Andrea and Costanza’s love affair

Andrea and Costanza’s love affair is a concealed attachment that emerges from the close-knit friendship between Andrea and Mariano and the families’ shared history. Its eventual exposure helps fracture both marriages and leaves Giovanna to interpret a web of loyalty, secrecy, and competing explanations. The affair’s history is inseparable from the bracelet passed through the family: Andrea describes giving it to Costanza as an act of symbolic care, while Giovanna experiences its unexplained transfer as evidence of damage adults cannot plainly acknowledge.

Background and concealed history

Andrea and Mariano had been friends since their university days, and Mariano was a frequent presence in Andrea’s home. The two men spent long hours discussing politics, Marxism, economics, and their intellectual work; the girls grew up treating their arguments as a serious, almost permanent feature of family life. Costanza, Mariano’s wife, was likewise a familiar visitor. The intimacy among the adults appeared to Giovanna as the stable setting of childhood, while the concealed attachment between Andrea and Costanza remained outside her knowledge.

Andrea later told Giovanna that his feelings for Costanza had begun well before her birth. He said he had initially understood their bond as familial, comparing Costanza to a sister and Mariano to a brother with whom he could study and confide. In his account, he and Costanza had regarded one another as close friends within a group of four young people that also included Andrea’s future wife, Nella, and Mariano. He described the change in their relationship as something they themselves had not anticipated, rather than as a planned betrayal from the beginning.

Discovery through gestures and conflict

Giovanna’s first suspicions arose not from a confession but from watching the adults. During an evening at Mariano and Costanza’s home, she noticed her mother and Mariano exchanging little conversation while Mariano watched Nella with unusual attention. When Giovanna later recalled the scene, she could not make what she had seen fit the ordinary, harmless language of friendship. She considered telling Vittoria, who had urged her to observe her parents closely, but feared that Vittoria would turn the observation into an accusation. Giovanna therefore kept the scene to herself.

The adults’ unease around family visits had already taught Giovanna that something was being concealed. Her parents prepared carefully before seeing Vittoria and warned her to ignore anything her aunt might say. At dinner, her mother appeared preoccupied and Mariano’s manner toward her seemed unusually tender to Giovanna. These small shifts in conduct did not establish what had happened, but they made adult relationships feel legible through silences and gestures before anyone would explain them.

The fracture between the households became unmistakable when Andrea and Mariano’s argument, which began with familiar intellectual subjects, turned into a bitter quarrel. Costanza left after Mariano insulted her, and Andrea ran after her. Angela later told Giovanna about the confrontation, while the girls struggled to understand why arguments about politics and Marxism had suddenly become so violent. Giovanna suspected that the real cause involved the adults’ intimate relationships, not their stated intellectual disputes. Afterward, Mariano and Costanza ceased appearing at Via San Giacomo dei Capri, and Giovanna saw Angela and Ida less often.

The bracelet and competing accounts

The bracelet gave the affair a tangible, recurring form in Giovanna’s life. After the rupture, Costanza visited Giovanna and helped put the white-gold bracelet on her wrist, presenting its return as restitution rather than a simple gift. Giovanna wore it day and night, but its arrival was surrounded by charged looks and explanations that did not answer the questions she was beginning to ask. To her, the bracelet became bound up with the adults’ concealed history and the disintegration of their families.

Much later, Costanza tried to reassure Giovanna that Andrea was suffering and that what had happened should not be assigned to one person as a fault. Her distress made clear that the separation had not ended the emotional consequences of the affair. Costanza described Andrea as missing Giovanna and the girls, but her appeal to a shared absence did not resolve Giovanna’s uncertainty about what the adults had done or how responsibility should be understood.

Andrea’s own explanation joined his love for Costanza to the bracelet’s history. He told Giovanna that he and Costanza had travelled together on a work-related trip and, after an evening spent talking, recognized that their attachment was not simply that of siblings or friends. He insisted that this realization did not mean the relationship continued afterward in the way Giovanna might imagine. His account presents the attachment as intense and consequential, while also framing its origin as an unexpected discovery rather than a deliberate plan.

Andrea also explained that the bracelet had belonged to his mother. He said he had wanted it after her death despite Vittoria’s insistence that it belonged to her, and that he had later asked Vittoria to give it to Giovanna when she was born. He then passed it to Costanza because he believed she would like it. In his telling, he had mentally associated the bracelet with Costanza long before he physically gave it to her; what he considered an act of kindness had therefore become a symbol of divided loyalties and injury. The explanation clarifies the object’s route without making its emotional meaning simple.

Separation and aftermath

Andrea and Nella took almost two years to decide to separate, although they spent only brief periods under the same roof during that time. Andrea would disappear for weeks, causing Giovanna to fear that he had died, and she learned only later that he had been staying in a house in Posillipo provided to Costanza by her parents. Costanza was by then in conflict with Mariano. When Andrea returned to Nella and Giovanna, he could be affectionate and courteous, but reconciliations soon gave way to further arguments. Through these repeated departures and returns, the affair’s consequences persisted even when the adults tried to resume ordinary family life.

Despite their own marital crisis, Andrea and Nella agreed that Giovanna should no longer see Vittoria. Giovanna did not object at the time, and she herself tried to withdraw from her aunt. The wider rupture thus narrowed the child’s relationships as well as ending the old pattern of family visits. The concealed attachment between Andrea and Costanza had repercussions beyond the two adults: it rearranged friendships, separated children, and made the bracelet an object Giovanna could not regard as merely ornamental.

Significance in Giovanna’s account

The affair reaches the reader through Giovanna’s partial knowledge, not through a single authoritative disclosure. First she sees the adults’ behavior; then she hears about the quarrel; later Costanza offers reassurance, and Andrea gives a long, self-justifying account. Each explanation adds information but also exposes the adults’ difficulty in distinguishing love, harm, intention, and responsibility. Giovanna’s uncertainty is not simply a lack of facts: she recognizes that the adults’ declarations of affection coexist with choices that injure one another and unsettle the children around them.

Andrea’s account is especially revealing in its treatment of symbols. He insists that he did not mean to wrong Giovanna by giving the bracelet to Costanza, because he had already assigned it a meaning connected to her. Yet the same object, returned to Giovanna after the rupture, carries consequences that his intended gesture cannot control. The affair therefore becomes part of the novel’s larger examination of how adult secrecy enters a child’s life through ordinary objects, altered relationships, and explanations that arrive only after trust has been damaged.