Nina's desire to escape

Nina’s desire to escape is expressed most plainly when she tells Leda that she cannot go on as she is and that escape is the only thing she truly wants. Her request for the apartment keys, apparently connected to meeting Gino, becomes a test of whether Leda will help her take a risk and imagine a different future. The scene does not resolve whether Nina leaves her marriage or what follows; its decisive change is that Leda recognizes a larger appeal for support beneath the immediate request.

The Request and Its Stakes

Nina approaches Leda about borrowing her apartment, and Leda asks whether she really wants the keys. Nina answers conditionally, asking whether it is all right with Leda. Sitting together on the sofa, Leda recalls that Nina had described herself as happy with her husband and Gino as only a game. Nina confirms those statements, but uneasily. When Leda asks what follows from them, Nina says she cannot take it anymore. Her admission shifts the conversation: the request is no longer simply an arrangement concerning a few hours with Gino, but an opening onto a distress Nina has not otherwise made explicit.

Leda gives the keys, placing them on the table beside a hatpin and a hat. Nina does not appear happy at the sight of them. That reaction complicates any reading of the keys as a straightforward solution: getting permission does not make Nina’s uncertainty disappear. Leda warns that Nina is risking everything and suggests returning to her studies, graduating, and finding work. Nina responds that she knows nothing, has no worth, and has become a mother without understanding her own body. She identifies escape, rather than education or employment, as the one thing she knows she wants. The exchange establishes both the urgency of her dissatisfaction and the narrowness of the choices she can currently articulate.

From an Affair to a Future

Leda initially frames the matter around Nina’s proposed meeting with Gino, but, alone afterward, she questions that interpretation. She considers whether Nina might want Leda to refuse the keys, allowing Nina to deny herself a dangerous outlet, or instead to grant them, giving her a sense of authorization to risk departure. In Leda’s thinking, either answer could help propel Nina toward a choice she must make herself. The uncertainty is important: Leda does not claim to know exactly what Nina intends. She understands the request as an appeal to be accompanied while Nina confronts her options.

Leda consequently reads Nina’s request as a form of trust. Nina seems to be asking for more than access to the apartment: she wants Leda’s experience and what she imagines as Leda’s independence and rebellious strength placed at her service. Leda sees the request as an invitation to concern herself with Nina’s life and to support her step by step, whether or not the keys are handed over. This interpretation does not erase the immediate connection to Gino, but it places that proposed encounter within a larger question of escape and agency.

Leda’s Recognition of Their Difference

Leda’s recognition is sharpened by comparison with her own departure from her husband and daughters. She recalls leaving when she felt certain she had the right to do so, and notes that Gianni, though desperate, did not persecute her. During the three years she lived apart from her daughters, she had Hardy, who loved her, and friends who shared her cultural world and understood her ambitions and depressions. When she returned to Bianca and Marta, some relationships and doors were lost, and her former husband left for Canada, but no one expelled her or treated her as contemptible.

Leda sees Nina as lacking the protections that had supported her own break. In her assessment, the world has grown harsher for women, and Nina could face lethal violence for an act that Leda had undertaken years earlier. The parallel between their restlessness therefore does not make their circumstances equivalent. Leda’s memories supply a point of identification, but they also reveal how much Nina may have to risk without the support and relative freedom Leda once possessed.

A Reversed Inheritance of Support

Leda also reconsiders the part she has played in Nina’s life. She had cast Nina as a perfect mother and a successful daughter, while her own actions had complicated Nina’s existence, including taking Elena’s doll. Though Nina had treated Leda as a free and courageous woman, Leda recognizes that she had answered Nina’s anxious questions with reticence. The confidence Nina places in her is therefore based partly on an image of Leda that Leda knows is incomplete.

Thinking of Nani, the doll she has taken to the bedroom, Leda recalls Brenda, an English woman she met briefly in Calabria. Leda had once invested Brenda with a power she wanted for herself; Brenda, Leda believes, helped with a minimal gesture and then left Leda responsible for her own life. Leda sees that encounter as a possible model for her response to Nina: she can offer support without choosing Nina’s future for her. When Nina asks whether Leda will help, Leda answers that she is already doing so. This recognition gives the keys a double significance: they are a practical permission, but also part of a tentative promise of accompaniment.

An Unresolved Desire

Nina’s desire remains a demand for escape, not a settled account of what escape will mean. She has stated that she cannot continue, acknowledged feeling ignorant and worthless, and asked for help; Leda has responded with advice about studies and work, then with permission to use the apartment. The conversation leaves the tension between those responses intact. Leda offers a possible route toward independence, while Nina has named only the need to get away.

The scene thus makes escape both immediate and uncertain. The keys can enable a risky act, but Leda’s deeper reading is that Nina is asking to be seen and supported as she confronts a life she cannot bear to continue unchanged. By accepting that appeal, Leda moves from judging the request as an intrusion into her home to considering the responsibility Nina is placing in her hands. The evidence ends with that offer of help and Nina’s question about where Leda lives; it does not establish the outcome of the proposed escape.