Irene drowned (58dcb7f6)

Irene’s drowning is a death preceded by signs her family does not understand in time, and one that continues to shape Marco’s memory of guilt, love, and helplessness. Its force reaches beyond the moment itself: Marco associates Irene’s death with the beginning of his relationship with Luisa, recalls an earlier near-fatal crisis as its premonition, and later returns to the image of his sister as someone whose suffering was visible yet repeatedly misread.

Warnings and family inattention

In the account leading toward the crisis, Irene is exhausted, withdrawn, and listening repeatedly to Gloomy Sunday, a song known in the story as the “Hungarian song of suicides.” The cassette plays in a loop on the red Walkman her brothers gave her for Christmas. Her appearance and habits have changed, but the people around her do not respond to the signs. The narrative makes the gap between what is observable and what is recognized central: the song functions as an alarm, yet no one treats it as one.

Letizia, dissatisfied and preoccupied, does not see how unwell Irene is. She might have stayed home rather than attend dinner, but the possibility of noticing Irene and inviting her to talk never becomes an action. The account does not reduce the tragedy to a single missed conversation or claim that one intervention would have prevented it. Instead, it depicts a household in which distress is present and legible in retrospect, while attention is elsewhere. On the night Irene leaves, Marco is absorbed in his plan to meet Luisa, and the house is otherwise occupied by separate concerns.

The night of the drowning

Marco’s later letter to Luisa describes the happiness and catastrophe as arriving in the same place and at the same time. He remembers being with Luisa when Irene died and believes, under the pressure of grief, that his happiness with Luisa made him responsible. He also recalls fighting with Giacomo and blaming him, while being unable to face his parents. His account is not a settled explanation of the death but a record of guilt searching for a cause.

That night, Irene leaves the family home and walks toward the beach, beyond the dunes, to the Mulinelli. Meanwhile, Marco goes to meet Luisa, and Giacomo, suspicious that Luisa has gone out after telling him she would not, attempts to confirm where she is. These parallel movements sharpen the separation between the family’s private crises: each person acts within limited knowledge, and Irene’s departure is not intercepted. The evidence establishes that Irene drowns at the Mulinelli, but does not present the drowning itself as a fully narrated rescue or observation scene.

Marco’s guilt and the memory of Luisa

In the letter dated 11 September 1981, Marco writes from Bolgheri in the immediate aftermath. He admits that he ran away, but says that for days he felt like no one at all, caught in a trance and convinced that everything was his fault. He resists explanations that Irene’s death was God’s will or destiny, while also being unable to free himself from the thought that he had been happy with Luisa as the tragedy occurred.

His repeated address to Luisa conveys how urgently he wants to keep both the happiness and the pain. He fears losing the grief as well as losing Luisa, whom he worries he has already lost because she believes he fled. The letter’s unfinished, breathless insistence that the page has ended rather than the letter makes it a document of unresolved attachment: he asks Luisa to wait and forgive him, even as he acknowledges that he did not cross the hedge or say goodbye. Irene’s death thus becomes entangled with the beginning of a love that Marco experiences as inseparable from loss.

The earlier crisis and its return

The narrative reaches back to an earlier incident in the fog, when Irene is found on the ground, apparently unconscious but not dead. Marco’s terror in that minute is described as the same look he will later direct at her corpse in the Cecina hospital morgue, seven years afterward. The sequence gives the drowning a history of fear without treating the earlier incident as the cause of her death. It shows instead that Marco had already imagined losing Irene, and that the fear returns with painful precision when the loss becomes real.

As a small child, on the night of San Lorenzo at the same beach where Irene would die, Marco had been asked to make a wish after seeing a shooting star. He wished that Irene would not commit suicide, without understanding what the wish meant. The remembered wish places childhood foreboding beside adult bereavement, but does not turn the death into an inevitability. Years later, Marco recalls Irene’s many troubles and the compassion directed toward her, while describing himself as the family member who continued to understand, justify, support, and love her despite their conflicts.

A death that remains unfinished

Marco’s letter presents him as alone after Irene’s death: the family has withdrawn from the house and beach, and he wanders the shore and the Mulinelli while thinking of Irene and Luisa. He does not want to lose either the happiness or the despair bound up in that period. His grief is therefore not simply a conclusion to one relationship; it persists as a refusal to separate love from pain, or memory from self-accusation.

The drowning also remains linked to the night Marco and Luisa first kissed. Years later, when they meet again, they remember that kiss as having occurred while Irene was drowning. Their later vow of chastity does not undo the connection; rather, it shows how the unconsummated past continues to govern their choices. Irene’s death is consequently both a family catastrophe and a lasting hinge in Marco’s emotional life: it recurs in his account of the past, in his relationship with Luisa, and in the image of helplessness he had feared long before it became final.