The body, desire, and adult sexuality

The body, desire, and adult sexuality are not confined to private attraction in the novel: they connect Giovanna’s adolescent self-understanding to the concealed relationships and betrayals of the adults around her. As the adults’ conflict emerges into view, she and her friends begin to recognize that sexuality can carry consequences and forms of power they had not imagined. Her developing understanding is shaped by a painful contrast: the body is treated as an object of judgment and desire, yet it is also where the consequences of secrecy and adult conduct become impossible to ignore.

Adult Sexuality and Family Secrecy

A violent quarrel between Giovanna’s father and Mariano initially appears to concern the political subjects they had long discussed. Giovanna, Angela, and Ida gradually infer that sex, not Marxism, lies behind the rupture. This is not the kind of sexuality that had seemed amusing or attractive to them in conversations about boys; they perceive instead that their parents’ bodies and relationships have entered their lives in a disturbing way. The quarrel therefore marks a shift in what the younger characters think sex can mean: it is entangled with betrayal and adult obligations, rather than belonging only to the flirtations and curiosities of youth.

The girls’ response also shows that this discovery changes how they approach their own relationships. Ida describes the men’s words as contaminating, as though the conflict had spread something repulsive across their private desires. The friends, who had been inclined to talk about Tonino and Corrado, grow subdued and turn away from that kind of sexual conversation. Giovanna withdraws from the telephone confidences, burdened by her greater knowledge of the families’ secrets and afraid that a careless word might bring the concealed facts fully into the open. Adult sexuality reaches the young not as a clear explanation, but as a disquieting force that alters what they can say to one another.

The returning bracelet makes the adults’ hidden relations tangible for Giovanna. When Costanza visits without her daughters and gives her the white-gold bracelet, Giovanna’s mother explains that Costanza is returning it. The object forces Giovanna to think about the long affair between her father and Costanza, and about the fact that it began before Giovanna was born, while both Costanza and her father remained close to the family. She also thinks about Mariano’s more recent approach to her mother, which her mother insists was not consensual. These relationships differ in their circumstances, but together they fracture Giovanna’s earlier sense that reasonable adults can be trusted to govern their desires.

Giovanna’s mother breaks down after agreeing that her father had not taken the bracelet simply to give it to her. Giovanna understands that he had wanted to fasten it around Costanza’s wrist. The bracelet thus gathers several adult relationships into one object: it passed through a family history and became tied to her father’s affair, while also carrying the conflicting meanings Giovanna associates with Costanza and her aunt Vittoria. What might have seemed a gift or ornament instead exposes how desire can turn familial possessions and attachments into instruments of concealment and injury.

The Body as a Public Object

The family’s secrets are not the only force reshaping Giovanna’s understanding of sexuality. At school, she learns that boys discuss her breasts and body as objects for appraisal: a classmate reports a remark made by Silvestro, an older student known for arriving on a motorbike. Giovanna spends the night weeping with humiliation and anger. Her first impulse is to turn to her father, recalling the childhood belief that he would solve any problem; then she imagines him as subject to the same male gaze, and wonders whether he would have spoken of Vittoria with comparable contempt had she not been his sister. The episode connects sexual objectification to family knowledge: the men’s language seems brutal not only because it reduces Giovanna to her body, but because it makes her reconsider what her father might say about women, including those closest to him.

That fear is sharpened by contrast. Giovanna imagines that Roberto speaks gently to Giuliana, even while desiring her, and tries to preserve the possibility of loving them both and being trusted by them. Her imagined ideal of tenderness does not erase what she has heard; rather, it shows how urgently she seeks a form of intimacy different from the degrading talk she associates with men. The body becomes a measure through which she tests whether desire must entail humiliation, even as she has little evidence that the distinction she hopes for will hold.

Desire, Agency, and Unequal Power

Giovanna’s encounters with boys further unsettle any simple distinction between being desired and desiring. In one encounter with Corrado, she finds his kissing and touching unpleasant and rough, and feels no curiosity or pleasure. Rather than continue to let him direct the encounter, she decides to act on her own terms, partly to prevent him from acting further. Her decision does not arise from desire; she remains anxious and wishes someone would interrupt them. The episode presents adolescent sexual exploration as an attempt to manage an unwanted situation, not as uncomplicated discovery or mutual intimacy.

Later, in Rosario’s car, Giovanna deliberately attends to him, praises his driving, asks about engines, and puts her hand over his on the gear shift. She notices that Rosario responds eagerly to the contact, while Corrado, also present, is unhappy that she is not sitting beside him. Giovanna uses flirtation and physical closeness to direct the boys’ attention, and briefly wonders whether such small gestures could make them yield to anything. Yet her calculation is inseparable from self-disgust: she is astonished that the boys seem not to perceive what she feels about herself. The scene gives her a measure of agency, but not a secure or liberating one; she is testing how desire works while experiencing herself through a harsh judgment she cannot readily escape.

Desire, Class, and the Pressure to Change

Adult sexuality also appears through the unequal circumstances in which women’s lives are shaped. Vittoria is described as a maid who left school in fifth grade; her brother had intervened when she was in love with a married criminal who already had three children, but she resented his intervention rather than accepting it as rescue. Her story complicates any account of desire as private choice: education, work, family authority, and the social standing of the man she loved all bear on the consequences, while Vittoria’s anger becomes part of a lasting estrangement between siblings.

The women around Giuliana likewise disagree about what a young woman should do with her future. Giuliana tells Giovanna that Roberto’s presence has made her feel a need to change, and that Vittoria noticed first, objecting that she was not eating and was becoming too thin. Her mother, by contrast, quietly urges her to leave Naples with Roberto and her brothers. Vittoria presses Roberto to return to Pascone, while he listens and then pursues his own plans, including unfinished business in Milan. The competing advice makes romance inseparable from questions of place, family influence, and a woman’s freedom to imagine a life elsewhere.

When Tonino leaves, Giuliana is left to contend with Vittoria’s pressure over her engagement. Margherita, encouraged by Vittoria, wants Giuliana to demand that Roberto marry her immediately and move to Naples, or else end the engagement. Giuliana rejects that ultimatum as unreasonable: Roberto is occupied with work important to his career, and she wants to leave the city rather than settle there. She turns to Giovanna for counsel and eventually explains Roberto’s circumstances to the two older women, but they continue to suggest that his priorities prove insufficient love. Their dispute shows how sexuality and marriage are governed not only by private attachment but by family demands and competing ideas of women’s futures.

Across these episodes, desire is never simply an inward feeling. It is interpreted through adult secrecy, public judgments of women’s bodies, family control, and unequal social conditions. Giovanna’s understanding remains unsettled: she can recognize manipulation and seek some control in her encounters, yet she also absorbs the degrading standards through which bodies are judged. The novel’s treatment of sexuality therefore follows the pressure exerted on young women as they try to distinguish attraction from coercion, intimacy from possession, and their own choices from the desires and plans imposed by others.