shares his care with her. Giovanna first hears of Margherita through Vittoria’s account, then meets her in the home where Enzo’s family lives; her later conduct shows that compassion and hurt coexist rather than cancel each other out.

Family and First Appearance

Margherita belongs to Enzo’s household, where she raises their sons Tonino and Corrado and their daughter Giuliana. Giovanna first sees her at home in a dark kitchen, after Vittoria lets herself in with a key. Margherita is small and round, dressed in black, with blue eyes and a face Giovanna imagines may once have resembled Giuliana’s. The children’s different temperaments come into focus around her: Tonino is handsome and shy, Corrado outgoing and flirtatious, and Giuliana slender, beautiful, and lavishly made up.

The household also preserves Enzo’s image. On the kitchen wall hangs a large framed photograph of him in police uniform, a pistol at his side, with a red light burning before it. Seeing the photograph, Giovanna recognizes in Corrado the same wavy hair, low forehead, lively eyes, and smile. Margherita feeds her sweets while Corrado’s teasing draws her attention and Giuliana flatters her; when Corrado becomes too forward, Margherita calls him rude and tells him to stop. The scene presents her as a mother attentive to the boundaries and manners of her children, even as the house welcomes Giovanna warmly.

The Affair and the Family Property Dispute

Margherita’s marriage is entangled with the rupture between Enzo and his friend Andrea. In Vittoria’s account, a dispute over the family house had lasted for months: Andrea wanted the property sold and its proceeds divided among the siblings, while Vittoria argued that she had invested money in the house and had nowhere else to go. Enzo intervened on Vittoria’s behalf, offering to pay Andrea’s share himself. Andrea rejected his intervention and accused him of being a thief in uniform, then went to Margherita and disclosed Enzo’s affair with his sister in front of their three children.

The disclosure did more than expose the lovers. It drew Margherita and her children into a conflict over loyalty, property, and the cost of a friendship’s collapse. Giovanna hears this history from Vittoria at Enzo’s tomb, on the seventeenth anniversary of the couple’s love. She struggles to reconcile the accusation with her father’s insistence that informing on someone was the worst thing a person could do, and cannot comfortably defend him or accuse him. Margherita herself is absent from that telling, but the account establishes the shock and public humiliation imposed on her family.

Anger, Illness, and Shared Care

Vittoria does not describe Margherita as having calmly accepted the affair from the start. Margherita was angry; she took Enzo back, screaming and hitting. Only after he became sick—an illness Vittoria says erupted during a few weeks of rage—did Margherita tell him to return to Vittoria, regretting that she had not sent him sooner. The change is not presented as a simple pardon: it comes after anger and in the face of Enzo’s worsening condition, when the women’s attention turns to his illness and the remaining time with him.

Margherita and Vittoria then went through Enzo’s illness together, staying with him until the last moment. Vittoria speaks of her as wonderful and sensible, and recalls that Margherita recognized how deeply Vittoria loved Enzo and how much she suffered. Margherita’s response, as Vittoria recounts it, was to acknowledge that both women had loved the same man and that Enzo was easy to love. She also accepted Vittoria’s wish to love the children she had had with Enzo. Her actions make the household’s family ties more complex than a contest between wife and lover: she does not erase the betrayal, but permits care and affection to extend across it.

Margherita and Vittoria

The relation between the two women is marked by both rivalry and a remarkable later intimacy. Vittoria admits that she took Enzo from Margherita and says she would have died rather than give him back; she calls the act terrible, while insisting that powerful love can lead people to do what they cannot help doing. Margherita’s response, as narrated by Vittoria, neither absolves the affair nor reduces her to jealousy. She is first furious, then capable of understanding Vittoria’s suffering and accepting her place beside Enzo and the children.

Their closeness is visible in the present as well as in the remembered illness. When Giovanna phones during a tense moment at Vittoria’s house, Margherita is there with her daughter Giuliana and tries to shield Giovanna from the dispute, saying that the child has nothing to do with it. Later, she and Vittoria disagree over Giuliana’s future: Vittoria wants Giuliana to marry Roberto immediately and live in Naples, while Margherita does not share that plan. Their disagreement is calm on Margherita’s side, until Giuliana herself erupts, breaking dishes and declaring that she will leave to live with Roberto. Margherita’s household remains a place of affection, but not one without conflict or competing claims over the children’s lives.

Narrative Significance

For Giovanna, Margherita complicates the categories through which adults explain love and family. The story first reaches her as Vittoria’s account of an affair, an accusation, and a betrayal; meeting Margherita reveals a welcoming mother who feeds her and protects her from an argument. Vittoria’s account of their shared care for Enzo then offers a still more difficult image: the injured wife recognizes the lover’s attachment without pretending that the injury never happened.

Margherita’s generosity is especially significant because it does not depend on polished speech or social distance. She welcomes Giovanna into a close, lived-in household and later intervenes when a quarrel threatens to place blame on the child. Her relationship with Vittoria holds tenderness and conflict together: they share the care of Enzo, but differ over Giuliana’s marriage and future. In a story where family bonds are repeatedly strained by concealed relationships and adult loyalties, Margherita’s actions show one possible response to betrayal—not forgetting it, but making room for responsibility and affection to continue.