Women’s escape and autonomy

Women’s escape and autonomy are treated as precarious choices shaped by unequal risks, not as a freedom that becomes available simply because a woman wants it. The contrast between Leda’s earlier departure from her husband and daughters and Nina’s present desire to flee unsettles Leda’s image of herself as an example of independence. When Nina asks to borrow her apartment, Leda must decide whether to refuse or offer the keys; the request becomes a test of whether one woman can support another without claiming authority over her life.

A request that becomes a bond

Late at night, Leda considers Nina’s request in the apartment and on the terrace, where sounds from the fair still carry through the darkness. At first, she resists the idea of lending her home to Nina for time with Gino. Leda remembers having accommodated her own daughters when they wanted the apartment to themselves, but she sees Nina differently: until then, Nina had been a distant beach encounter, a young woman whose life Leda had already affected by taking Elena’s doll. Leda wonders why she should give Nina her house, and why Nina had asked her.

The question changes as Leda recognizes a connection between them. She imagines that Nina might want either refusal, which would help her turn away from a dangerous possibility, or consent, which might feel like permission to risk a different future. In either case, Leda thinks, Nina is asking for more than a place to meet Gino. She wants Leda’s experience and the strength she attributes to her; she wants someone to attend to her life and support the choices she will have to make. The apartment keys therefore carry a meaning beyond practical access: offering them may acknowledge Nina’s agency while also accepting a relationship of care.

Two departures, unequal conditions

Leda’s reflection makes clear why she cannot simply treat Nina’s situation as a repeat of her own. Around twenty years earlier, Leda left her husband, Gianni, and her daughters when she believed she had the right to do so. During the three years apart, she was not isolated: Hardy loved her, and she had friends who shared her cultural world and understood her ambitions and depressions. When she returned to Bianca and Marta, some relationships and doors had closed, and Gianni later left for Canada; nevertheless, Leda recalls that no one had cast her out as contemptible.

Nina, in Leda’s assessment, has none of the protections that surrounded Leda before her own break. The world has grown harsher for women, and the consequences Nina might face for a less extensive act of departure could be far more severe. This comparison prevents Leda’s past from serving as a simple lesson or model. Her independence did not prove that every woman can leave on the same terms: it depended on support, social and cultural resources, and circumstances Nina does not share. Autonomy appears here as both the right to choose and the unequal capacity to survive a choice.

Reversing the roles of support

Leda’s thinking also revises how she understands the women who have influenced one another. She recognizes that she had assigned Nina the roles of perfect mother and successful daughter, even as her own intervention with Elena’s doll complicated Nina’s life. Nina, meanwhile, had seemed to regard Leda as free, refined, courageous, and without hidden corners. But Leda knows that her answers to Nina’s anxious questions were reticent rather than fully open. Their apparent likeness had concealed a difference in the scale of the risks they faced.

Beside Nani, which Leda sets upright on the bed before lying down, she remembers Brenda, the English woman she met briefly on the highway for Reggio Calabria. Leda had invested Brenda with a power she wanted for herself; Brenda may have understood this and helped her through a small gesture, while leaving Leda responsible for her own life. Leda sees a possible reversal in her relation with Nina: Nina now places Leda in the position of a figure who might help her, just as Leda once placed Brenda there. The memory suggests that support need not mean taking over another person’s decision. Leda can assist Nina and still leave the choice, and its consequences, with Nina.

The keys and the limits of permission

When Nina tells Leda she cannot go on as things are, Leda gives her the keys, setting them on the table beside a pin and a hat. The offer follows a moment of hesitation: Leda reminds Nina that she had said she was happy with her husband and that Gino was only a game. Nina confirms those earlier claims uneasily, but her appeal makes plain that her desire to escape is now more important to her than the appearance of contentment. Leda initially advises her to return to her studies, graduate, and find a job. Nina answers that she feels she knows nothing and is worth nothing, and identifies escape as the only thing she truly wants. Leda then tells her to do what she feels she wants to do.

The gesture does not resolve Nina’s future or establish that leaving will make her safe. It marks a shift in Leda’s response: she moves from warning Nina toward a more limited form of support, giving her access to the apartment without claiming that she can decide what Nina should do. Nina says she will come to see Leda, and Leda offers to leave her address. The exchange leaves their connection open rather than promising a settled outcome. Escape and autonomy remain bound to uncertainty, but the scene shows how one woman’s acknowledgment can help another act without turning assistance into command.