“Gospodinèèèè!”

“Gospodinèèèè!” is an unfamiliar cry heard in the fog after the 1974 car accident involving Marco Carrera and his sister, Irene. Spoken repeatedly by an injured woman, it locates the wreck for Marco and draws him toward the Peugeot where he finds Irene unconscious or possibly dead. The word, identified as Serbo-Croatian for “Oh, Lord,” makes an otherwise bewildering scene audible and navigable; its repeated urgency culminates in Marco’s recognition of the person lying on the road as his sister.

The cry in the fog

The accident first reaches Marco as a jumble without sequence: roar, crash, horn, and human screams seem to arrive together. The fog removes familiar bearings, and the narration links the loss of space with the collapse of time. Against that confusion, the first human cries resolve into a single word Marco has never heard before: “Gospodinèèèè!” Its strangeness is part of its force. Before he knows who is calling or what has happened, he hears a voice insist that someone is there.

The word is repeated rather than explained. The cry seems to tell Marco that help is needed and to mark the accident’s location, but it does not tell him exactly where to go or whom to find. He follows it into the fog, and as he takes his first steps, time seems to begin flowing again: the horn stops its enchanted braying, while the sounds of metal and other voices take shape around him. The cry does not clear the scene; it gives him a direction within it.

From sound to recognition

A bloodied woman emerges from the fog, shouting the word at close range. Marco also sees an elderly injured man and a Ford Taunus with its doors open and smoke coming from the hood, while another male voice remains difficult to locate. The woman’s cry recurs as Marco advances through the whiteness without knowing precisely what he is searching for. The sound holds together a scene whose people, vehicles, and damage appear in fragments.

The cry continues as Marco reaches a second wrecked vehicle, a Peugeot 504 thrown against a lamppost and nearly without its front end. A younger man has opened its door and is pulling an unconscious person from the cockpit. At first Marco can only register a girl, then the possibility that she is his sister. The repeated sound accompanies the movement from distant catastrophe to a particular body, and from uncertainty about the accident to uncertainty about Irene’s survival.

Irene and the family memory

The recognition of Irene brings the crash into contact with the arguments Marco has heard at home. In the weeks before the accident, Irene had repeatedly wanted to borrow their father’s car to travel to places including Abetone and Bolgheri or attend a party in Impruneta. She had a provisional permit but no accompanying driver; their father refused, while Marco had privately sided with her. The remembered dispute makes the wreck more than an isolated emergency: the car and the journey recall a conflict Marco had watched unfold and in which his loyalties lay with his sister.

Marco remembers Irene as his “polar star,” a model of youth whose anxiety, anger, and ardor set her apart. The family had treated her as a burden and associated her with a long succession of misfortunes—falls, accidents, fractures, quarrels, depression, drugs, and psychotherapy. Marco, unlike the rest, continued to understand and defend her, loving her even through what he regarded as her wrongs. The cry’s recurrence therefore leads him not simply to an injured stranger but to the sister whose place in his life is defined by attachment amid family strain.

Meaning and later resonance

The word is identified as Serbo-Croatian for “Oh, Lord.” That meaning gives the cry the character of an appeal, but the scene does not turn it into a supernatural signal or a message with a fully explained source. Its immediate work is concrete: a human voice cuts across fog and wreckage, and Marco follows it. The narration’s uncertainty persists around what he will find, while the repeated sound supplies a thread of urgency through that uncertainty.

The cry also becomes a hinge between the accident as immediate experience and its later recollection. Marco’s adult narration looks back on the fog and on Irene’s survival in this crash, setting it against the many misfortunes that followed and her eventual early death. In the accident scene he cannot know that future; his question is whether Irene is dead now. Read retrospectively, the repeated word remains attached to the moment when she was still there before him, pale and without awareness, and when the family’s later grief had not yet arrived. Its importance lies in that tension: the cry marks both a passage into action and the limit of what Marco can know as he reaches his sister.