Leda's Relationship with Her Mother

Leda’s relationship with her mother is a history of care entangled with fear and anger, and of an inheritance Leda spends much of her life trying to escape. Her mother’s warnings and repeated threats to leave make abandonment a lasting source of anxiety; her practical care, later care of Leda’s daughters, and transmission of Neapolitan speech make the relationship harder to reduce to injury or blame. As Leda becomes a mother herself, she recognizes that the conduct she rejected in her own childhood has not simply vanished from her.

Childhood Fear and Care

As a child, Leda is frightened by her mother’s warning that a red flag at sea means she must not swim. Years later, during the episode preceding her car crash, Leda experiences an alarming scene of an empty beach and calm water under such a flag. Her mother appears on the dunes, calling out the warning as if Leda were still a child. In hospital, Leda recalls hesitating before the sea and wonders whether the episode was a dream or a fantasy brought on by alarm. The remembered warning has outlasted the circumstances in which it was given: even in the imagined calm, Leda cannot make herself enter the water.

Another memory of the sea makes the mixture of care and anger more complicated. When Leda stayed in the water until she was cold, her mother pulled her out, covered her with a towel, and rubbed her vigorously. Leda could not tell whether the action expressed concern for her health or anger that had accumulated over time. The uncertainty matters: care is present, but Leda remembers it as difficult to separate from force and resentment. The same gesture can protect her and leave her unsure of what her mother feels.

Threats, Speech, and Family Inheritance

Leda remembers her mother threatening that her daughters would wake to find her gone. The threats made Leda tremble, although her mother remained at home. This gap between repeated declarations of departure and continued presence shaped Leda’s childhood: abandonment was invoked often enough to become a fear, without becoming an actual departure. Later, when Leda observes Nina speaking affectionately to Elena, the sound of Nina’s Neapolitan dialect recalls her own mother. Leda remembers that the same cadence could turn into commands and anger, and that the language of family life carried both tenderness and distress.

Leda’s resentment is also bound up with the household and relatives from which she sought distance. She recalls her father’s family as socially forceful and capable of turning friendliness into pressure or insult. Her mother was ashamed of their manner and tried to present herself as a well-dressed, well-behaved woman. Yet, in Leda’s recollection, conflict could make her mother adopt the same aggressive behavior she wished to disavow. Leda watched this contradiction with disappointment and resolved not to repeat it. Her wish to become different was therefore directed not only at a style of behavior, but at the family world she feared she had inherited.

Leda as a Mother

Leda’s later experience of motherhood brings that inheritance into her own conduct. After Bianca’s birth, she describes pregnancy and the body as involving a life that belongs to her yet is moving toward becoming someone else. When Marta is born, Leda is exhausted and feels unable to study or play freely. Bianca wants her attention, while Marta’s crying repeatedly draws her away. Leda feels relief when she has a reason to leave Bianca’s game, then recognizes that this relief is tied to her own desolation and sense of inadequacy.

In one remembered incident, the pressure of trying to work and maintain her concentration gives way to a physical retaliation when Bianca strikes her. Leda’s response escalates beyond the child’s original act; she recognizes that what began without deliberation has become real, if controlled, violence. The memory does not establish a simple repetition of her mother’s behavior, but it unsettles Leda’s confidence that intention alone can make her different. Her account places the desire to be a good mother beside exhaustion, anger, and actions she herself cannot comfortably defend.

Separation, Blame, and Reconciliation with the Past

When Leda leaves Gianni and their daughters, she fears that he may take Bianca and Marta to Naples and leave them with her mother and relatives. She had asked him not to do this, but he insisted that decisions about his daughters were his to make. In practice, Gianni cared for them, yet work and travel sometimes led him to leave them at their grandmother’s home for months. Leda learned that this had happened and regretted it, but did not return. At the time, distance seemed to confirm that she had become another person, while her daughters’ exposure to the family world she had fled became a source of anxiety.

After Leda reclaimed the girls and brought them to Florence, she accused her mother of having marked them as she believed she herself had been marked. She later calls those accusations wicked. Her mother had cared for Bianca and Marta and worn herself out doing so, but Leda says she offered no gratitude and turned her own concealed anger against her. Her mother died shortly afterward. The account gives no certain explanation for her death; instead, it leaves Leda confronting the severity of what she said and the care she failed to acknowledge.

What Passes Between Generations

Leda’s fear that her daughters will repeat her family’s past shapes her response to their difficulties at school. For several years Bianca and Marta do poorly, and Leda presses them to improve, linking their prospects to the education and status she associates with escape from their grandmother’s life. When they begin succeeding, Leda feels the shadows of the women in her family recede. Yet this apparent separation does not erase their connection. She recognizes that her mother’s clearest inheritance to the girls was the Neapolitan dialect and a handful of expressions. Bianca and Marta imitate Leda’s accent and criticize her English, reminding her that the language she tried to leave behind still surfaces in her speech.

By the time Leda reflects on this inheritance, her judgment has shifted from repudiation toward uneasy recognition. She admits that, despite her efforts to break away, she has not gone as far from her mother as she once imagined, while her daughters belong to a future beyond her reach. Their dialect carries forward a bond Leda had treated as a threat, but it also exposes how little any generation can choose what it receives unchanged. The relationship’s significance lies in that unresolved passage: Leda’s Mother’s care and anger remain difficult to separate, and Leda’s own efforts to refuse that pattern coexist with traces of it in her life as a mother.