Marco accepts Adele's fatherless pregnancy

Marco accepts Adele’s decision to become a single mother, a choice that tests his understanding of fatherhood and asks him to support a future he cannot predict. Though he worries that her certainty might conceal hurt or denial, he follows his love for her, agrees to take on the paternal role, and adapts his help to the boundaries she establishes during pregnancy.

Adele’s Independence and Marco’s Expectations

By the time Adele approaches adulthood, she has begun travelling to surf and climb with her group without Marco. He has accompanied her discreetly to places including Capo Mannu, La Gravière, and the Gorges du Verdon, often spending the day on his own while she pursued her interests. Their arrangements reflect the freedom he has tried to give her: she returned to their bed and breakfast without being compelled, and he had learned to manage both his anxiety during her absences and his gratitude when she came back.

Adele’s independence is practical as well as adventurous. She studies motor sciences, works part-time at a gym, and earns enough to contribute to her own expenses, including the petrol for her Twingo. She also continues to see a psychoanalyst. Marco expects that she will eventually leave Florence, perhaps even Italy or Europe, and has saved money so that she can pursue her interests and studies without economic pressure. He has tried to prepare himself for many possible changes, including her becoming pregnant young. Yet when she tells him how she intends to raise the child, the plan catches him off guard.

The Decision and Its Meaning

Adele tells her father that the child will be the Man of the Future. When Marco asks who the father is, she makes clear that the child will be born without one: she intends to raise the baby as a contented single mother, without regret or concern. She expects Marco to cover the paternal function. For him, this request carries two meanings at once. He feels it as the strongest declaration of love he has received, a recognition of how much she trusts him, but also as a disturbing entanglement of their roles.

The prospect makes Marco question whether Adele’s refusal to give the child a father might be a response to damage in the family, including the harm he and Marina caused, or to some unspoken experience of Adele’s own. He wonders whether her confidence could be a refuge from reality, as he believes Marina sometimes sought one, and whether the child might inherit that pattern. He also asks himself how a child raised by a twenty-one-year-old mother and a fifty-one-year-old grandfather would fare. These are Marco’s fears, not explanations Adele provides for her decision: he cannot establish that her plan comes from trauma, abandonment, or denial.

Acceptance and the Pregnancy

Marco does not let those uncertainties become a refusal. He follows his heart and accepts Adele’s plan, committing himself to what she expects of him. He recalls a verse Luisa once quoted in a farewell letter: “To go where you don't know / you have to go through where you don't know”. The remembered words give form to his decision to enter a future whose destination he cannot foresee, for the sake of his daughter and the child she plans to have.

As the pregnancy progresses, Marco tries to find the right distance from Adele’s changing body and from the experience itself. His only point of comparison is Marina’s pregnancy, which he treats as a precedent to learn from while also working out what role Adele actually wants him to play. He agrees to accompany her to medical checks and to place his hand on her belly when she wants him to feel the baby move. He does not attend the preparation course, which Adele does not require of him. His support is not a licence to take charge: he agrees to relieve her of practical tasks and to stop her from surfing or climbing, but does not indulge every pregnancy-related whim.

Adele’s decisions also define what Marco will not decide for her. She opposes amniocentesis and does not want to learn the baby’s sex from ultrasound scans. Unlike Adele’s own name, which Marco says was chosen through a tennis scoreboard, the child’s name has been settled from the beginning. His involvement consists partly in respecting these choices, even when his professional position at Careggi Hospital might have enabled him to secure privileges there.

Miraijin and the Chosen Future

Adele has already chosen a water birth, with a midwife named Norma and a designated facility, Santa Maria Annunziata Hospital. She does not choose Careggi, where Marco works and where water birth is also possible. The decision keeps the arrangements in Adele’s hands; it even determines how the place of birth might be recorded, whether as Ponte a Niccheri, Ponte a Ema, or, more bureaucratically, Bagno a Ripoli.

Marco does take an active interest in the name she has chosen: Miraijin. Adele explains that it combines Japanese characters meaning “future” and “person,” and that she took it from the manga series Miraijin Chaos, created by Osamu Tezuka. Through her explanation, Marco learns about the artist his daughter admires and the meaning she attaches to the child she calls the Man of the Future. His acceptance is therefore more than acquiescence to a pregnancy: he agrees to help make room for a future shaped by Adele’s convictions, while learning to support her without substituting his own judgment for hers.