May 23

May 23 is the anniversary on which Vittoria marks her first meeting with Enzo, the dead man she continues to experience as emotionally present. For Giovanna, the date becomes both a promised visit to Enzo’s grave and a moment of connection to Vittoria’s larger family—a bond that challenges her parents’ effort to keep her isolated from it.

The Anniversary and the First Meeting

Vittoria recalls that she first saw Enzo at a dance party, where they danced together. When asked how long ago it happened, she counts the interval precisely: seventeen years on May 23. The exchange sets two measures of time against each other. Though many years have passed, Vittoria answers that not even a minute has gone by, conveying the continuing immediacy of the memory and her attachment to Enzo.

A Promise to Visit the Cemetery

Giovanna asks what Enzo was like and whether there is a picture of him. Vittoria responds with evident pleasure at her niece’s curiosity and proposes that they meet on May 23 to go to the cemetery, where he is. The date thus gives Giovanna’s questions a concrete destination: learning about Enzo is joined to visiting his grave.

Family Belonging and the Meeting at Home

Before they part, Vittoria has told Giovanna that her father has deprived her of a larger family, cutting off grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins because he considers them unintelligent and uneducated. Giovanna later finds comfort in those words. She understands them as a claim that she belongs not only to her parents but also to the family on her father’s side, and she remembers that this sense of belonging helped her promise to skip school on May 23 and go to the cemetery with Vittoria.

The planned visit is disrupted when Vittoria arrives at Giovanna’s home to collect her. She explains that it is exactly seventeen years since she met Enzo and expects her reason to be understood. Giovanna’s mother objects that Giovanna must go to school, bringing the family’s competing claims into the open: Vittoria invokes the anniversary and kinship, while Giovanna’s mother asserts parental authority and routine obligation.

Meaning of the Date

May 23 binds an intimate memory of a dance to a present-day act of remembrance. Its recurrence gives Vittoria’s grief a calendar date, but the date also opens a path for Giovanna toward relatives from whom she has been separated. What begins as the anniversary of Vittoria and Enzo’s meeting therefore acquires a second significance: it becomes a test of whether Giovanna can act on the family connection that Vittoria has offered her.