Giovanna tells Vittoria about her mother’s suspicious contact with Mariano

Giovanna tells Vittoria about her mother’s suspicious contact with Mariano after seeing Mariano hold Nella’s ankle between his legs beneath the dinner table. The disclosure turns an ambiguous gesture into a family crisis: Giovanna brings the scene to the aunt who has urged her to look closely, only to hear that her father may care nothing about it.

The Scene Beneath the Table

The encounter begins at a dinner attended by Giovanna’s parents, Mariano, and his wife, Costanza. When Giovanna throws herself backward to avoid a ball, she ends up on the floor beside the open dining-room door, able to see the adults mainly in profile and to make out their legs and feet. Mariano has stretched his legs beneath the table and is speaking to Giovanna’s father while squeezing one of Nella’s ankles between his own.

Giovanna sits up with an obscure sense of shame and throws the ball back. A few minutes later she lies down again. Mariano’s legs remain outstretched, but Nella has pulled hers away and turned her whole body toward her husband, remarking that November is still warm. The small, partially concealed movement is all Giovanna has directly witnessed; it does not establish what Nella or Mariano intended, or how long the contact lasted.

The family’s earlier dinner conversation gives this glimpse a charged context. Mariano is Andrea’s longstanding friend, a university history teacher who visits often and argues with him about their work and the enemies they believe obstruct it. Giovanna has grown up hearing the adults’ discussions without understanding much of their substance. She and her sisters, Angela and Ida, are forbidden to speak Neapolitan or swear, yet repeat under their breath the obscene dialect insults they hear Mariano use. To Giovanna, his jokes carry an impression of spite as well as amusement, a suspicion that shapes how she reads the later scene.

From Observation to Suspicion

After the family leaves Mariano and Costanza’s apartment, Giovanna cannot concentrate. She tries to decide whether the ankle contact was innocent play, a deliberate illicit gesture by Mariano, or an act involving both adults. Her questions multiply rather than settle the matter: she wonders how long the contact lasted, why Nella did not pull away immediately, and whether her mother’s distracted manner afterward means anything.

The uncertainty is sharpened by Giovanna’s view of her mother. She remembers Nella dismissing Mariano as stupid and questioning how Costanza could bear his inability to keep quiet. That apparent dislike seems hard to reconcile with the contact beneath the table. Yet the scene also troubles Giovanna because it involves her mother’s familiar clothes and jewelry, objects from her own childhood that she has played with and sometimes worn. Suspicion becomes entangled with jealousy: Mariano seems to her a malicious stranger intruding on her mother’s body and on the private world of the family.

In bed, Giovanna tries to strip the image of its suggestive meaning and tell herself it was only play between friends. She cannot. Vittoria’s instruction to look carefully returns to her mind: now that Giovanna has seen something, she could report it and ask her aunt what weight to give it. But she imagines Vittoria interpreting the scene through the crude sexual vocabulary she uses about her own relationship with Enzo. Giovanna fears that Vittoria would turn a possibly innocent gesture into a degrading accusation against Nella and, through her, Andrea. She decides that night not to tell her aunt.

The Confession at the Christmas Market

The decision changes at the church Christmas market. Giovanna is already distressed by the disorder at home and by the thought that Mariano is embracing Nella. She stands beside Corrado, partly helping him sell and partly seeking relief, while watching Vittoria move through the market in visible distress. Vittoria sometimes greets parishioners with artificial brightness and sometimes stares into space; when Corrado asks what is wrong, she says she is sick at heart, in her chest, and in her stomach, and asks him to fetch water.

Giovanna recognizes herself in Vittoria’s unhappiness and feels that her aunt is the person closest to her. Her own distress has become physically oppressive, and she can no longer keep the scene to herself. She impulsively calls Vittoria “aunt,” although Vittoria has forbidden her to use that form of address, and asks her to promise secrecy. Vittoria refuses to swear: the only oath she has taken, she says, is to love Enzo forever. Giovanna hesitates, but Vittoria warns that unsaid, ugly things become dogs that eat at a person’s head during the night. Frightened and in need of consolation, Giovanna pulls her aside and tells her about Mariano and Nella, mixing what she actually saw with what she has imagined.

Vittoria’s Reply and the Unresolved Meaning

Giovanna ends her disclosure by pleading, “Please, don’t tell Papa.” Vittoria stares at her for a long moment, then answers in dialect, with a mocking cruelty Giovanna cannot fully understand: “Papa? You think Papa gives a fuck about the ankles of Mariano and Nella under the table?” The response shifts the focus from the uncertain meaning of the contact to Vittoria’s judgment of Andrea. It suggests that, in her view, Andrea would be indifferent to what happened, but does not prove that he knows about it or confirm that Nella and Mariano are lovers.

The confession therefore offers no clean verdict. Giovanna has looked as Vittoria instructed, but what she has seen remains incomplete, and the act of reporting it risks giving Vittoria’s hostile interpretations power over her mother. Her plea for secrecy shows that the disclosure is not simply an accusation: she seeks comfort while fearing what her aunt will do with the information. Vittoria’s reply leaves that fear intact, converting a hidden ankle beneath a dinner table into evidence of the estrangement and mistrust that govern the family’s adult relationships.