Enzo and Margherita’s marriage

Enzo and Margherita’s marriage is tested by Enzo’s relationship with Vittoria, but it does not end in a simple contest between wife and lover. Margherita initially reclaims her husband, then, confronted with his illness and Vittoria’s enduring love, makes room for her rival in the care of Enzo and their children. The relationship is therefore defined both by betrayal and by a generosity that exceeds the usual boundaries of marriage.

Marriage and Exposure

Margherita is Enzo’s wife and the mother of their three children. According to Vittoria’s account, the affair was not known to the wider family during the dispute over the family house. Andrea and Vittoria’s siblings were arguing about whether the house should be sold and its proceeds divided; when Andrea insisted on his share, Enzo offered to provide the money himself. Andrea rejected the offer and accused him of improper conduct. After the confrontation, Andrea went directly to Margherita and disclosed that Enzo was involved with his sister. In Vittoria’s telling, that disclosure brought the affair into the open in front of the children and made the family’s private conflict a public injury.

The marriage consequently becomes entangled with more than Enzo’s infidelity. Andrea’s intervention, the property dispute, and Enzo’s attempt to help Vittoria converge in a single rupture, affecting Margherita, Enzo, Vittoria, and the children. Giovanna hears this history from Vittoria at Enzo’s tomb, where she struggles to reconcile the accusation with her father’s usual condemnation of informing on others. The account is explicitly Vittoria’s perspective, and Giovanna remains uncertain about how to judge it.

Separation, Return, and Illness

Vittoria does not present Margherita as accepting the affair from the outset. She says Margherita was angry, took Enzo back, and reacted forcefully to his relationship with Vittoria. The arrangement changes only after Enzo becomes ill, an illness Vittoria associates with the intensity and duration of his distress. Margherita then tells him to return to Vittoria and expresses regret that she had not done so earlier, before his condition had worsened. By this account, the shift is prompted not by indifference to the marriage but by recognition of Enzo’s suffering and the limits of what could still be repaired.

The two women then face his illness together and remain with him until his final moments. Vittoria describes their cooperation as a decision made too late to alter the outcome, but still consequential: Margherita’s earlier anger gives way to shared care rather than continued exclusion. Their conduct makes the marriage’s crisis an ongoing relationship among three people, with Enzo’s illness and eventual death setting the terms of what they can do for him.

Margherita and Vittoria

Vittoria describes Margherita as a remarkable and sensible woman. Once Margherita understands how deeply Vittoria loves Enzo and how much she suffers, she acknowledges that they loved the same man and permits Vittoria to love the children as well. Vittoria presents this welcome as an act of generosity, not as proof that the affair caused no harm: she openly admits that she took Enzo from Margherita and would not have wanted to give him back. The reconciliation therefore retains the injury at its center instead of pretending that affection erased it.

That shared bond becomes visible when Vittoria takes Giovanna to Margherita’s home. She has a key and enters without ringing, a sign of the familiarity established between the households. Margherita welcomes them, introduces Giovanna to her children, and feeds her sweets. The family home also keeps Enzo’s memory present: a large photograph of him in police uniform hangs in the kitchen, with a red light burning before it. His image sits within the ordinary life of the household that the two women have helped sustain.

Children and the Wider Family

Margherita’s children are part of the relationship’s aftermath, not an incidental detail. Vittoria says she worked as a maid in wealthy households across Naples to help raise them, and she emphasizes that her care extended to both the children and their mother. Years later, the children are grown: Tonino and Corrado are described as over twenty, while Giuliana is around eighteen. Giovanna’s visit introduces her to a family whose closeness with Vittoria is part of its everyday arrangement, despite the history of the affair.

The marriage’s crisis also alters the connection between the two families. After the quarrel between Andrea and Mariano, Mariano disappears from the Trada home, and Giovanna sees Angela and Ida less often. The girls do not understand the adults’ conflict at first; they sense that it concerns their parents’ sexuality rather than the political and intellectual subjects their fathers used to discuss. In Giovanna’s later speculation, Costanza’s departure and the adults’ changed behavior belong to the same web of revelations and marital strain. These scenes broaden the consequences of Enzo and Margherita’s marriage beyond the couple: adult intimacy and conflict reorganize children’s friendships and leave them trying to interpret what the adults will not plainly explain.

Narrative Significance

The marriage is known chiefly through Vittoria’s testimony, heard by Giovanna during a visit to the cemetery. That framing matters: Vittoria speaks with conviction and grief, while Giovanna listens without either fully accepting or openly disputing her account. Later encounters give the story a domestic counterpart in Margherita’s welcome and the children’s presence, but do not erase the uncertainty surrounding the older conflict.

Through this relationship, the novel places betrayal beside care without making either cancel the other. Margherita’s anger, her return to Enzo, her decision to let him go back to Vittoria, and the women’s shared vigil during his illness form successive responses to an affair whose consequences cannot be neatly undone. The marriage’s most lasting significance lies in this uneasy transformation: the wife and the lover become collaborators in caring for the same man and the children whose lives his choices have shaped.