Gianni

Gianni, Leda’s husband and the father of Bianca and Marta, is portrayed as a kind, tender man whose care for his daughters coexists with a demanding working life. When Leda leaves the family, he becomes their principal caregiver, but their separation also makes clear how little either spouse can dictate the other’s choices. His character emerges through the narrator’s qualified account: neither an idealized father nor a callous one, he is a parent who does what he can within the pressures of work, travel, and family rupture.

Identity and Family

Gianni is the father of Leda’s two young daughters. Looking at them, he remarks tenderly that they are identical to Leda. The comment joins affection to the language of resemblance: the girls appear, in his eyes, to carry their mother’s likeness. Yet the narrator also says he barely looked at them, and that he had little time to consider what had been reproduced from his body. His tenderness is therefore real but brief, set beside his habitual absorption in opportunities and activity beyond the household.

The account does not treat that limited attention as proof that Gianni lacks affection. Leda describes him as kind and says the daughters love him. She imagines that, if he were present while she remained on a lounge chair, he would go and play with Elena because he would feel obliged to do so. This imagined contrast gives his parenting a practical, dutiful quality: he is someone who would respond to a child’s need through action, even when such care is not presented as his constant practice.

Care and the Pressures of Work

Leda’s description of Gianni’s caregiving holds two assessments together. At one point, she says he took little or no care of the girls; she immediately qualifies this by explaining that, when necessary, he did everything he could, and that he was still doing so. Elsewhere, she says he took good care of them. These statements do not settle into a simple verdict. They distinguish between the attention he could provide in ordinary circumstances and the effort he made when circumstances required him to assume responsibility.

His work and travel help explain that strain without erasing it. When Leda announces that she is leaving, Gianni protests that he cannot keep up with both his work and the children. He calls Leda’s Mother and insists that Leda must think of the girls. The appeal reveals the practical burden he anticipates, as well as his conviction that the children should weigh heavily in her decision. His response is not merely a refusal to accept the separation: it is also a plea about the care arrangement that her departure will leave behind.

Leda’s Departure and Their Separation

Leda says that Gianni did not believe she would leave without the children. She did leave them with him, however, and was away for two months without calling. During that period, Gianni sought her out from a distance and pursued contact persistently. When she returned, she came only to pack her books and notes for good. The sequence places his efforts to recover contact against her increasingly definitive departure: he looks for her, but her return serves to complete the separation rather than restore the marriage.

Leda’s recollection also records her fear about what might happen to Bianca and Marta if Gianni’s work or travel overwhelmed him. She worried that he might take them to Naples and leave them with her mother and relatives, where they would grow up amid the habits and language she had tried to leave behind when she moved to Florence at eighteen. She had asked him not to leave the girls with her relatives; he answered that, if she was leaving, she had no right to interfere with what he did with his daughters. The disagreement shows how their separation becomes a conflict over parental authority and the girls’ upbringing. Leda’s anxiety is explicit, but her account also says that Gianni took good care of the children; the evidence does not reduce his parenting to the feared possibility she describes.

Aftermath and Characterization

By the time Leda returns to Bianca and Marta after three years away, Gianni has become her ex-husband and has gone to Canada. The account places this fact within a wider change in Leda’s life: some friends have withdrawn, some doors have closed, and Gianni has, in turn, taken his own departure. The symmetry is consequential but limited. The text establishes that he leaves for Canada; it does not explain his motives or describe the circumstances of his life there.

Gianni’s narrative role is defined by this tension between care and absence. He is the parent who remains with the girls when Leda leaves, objects that he cannot manage work and childcare together, and, according to her, nevertheless takes good care of them. He is also a man frequently occupied elsewhere, first by work and travel and later by his departure to Canada. Leda’s retrospective account recognizes his kindness and his capacity to meet obligations without making him the measure of her own choices. His presence anchors the practical consequences of her leaving; his eventual absence marks how thoroughly the family arrangement has changed.