The Narrator Takes and Keeps Elena’s Doll

Leda’s taking and keeping Elena’s doll, Nani, turns a small object into the center of a concealed breach between two mothers. The act matters not only because it deprives Elena of something she loves, but because Leda withholds the truth from Nina and later recognizes that this silence shaped their relationship. When Nina discovers what happened, she reclaims the doll and breaks with Leda.

The Doll and the Hidden Act

On the beach, Elena is briefly apart from her mother and sits alone in the sun, playing with her doll. Leda later acknowledges that she took the doll from Elena. The available account does not present the taking as a negotiated exchange: Leda kept Nani, and Nina did not know what had happened to it while she was trying to manage her distressed child.

Later, Nani is on Leda’s kitchen table. Its appearance seems clean and fresh, but its expression strikes Leda as indecipherable. The doll’s physical presence sits beside her recognition that her involvement in Nina’s life has been disordered: she had taken something from Elena and kept that fact from Nina. What might have looked like an isolated intervention thus becomes part of an unequal relationship in which Leda possessed information Nina needed.

Earlier Maternal Strain and the Doll’s History

Leda’s reflections place the act against a longer history of difficult, ambivalent motherhood, without establishing that this history caused her to take Nani. She remembers the physical alienation of pregnancy and the conviction, shared by those around her, that Bianca needed a sibling. She planned for Marta to follow, while her own ambitions and working life were already under pressure.

When Bianca was small and Marta’s irregular sleep left Leda exhausted, Leda tried to become the doll in Bianca’s games, letting her daughter care for her. Yet when Marta cried, Leda felt almost released from the game and left Bianca to attend to the younger child. She recalls feeling inadequate and desolate in those years, caught between her daughters’ needs and her own depleted capacity.

Dolls had also carried a personal history for Leda. She gave Bianca Mina, her own childhood doll, hoping Bianca would cherish it, but Bianca preferred another doll and set Mina aside. Later, Leda found Bianca sitting on Mina and angrily reclaimed the doll, insisting that it had been precious to her. This earlier episode does not explain Leda’s later choice with Elena’s doll, but it shows how a doll could become more than a toy: it could hold a mother’s memories and expose the strain between what she offers a child and what the child wants.

Leda and Nina: Unequal Histories

After Nina asks to use Leda’s apartment, Leda reflects on the bond between them and on the role she has come to occupy in Nina’s imagination. She believes Nina may be seeking not merely a place to meet Gino but guidance and support in deciding what to do with her life. Leda also recognizes that she had seemed to Nina like a free, independent woman while answering her anxious questions with reticence.

Leda distinguishes Nina’s situation from her own earlier departure from her husband and daughters. Leda had left at a time when she felt entitled to do so; she had Gianni’s sensitivity, a circle of friends who understood her ambitions, and Hardy’s love during the three years she was away from her daughters. Returning cost her relationships and closed doors, but she had not been cast out as contemptible. Leda sees Nina as having far fewer protections and facing more severe danger. Against that contrast, keeping Nani while Nina struggled with Elena reads as a failure of the responsibility Nina had entrusted to her, not simply the act of a woman who had once escaped motherhood herself.

Discovery and Reclamation

Nina eventually confronts Leda with the fact that she had the doll while Nina was overwhelmed by Elena’s crying. Leda calls herself an unnatural mother, and Nina agrees. The exchange makes the concealed act explicit: Leda had kept Nani and had not told Nina or intervened when Nina was at a loss.

Nina takes the doll from Leda in a fierce gesture of reclamation. She says she wants nothing more from Leda and leaves. The return of Nani does not repair the harm; it marks the point at which Nina withdraws the trust she had placed in Leda. The doll’s movement—from Elena, into Leda’s keeping, and finally back to Nina—gives material form to the relationship’s change from apparent closeness to rupture.