Irene’s drowning at the Mulinelli changes the meaning of the same night for Marco Carrera: it is both the beginning of his love for Luisa Lattes and the loss of his sister. The novel returns to the death through a letter, family members’ missed opportunities to recognize Irene’s crisis, and Marco’s later guilt. Its account turns not on a single explanation for the tragedy, but on the distance between visible warnings and what those around Irene are able to understand.

Background and Warning Signs

In the account of the night, Irene is already visibly exhausted. Her appearance and manner have changed, and she has spent days listening on repeat to “Gloomy Sunday,” a song popularly associated with suicide. The music functions as a warning in the narrative, but no one in the household treats it as one. The signs are present; their significance is not recognized in time.

The family’s inattention is not assigned to a single person. Letizia is preoccupied and does not perceive Irene’s condition, while the household’s attention is elsewhere. Marco leaves to meet Luisa, occupied by the expectation that their encounter will make him happy. Giacomo, meanwhile, uses Irene’s departure from the house as an opportunity to telephone the Lattes household and confirm whether Luisa has gone out. The episode sets ordinary family concerns and private plans beside an unfolding crisis that no one acknowledges.

Irene leaves the house and walks toward the dunes and the beach, with the Mulinelli beyond it. This movement places the death within the familiar landscape of the family’s time at the coast. The narrative supplies the location and the ignored warnings, but does not turn them into a complete causal explanation of Irene’s decision.

The Night and Its Double Meaning

For Marco, the night is inseparable from Luisa. Seventeen years later, he recalls that they kissed only once, on the night Irene drowned at the Mulinelli. In his memory, the beginning of the relationship and the loss of his sister occupy the same time and place. Happiness and desperation arrive together, and he cannot bring himself to want one without the other.

This conjunction becomes explicit in Marco’s letter to Luisa from Bolgheri, dated September 11, 1981. He writes that he believed the tragedy was his fault because he had been with Luisa and had felt happy while it was happening. He describes himself as having been in a trance afterward, unable for a time to feel like himself or anyone else. His guilt attaches not to an established account of how the death occurred, but to the unbearable coincidence of his happiness and Irene’s loss.

Marco also resents his family and argues with Giacomo, whom he blames. He cannot bear to face his parents, and their whereabouts become a reason for him to go somewhere else. His letter does not present this flight as a clean escape: he compares himself to pheasants fleeing a forest fire in the wrong direction, moving toward danger rather than away from it. In that image, grief does not lead him out of the catastrophe; it drives him through it.

The Unanswered Crisis

The preceding scene establishes how close Irene is to others without being understood by them. Her exhaustion is visible, her repeated listening to “Gloomy Sunday” persists for days, and yet the people around her do not respond to these details as a reason to stop and ask what is happening. The contrast is central to the episode: the warning is not absent, but its meaning remains unread.

Giacomo’s telephone call sharpens that contrast. He has seen Irene leave and is relieved that she is no longer in the house, because he believes she would notice what he is doing. He calls the Lattes home to check Luisa’s whereabouts, then hangs up when told that she has gone out. The scene does not make his call the cause of Irene’s death; rather, it shows how completely his attention is occupied by his own suspicion and by the movements between the two families.

The account therefore resists reducing Irene’s death to the song she listens to or to the failures of any one relative. Those details disclose a crisis and a failure of recognition, but the novel does not claim that any single signal explains the outcome. The family’s missed response becomes part of the tragedy’s aftermath, not a simple answer to it.

Marco’s Letter and the Aftermath

In the letter, Marco describes returning alone to the beach and the whirlpools, passing behind the dunes, and thinking about both Luisa and Irene. The others have left; the family speaks of selling the house and never returning to the beach or taking a holiday again. These threatened departures make the place itself part of the loss: the familiar summer setting is now inseparable from what happened there.

Marco tells Luisa that he wants to retain both happiness and despair, and fears losing either. He is afraid of losing the pain along with his sister, as if relief might also mean losing what remains of Irene. At the same time, he fears that Luisa has already left him because she believes he ran away. He admits that he did flee, but insists in the letter that he did not run away from her. His plea for forgiveness cannot settle the question of responsibility; it makes the need for closeness visible within the very act of separation.

The letter’s final distinction is between the end of the sheet and the end of what Marco feels. He asks Luisa to wait for him, forgive him, and embrace him, insisting that the letter has ended only because the page has. The drowning thus continues beyond the night itself, shaping Marco’s grief, his account of his own actions, and the love that began at the same moment as his loss.