“I forget I hate him”

“I forget I hate him” is the phrase Giovanna seizes on to understand the contradiction in her mother’s attachment to Andrea. It also becomes a measure of Giovanna’s own effort to recover a view of her father that can contain both her childhood admiration and her present estrangement: she tries to see his former virtues again, not out of love, but to make sense of the person her mother continues to love.

The phrase and its contradiction

Nella distinguishes what she says from what she thinks, then explains that her thoughts return to the years when the family was happy. In that recollection, she forgets her hatred of Andrea. The sentence does not resolve the conflict between love and resentment; its force lies in holding them together. Happiness returns in memory, temporarily displacing the present grievance without making it disappear.

Giovanna hears the phrase as something “true and alive.” Rather than treating it as a passing remark, she turns it into a way of interpreting both her mother and herself. The words describe not a settled forgiveness but an unstable movement: memory restores the past’s happiness, while the present keeps the grounds for hatred intact.

Giovanna’s reconsideration of Andrea

At this point, Giovanna hardly sees her father. She no longer goes to the house in Posillipo, and she has eliminated Angela and Ida from her life. She cannot understand why Andrea left her and Nella to live with Costanza and her daughters. The separation has altered her judgment: once she considered him far superior to her mother, but now she finds no greatness of soul in him, “even in a negative sense.”

When Andrea occasionally comes to take her to school, Giovanna listens closely to his complaints and tells herself they are false. He wants her to believe that he is unhappy, or at least only a little less unhappy than he was in the apartment on Via San Giacomo dei Capri; she does not believe him. Her attention to his words is therefore also a form of scrutiny: she watches for the gap between what he says about his life and what she thinks his conduct has shown.

An effort made for her mother

Nella’s phrase leads Giovanna to consider whether she can set aside her present feelings and remember the father she adored as a child. If her mother can remain attached to Andrea, even reaching the point where she forgets she hates him, Giovanna reasons, perhaps his exceptional qualities were not only an effect of childhood. She makes a considerable effort to restore some virtues to him, but explicitly not out of affection. She wants to believe that her mother loved a person of substance.

That effort changes the texture of their rare encounters. Giovanna tries to be cordial, talks with Andrea about school and teachers, and sometimes compliments him: on his explanation of a difficult passage by a Latin writer, for instance, or on his haircut. The small praise is not proof of reconciliation. It shows how deliberately she performs civility while testing whether any part of her earlier admiration can survive her knowledge of his choices.

A recurring expression of divided feeling

The expression belongs to Nella’s account of her own divided thoughts, but Giovanna makes it a tool for reassessing Andrea. Its movement from the mother’s speech into the daughter’s reflection links two different attachments to the same man: Nella’s enduring bond and Giovanna’s attempt to understand what she once saw in him. The phrase preserves the past’s happiness without erasing the present’s betrayal, giving the contradiction a compact verbal form rather than a final answer.