Irene's suicide by drowning

Irene's suicide by drowning is the hidden catastrophe at the center of a night otherwise remembered through the Carrera family's separate moments of happiness. The account places her death against visible signs of crisis and a household that does not respond, then reveals her body among the waves after following her from the house toward the beach. Its force lies not in a single stated cause, but in the contrast between an alarm that has been sounding for days and the family's failure to hear it.

Crisis and Missed Warning Signs

Irene appears exhausted in ways the narration renders unmistakable: her eyes are deeply sunken, her gaze shattered, a vein stands out at her temple, and she moves through the house with salt-crusted hair and a ghostly step. For days, she has listened on repeat to Lydia Lunch's version of “Gloomy Sunday,” the song popularly known as the Hungarian song of suicides. The red Walkman playing it was a Christmas gift from her brothers. In this account, the song is not presented as a sufficient explanation for her death; it is an alarm within a larger crisis, one that the people around her do not interpret as a call for help.

The narrator makes that failure of recognition explicit. Letizia does not notice Irene's condition, although staying home from dinner might have given her a chance to speak with her daughter. The text imagines that Irene might have rejected an attempt to talk, but even that possibility would have meant contact. Instead, Letizia proceeds with the evening, dissatisfied and unwilling to change her plans. The account frames this omission as a family failure of attention, not as proof that one missed conversation alone caused the death.

The Night of the Death

At the Carrera house, attention is directed elsewhere. Marco leaves to meet Luisa, while Giacomo, troubled by his own suspicion and refusal, calls the Lattes household after Irene has gone out. He learns that Luisa is already away, hangs up, and remains on the sofa. Irene, meanwhile, walks out of the garden along the path toward the dune; beyond it lies the beach, with the Mulinelli in front of it. The intercut sequence gives her departure a quiet, separate trajectory while the other family members remain occupied by their own concerns.

The same night brings the family sharply different experiences. Marco and Luisa share a long-awaited meeting in Baratti; Letizia and Probo rediscover an attraction to one another after dinner. Giacomo is left at home, while Irene goes to the coast. The narrative gathers these parallel scenes into one stretch of shoreline, where the family members' states of mind diverge even as the same sea touches the coast. That formal juxtaposition makes the death more than a sudden interruption: Irene's crisis unfolds alongside celebrations that neither see nor answer it.

Discovery and Narrative Meaning

The disclosure comes after the account has shown the family members in different states of happiness. Irene is described as having reached the surface from the whirlpools, her body carried by the waves to the shoreline, where the central Tyrrhenian Sea will find it again with the tide. This is the narrative's confirmation of her death by drowning. The restrained description gives the sea a final, indifferent role in returning her to the world from which the household's attention had failed to protect her.

The death is prepared through recurrence rather than explanation. Irene's repeated listening, her visible exhaustion, and her solitary walk toward the water form a sequence of warnings, while the adults' and siblings' separate preoccupations show how a family can share a house and a night without truly seeing one another. The song's wider legend—that it led some listeners to suicide—adds cultural context, including the history of censorship and the attempt to soften its reputation by adding a dream-framed verse to Billie Holiday's 1941 version. But the novel's treatment does not establish the song as the cause of Irene's death. Its decisive contrast is between a warning that is audible and a family that does not recognize what it is hearing.