Marina takes Adele to Germany, and Adele returns to Italy

Marina takes Adele to Germany, but the move does not hold. After Marina makes slanderous accusations against Marco as she leaves, Adele returns to Italy the following year and lives with her father. The episode is a reversal in both residence and care: the mother who takes her daughter away cannot keep her there, while the father left behind becomes Adele’s home again. Its return also brings back an old disturbance, the thread Adele once perceived behind her back, making the relocation part of a longer history of her vulnerability and Marco’s involvement in it.

The Separation and Move

In recounting the separation, Marco says that everything Marina knew about him came out, while he himself did not come out, and that they parted. He describes the timing as late, but better than never. In his account, Marina made slanderous accusations against him to cover her escape, then moved to Germany with a man she knew far better than Marco did. The description makes the departure more than a change of country: it is also a rupture in the marriage, framed by competing knowledge, accusation, and concealment.

Adele went with Marina. At the time of the conversation in which the episode is recalled, Adele is twenty-one, so the narration looks back on her childhood move with the outcome already known. The child’s departure initially appears to be part of Marina’s attempt to establish a life away from Marco, but that arrangement fails. The account does not specify the immediate circumstances of the failure; it states the decisive consequence instead: the following year Adele came back to Italy to live with her father.

Adele’s Return and the Thread

The return is linked to a recurrence in Adele’s childhood experience. Marco recalls that the thread behind her back had been eliminated with help from a colleague before Adele entered elementary school. After she returned to Germany, however, she never left the house, and Marco brought her back to Italy to live with him. The sequence ties the move and return to a serious disruption in Adele’s life: the thread had once disappeared, but the family’s movement back to Germany coincided with its reappearance and with her withdrawal from the outside world.

Marco states that after he brought Adele back to Italy, the thread disappeared again. The account therefore presents his intervention as an action followed by a change in Adele’s condition, while leaving the precise mechanism unexplained. It does not describe a medical diagnosis or establish why the thread returned. What it does establish is the pattern that Marco remembers: the disturbance was addressed before school, came back after Adele was again in Germany, and was gone once more after he brought her home to Italy.

Marco’s Recognition and the Outcome

For years, Marco believed the thread was a reflection connected to fencing. His understanding changed when his colleague was right that fencing had nothing to do with it: Marco says that he himself was the cause. This recognition gives the episode a personal dimension beyond the geography of the move. Marco had first connected the thread to Adele’s sport, but comes to understand that the explanation lies with him. The recollection does not further define what his role was, so its significance rests in the admission itself rather than in an elaborated account of how the thread worked.

Adele’s return thus resolves the immediate question of where she lives without resolving every question about her condition. She is brought back from Germany to live with Marco, and the thread is gone again; yet the narrated events preserve the disturbing recurrence that preceded this outcome. The family’s change of country is neither a clean escape nor a simple homecoming. It exposes how a decision made amid marital conflict can also alter a child’s life, and how Marco’s eventual recognition of his own connection to Adele’s experience changes the meaning of the earlier attempt to explain it as a reflection of fencing.