Marco Carrera—Probus

Marco Carrera’s relationship with Probus is shaped by paternal care, uncertainty about the consequences of a treatment chosen for Marco as a child, and the family’s later return to the house where Probus dies. After his father’s death, Marco leaves Probus’s bedroom untouched as a guest room that no guests seem to occupy; decades later, while facing his own terminal illness, he considers the difference between his father’s decline and the ending he has chosen for himself. The relationship thus persists not as a simple reconciliation, but through a room, an unresolved inheritance, and contrasting approaches to bodily vulnerability and death.

A father’s gamble over Marco’s growth

When Marco was a child whose growth had lagged, Probus tenaciously wanted him to undergo an experimental treatment. Marco then grew far faster than the doctor had predicted. Probus could be pleased that the treatment had succeeded, yet the unexpected scale of the result made him question whether success had come at the cost of control over his son’s body. The treatment’s effectiveness beyond expectation became, for him, a reason to worry rather than proof that everything had gone safely according to plan.

Probus asked Dr. Vavassori whether the intervention might have delayed consequences, including infertility, degenerative illness, tumors, or malformations. The doctor said that unforeseen effects, even those emerging much later, had been considered in the experimental protocol and identified in the consent documents Probus signed. He nevertheless dismissed the idea that a result exceeding expectations necessarily increased the risk as foolish and somewhat paranoid. The novel does not establish that the treatment caused any later illness: it records Probus’s enduring fear of a future price, and the distance between a father’s responsibility for consenting to an experiment and his ability to know what it might mean for his child.

Marco, by contrast, experienced the growth spurt without dwelling on its possible risks. From November to June he grew roughly two centimeters a month, and keeping up with his changing body occupied him. He neither describes himself as frightened nor sets conditions for the transformation; he adapts to it. The difference is telling: Probus looks ahead to uncertain consequences, while Marco inhabits the change as it happens. In later life Marco remembers his childhood as a hummingbird, but the account presents the treatment as a period of bodily transformation rather than as a confirmed cause of his eventual cancer.

Family home and the room left behind

Years later, when Probus and Letizia are seriously ill, Giacomo remains in Florence after his own family has returned home. He serves their parents closely at the house in Piazza Savonarola, attending to their needs and attempting to manage their care. Marco observes that his brother seems to erase himself in this service, and that he does not use the time to build a closer relationship with Adele. Giacomo’s care also brings back the old competitiveness he feels toward Marco: even while trying to perform medical tasks, he repeatedly asks his doctor brother for advice, then worries that he might make a fatal mistake.

One night, around three in the morning, Giacomo calls Marco, fearing that Letizia’s illness may become fatal. Marco reassures him and tells him to trust the nurse, then comes to the house himself. In the large living room, unchanged from their childhood, the brothers briefly seem close to recovery and reconciliation. But neither does anything to bridge the remaining distance, and nothing is healed. Their father’s illness brings them into proximity without itself resolving what has separated them.

After Probus dies, Marco does not move into his father’s bedroom, though it would have been the natural choice. Instead, he chooses his mother’s room. Lucia, the daughter of Mrs. Ivana, calls Probus’s former room the guest room, but Marco cannot remember anyone having stayed there in the decades since his father’s death. He wonders whether Luisa might once have occupied it, yet cannot recover the memory. The room remains the most beautiful in the house, with French doors opening directly onto the garden, and its emptiness gives the father’s absence a precise domestic form: preserved space, but no settled account of who has shared it since.

A theory of family disturbance and calm

The novel’s account of Marco’s relation to his own daughter helps clarify the family patterns against which his relationship with Probus can be read, without making the generations identical. When Adele is about three, she tells Marco that a thread runs from her back to the nearest wall. In the moment she explains that he never walks behind her, Marco feels a bodily shock and briefly understands something he cannot bear to retain. He immediately represses the recognition, which the narration connects to Irene, his sister. The episode presents family knowledge as something that can flash into awareness and then disappear, leaving its consequences in relationships even when the person who saw it no longer remembers seeing it.

Adele’s thread later becomes the occasion for professional advice and a change in family arrangements. Dr. Nocetti interprets it not as a literal connection to walls but as a sign of Adele’s close, exclusive bond with her father and her fear of losing him. He recommends that Marco spend substantially more time with her. That interpretation prompts the parents to reconsider their established roles, though the practical changes also strain their household: a new school and longer journeys lead to disagreements between Marco and Marina about who should carry the burden of transport and care. The thread therefore operates in the family story as an experience that is both Adele’s own and a signal of how her relationships are organized.

Much later, after Adele’s death, Marco and Marina begin seeing one another again for the sake of their granddaughter, Miraijin. Their renewed contact gives practical form to Daniele Carradori’s theory that tragedy can have opposite effects depending on the condition of a family. A calamity may break apart a family that had been held together by a pact; if the family has already fractured, it may instead quiet conflict and draw surviving members together. The image is of a stone thrown into water: it creates turbulence in calm water but can bring calm to water already agitated. Marco and Marina, once separated and estranged, visit one another in Germany in Miraijin’s company. This is a relationship renewed through bereavement, not a return to their former marriage.

Probus’s room and Marco’s chosen ending

At the end of his life, Marco is seriously ill, but the narration stresses that he remains physically more capable than Probus and Letizia had been in their final decline. That distinction matters to his decision: he intends to leave while he is still self-sufficient, rather than wait until illness has removed that capacity. His memories of his parents’ condition make the prospect of continued treatment and increasing dependence concrete, but the text presents his choice as his own, not as an outcome caused by the childhood growth treatment.

The contrast sharpens when Marco imagines the future that others might hope he will choose: renewed therapy, prolonged suffering, and increasing reliance on care, ending with a plea like Probus’s for someone to take him away. This is an imagined fear, not evidence that Probus’s death or request was identical to Marco’s. The resemblance lies in the family’s shared confrontation with dependence and death; the difference lies in Marco’s determination to decide before he reaches the condition he associates with his parents.

The father-son relationship is therefore carried forward in material and ethical forms. Probus’s bedroom remains available yet unused, a space Marco cannot fully remember or assign to anyone. Probus’s concern about the uncertain costs of his son’s treatment remains part of Marco’s history, even though the book does not claim that those feared effects came to pass. At the end, Marco’s awareness of his parents’ decline helps define what he wishes to avoid. The inheritance is not a simple lesson or a resolved reconciliation: it is the persistent presence of a father’s room, a father’s worry, and a son’s effort to meet mortality on different terms.