Adele Carrera

Adele Carrera is Marco Carrera’s daughter and the person whose imagined thread first makes her father feel that their relationship has truly begun. Her childhood vulnerability does not define her whole life: after periods of distress and family rupture, she returns to Italy, grows into a capable and adventurous young woman, and chooses to have a child without identifying the father. Naming her daughter Miraijin, the “Man of the Future,” Adele joins private family history to a hope for a different future.

Identity and Childhood

Adele is ten years old and attends fifth grade at the Vittorino da Feltre, a public school near the Colosseum. Her childhood is marked by a perceptual disturbance that began when she was about three. On a bright Sunday in August, while she and Marco have breakfast in the kitchen of the family’s Bolgheri house and her mother remains in bed, Adele tells her father that a thread runs from her back to the nearest wall. Because no one else can see it, she believes she must remain near the wall so people will not trip over the thread or become caught in it. If someone does get caught, she explains, she must circle around that person to free them, demonstrating the movement to Marco.

Marco asks whether everyone has such a thread and whether Adele finds it strange that other people do not. She answers that she alone has one and that what seems strange is the absence of threads on everyone else. Asked how she manages at home, she explains that her parents do not pass behind her. That detail—Marco’s realization that he never walks behind his daughter—makes him shiver. He later understands the breakfast conversation as the beginning of their relationship, a moment in which he briefly sees something connected to his sister Irene and is frightened by what he recognizes. He immediately forgets that flash of knowledge, and it never returns to his conscious memory.

The disturbance leads Adele’s parents to seek professional help. After a house move and a change of school, Adele is repeatedly found alone and crying at the end of the day. Marco sees her unhappiness as evidence that the school change has uprooted her unnecessarily; Marina asks whether it may instead have to do with the thread, and Adele says that it does. Before her parents can arrange a meeting, the school director summons them. When they disclose the thread, the director rebukes them for having kept the matter from her and for treating it as less serious than it is. She identifies it as an evident perceptual disturbance, probably obsessive-hallucinatory, and advises them to seek treatment rather than indulge it.

The director recommends Dr. Nocetti, and Adele begins visiting his studio twice a week, usually accompanied by Marina and only rarely by Marco. Marco’s pronounced aversion to psychotherapists makes taking his daughter there an effort of faith. He nevertheless relies on the director’s recommendation, Nocetti’s qualifications, and Marina’s confidence in the specialist. As Adele’s treatment begins, the parents’ initial fear that they have been irresponsible starts to recede.

Separation, Return, and Recovery

Adele’s family life is unsettled by her parents’ separation. Marina takes her to Germany, but the arrangement does not last: the following year, Adele returns to Italy to live with Marco. The return makes him her day-to-day parent and sets the conditions for the intense, practical closeness that shapes their later life together.

Adele’s thread reappears in Munich during the family’s annus horribilis, but disappears definitively after she moves to Florence. In the following nine years she shows no sign of losing touch with reality. Marco nevertheless remains conscious of her earlier disturbance and worries about her stability. His feelings are mixed: he loves her above all else, pities her because of her mother’s condition, and feels guilty that she has not had the ordinary life every child should have. These anxieties coexist with pride in the life they build after her return.

Marco dedicates himself to Adele, sacrificing much else to hold their household together. Their years are filled with the small work of daily care, but also with shared pleasures. He passes on his love of the sea and mountains, taking her to Bolgheri and skiing with her for enjoyment rather than competition. In summer they walk in the woods, looking for animals to photograph. Adele grows up healthy, lively, successful at school, and largely outside the troubles affecting her peers. She practices sports and, after leaving fencing, turns to surfing and free climbing, activities that express a noncompetitive approach to physical challenge and draw her into communities of climbers and surfers.

While Adele is a minor, Marco accompanies her discreetly to distant places such as Capo Mannu, La Gravière, and the Gorges du Verdon. He often waits apart while she surfs or climbs, joining her companions for dinner sometimes and eating alone more often. Adele returns to their lodging voluntarily, sober and mindful of the caution her age requires. As she approaches adulthood, she begins visiting the community on her own. Marco has to bear her absences, his anxiety, and his loneliness, then welcome her return as she resumes her studies and work.

Independence and Motherhood

Adele enrolls in the Faculty of Motor Sciences, located in a pavilion opposite the eye clinic at Careggi Hospital, where Marco works. Their proximity means that father and daughter often meet for lunch. Adele also works part-time at the gym where she trains, teaching aerobic gymnastics and, when the gym has a climbing wall, climbing to children and beginners. She earns little, but supports herself through work alongside her studies.

When Adele tells Marco she is pregnant, she has already decided what the child will be called and what the name means. She says that the baby will be the new man, the Man of the Future, and that he will be born on a special day. Marco asks who the father is; Adele does not tell him. Her decision is firm: the father will not be part of the story. Marco recognizes that pressing or imposing himself would be futile. Although he had tried to raise Adele to be free and expected her eventually to leave, he discovers that she intends to remain close to him and wants him present in the child’s life. Her choice of a fatherless pregnancy is therefore not a rejection of her father. She tells him she has no intention of separating from him and regards him as a magnificent father.

Adele’s daughter is born on October 20, 2010, a date Adele notices can be written as 20.10.2010. The child is named Miraijin, a Japanese word meaning the Man of the Future. During the water birth, Marco witnesses Adele and the newborn held together in the water, an experience that makes him reconsider the family life he has known. He is absorbed in the baby’s first calm breath, cry, and opening eyes, and at first does not even register that the child is a girl. Adele, still in the tub with the baby pressed to her chest, points out the meaning of the birth: the Man of the Future is a woman.

Relationship with Marco and Narrative Significance

Adele’s bond with Marco begins in a scene of unusual intimacy: she explains an invisible danger, and he discovers that his own habitual care has already accommodated it. He does not walk behind her. His startled recognition is immediately followed by forgetting, so the scene binds closeness to a knowledge he cannot retain. The narrative later makes that forgotten moment resonate with his fear that the thread is connected to Irene, while keeping the revelation buried from him.

Their relationship develops through actions more than declarations: Marco takes Adele to treatment despite his resistance to psychotherapy, brings her to remote places without controlling her, and builds a household around care after she returns from Germany. Adele, in turn, grows into independence without severing that attachment. Her decision to stay with him while becoming a mother reverses his expectation that she would eventually fly away. Miraijin’s birth then enlarges the relationship from father and daughter into a three-generation family, and Adele’s naming of the child gives her own conviction a concise form: the future she imagines is female.