The disclosure that Andrea has had another wife for fifteen years is a turning point in the family crisis narrated by Giovanna. It emerges not through a planned confession but during a tense Sunday lunch, when Giovanna asks her father about the bracelet and Nella answers for him. The revelation confirms a long-concealed relationship while leaving Giovanna to make sense of a family history whose clues she has only partly understood.

Causes and Background

The lunch question follows a period in which Giovanna has watched her parents’ household change without receiving a clear account of why. After a violent quarrel between Andrea and Mariano, the two families’ ordinary closeness breaks down: Mariano disappears from Via San Giacomo dei Capri, Giovanna sees Angela and Ida less often, and the girls hear that their fathers’ argument in Mariano’s apartment ended in shouting and insults. The adults’ political conversations had seemed to explain the quarrel, but Giovanna senses that the conflict concerns sex and the parents’ private lives instead.

Giovanna’s suspicions are also shaped by what she witnessed when staying with Angela. She saw Nella and Mariano’s ankles together under the table and wondered whether the contact meant something more. She considered telling Vittoria, who had urged her to look carefully, but feared that Vittoria would interpret the scene in the harshest terms and use it against her mother. Giovanna therefore keeps the observation to herself, even as she becomes increasingly anxious about what it might signify.

The bracelet supplies the immediate occasion for the disclosure. Costanza later visits Giovanna and helps put a white-gold bracelet on her wrist, presenting it as a restitution rather than a gift; Giovanna’s mother leaves the room, and Costanza never returns to the house. The bracelet is thus bound to the adults’ unspoken conflict before Giovanna asks her father whether it came from Vittoria and why he gave it to Costanza. Her questions connect an object she wears daily with a history of exchanges among the adults that has not been explained to her.

What Happens

At Sunday lunch, Giovanna raises the bracelet in a light tone. Andrea answers that, in a certain sense, it came from Vittoria. When Giovanna asks why he gave it to Costanza, he looks up at her coldly but says nothing. Nella orders him to answer; when he still refuses, she abruptly tells Giovanna that her father has had another wife for fifteen years.

Nella’s words are presented as an anguished outburst rather than a settled account. Red-faced and visibly distressed, she seems almost immediately to regret having revealed the secret. Andrea does not provide an explanation in the exchange. The scene establishes the duration of his other marriage through Nella’s statement, but it does not clarify its circumstances or resolve the questions surrounding the bracelet and the adults’ conflict.

Giovanna’s first response is strikingly different from her mother’s. She is not surprised and does not experience the information as a wrong; instead, she feels that she has somehow always known it. For a moment, she imagines that if the arrangement has lasted fifteen years, it might continue indefinitely, with each parent returning to the separate routines of her childhood: Nella in her room, Andrea in his study, and the family’s meetings and books restored. Her imagined solution treats the revelation as something that could be absorbed without changing the household.

Consequences and Aftermath

Trying to help bring about that reconciliation, Giovanna tells Nella that she, too, has another husband. Nella turns pale and denies it insistently. The response shows that Giovanna’s attempt to make the secret seem ordinary has instead touched another point of distress; the scene offers no confirmation of her suggestion about Nella, and her mother explicitly rejects it.

Giovanna then laughs, though she experiences the laugh as involuntary and cannot make it disappear from her face. She sees anger in Andrea’s eyes and feels afraid and ashamed. The moment closes not with an explanation or reconciliation but with her father slowly rising from the table to leave. The disclosure has made the hidden arrangement explicit, yet the family remains caught between what its members know, what they refuse to say, and Giovanna’s hope that naming the secret might restore their former life.

Narrative Significance

Because the episode is filtered through Giovanna’s understanding, the revelation arrives alongside her guesses rather than as an objective account of the adults’ history. Her earlier inference that the quarrel between Andrea and Mariano was about her report to Vittoria, and her belief that Costanza discovered the contact between Mariano and Nella, are presented as apprehensions rather than confirmed facts. The lunch scene confirms one secret directly—the other marriage—but leaves the wider chain of causes unsettled.

The bracelet makes that gap tangible. It passes through the adults’ strained relationships and ends up on Giovanna’s wrist, where it becomes the object that prompts her question. Yet even after Nella speaks, the bracelet’s full history is not explained. Its movement links the family’s concealed arrangements to Giovanna’s effort to understand them, while Andrea’s silence and Nella’s distressed disclosure show how little control she has over the story she is trying to piece together.