Leda’s departure from Bianca and Marta, followed by her return three years later, is a defining rupture in her family life and a measure of the conflict between maternal attachment and the self she wants to pursue beyond domestic obligations. Recounted years afterward, the episode is not explained by a single motive: Leda describes exhaustion and a hunger for intellectual and personal possibility, while also admitting that she left her daughters without contact and could not make her reasons fully clear, even to herself.

The Separation and Its Frame

Leda identifies the ages of her daughters when she left: Bianca was six and Marta four. Three years later, she took them back. These brief facts establish the separation’s duration and its stakes, but the account resists making the return a simple restoration. Leda reports the outcome without detailing how the reunion unfolded; the emphasis falls instead on the choice to leave and the long silence that followed.

The event reaches the reader as a recollection narrated by Leda. Its chronology is assembled retrospectively: later scenes of strain and disclosure lead into the history behind them. That structure makes the departure both a past action and an unsettled present fact. Leda can recount what happened, but the account does not settle the question of why she did it. She says that she wanted to explain the impulses that sent her away, not offer reasons she could stand behind with confidence.

Pressures Before the Final Departure

The leaving took shape through several departures rather than one decisive break. In a period of growing academic recognition, Leda travelled to England and returned, then left again. Professor Hardy’s confidence in her work seemed to confirm her sense that she had unusual abilities. At home, Gianni worried that work and the children were becoming impossible to manage together. Leda told him she intended to leave him, describing a need to understand who she was and what possibilities were truly hers; her account makes clear that such explanations did not convey everything driving her.

Gianni did not believe she would go without the children. Leda nevertheless left Bianca and Marta with him and was away for two months without calling. He searched for her from a distance. When she returned, it was to pack her books and notes for good, not to resume the household life she had left. The distinction between this brief return and her later return to her daughters is crucial: one visit completed her departure, while the other ended the three-year separation.

Ambition, Exhaustion, and Maternal Conflict

Leda describes the life outside the family home as filled with new intellectual possibilities and a language she could finally claim as her own. Against this, she remembers the demands made on her within the household as pressing upon her with a force she could not reconcile with her own desires. Her account places professional aspiration beside the ordinary claims of family life: dinner sauce bubbling on the stove, the clock advancing, and only a narrow stretch of time available for research, invention, recognition, professional standing, and money of her own. The departure emerges from this collision, not from a demonstrated absence of attachment to her daughters.

Her memories of motherhood elsewhere in the account show how care and resentment could occupy the same daily life. During a period of desolation, Leda says she could no longer study, played without joy, and felt that her body had become inert. When Marta cried in another room, Leda experienced the interruption as an almost liberating reason to stop playing with Bianca. She could tell herself that the younger child was pulling her away from the older one, rather than that she was choosing to leave Bianca. This remembered self-justification complicates any simple account of maternal duty: caring for one child could become a route away from another, and relief could coexist with the awareness of what that relief cost.

Leda’s reflections on pregnancy deepen this tension without resolving it. She describes a life growing within the body as both one’s own and moving away from oneself, experienced as at once joyful, heavy, and repellent. In the story of her departure, that bodily ambivalence does not function as a single explanation. Rather, it belongs to a wider account in which the demands of motherhood can be intimate and sustaining, yet also feel as if they displace the mother’s independent life.

Fear, Absence, and Return

One fear Leda recalls from the time she left was that Gianni might take Bianca and Marta to Naples and leave them with her mother and relatives. She had left Naples at eighteen to study in Florence and regarded the city, its habits, and its language as part of a past she had tried to put behind her. She pleaded with Gianni not to leave the girls with her relatives; he answered that, if she left, she had no right to dictate what he did with his daughters. Leda says he cared for them, but that work or travel could lead him to take them to her family. The fear reveals how leaving her daughters did not end her concern about the world in which they might grow up, even as it exposed the limits of her authority after she had gone.

After packing her books and notes, Leda left and for three years neither saw nor heard Bianca and Marta. The silence is a concrete consequence of her choice, not merely an interval in the account. Later, when she anticipated another long absence from them, she wrote a detailed letter describing how she had abandoned them, made two copies, and left one in each daughter’s room. Neither answered or asked to discuss it. Bianca once replied to an indirect, slightly bitter reference by pointing out that Leda had time to write letters. The attempted explanation therefore did not produce the conversation Leda might have wanted; the daughters’ silence, and Bianca’s sharp response, leave the consequences of the earlier silence in view.

Leda’s statement that she took her daughters back three years later marks the return as an action, but does not erase what preceded it. In a later conversation with Nina, Leda also acknowledges having abandoned Bianca and Marta and says she had been very tired. That disclosure connects the remembered separation to her present relationships with other mothers: her confession is not an abstract defense, but an account of a past choice spoken within a conversation about care, exhaustion, and a child’s distress.

Significance of the Recollection

The episode refuses a consoling division between a devoted mother and a woman seeking freedom. Leda’s academic ambition and need for a life of her own are specific and consequential, but so are her daughters’ ages, the unannounced two-month absence, the final departure, and the three years without contact. Her later effort to explain what happened records a wish to be understood while acknowledging that explanation cannot convert the impulses behind her choice into a settled justification.

The return is therefore neither presented as proof that the separation was harmless nor as a complete repair. Leda did take Bianca and Marta back, but the episode’s lasting weight lies in the difference between returning and undoing: the first is part of the chronology; the second is not claimed. By narrating the event from the distance of later life, Leda gives the abandonment a history while leaving its moral and emotional contradictions open.