Honor your father and mother

Honor your father and mother is presented not as an easy rule of obedience but as a demand Giovanna struggles to reconcile with the lies, tensions, and betrayals she associates with adult life. When she admits that she no longer understands her parents, the command offers her a possible discipline of approach: not instant forgiveness or restored trust, but an effort to move closer to them.

The Rule and Giovanna’s Resistance

During a conversation about how to live, Giovanna is told first to treat others with kindness and fairness, and then to attempt what is especially difficult at her age: honoring her father and mother. She answers that she no longer understands them. The response, that understanding may come when she grows up, leaves the rule in place without resolving her objection. Its force lies in that gap: parental respect is urged while the reasons for Giovanna’s estrangement remain real to her.

The command also carries the weight of the biblical injunction to honor one’s parents, but the narrative does not present it as automatic submission. Giovanna’s difficulty is not merely adolescent defiance; she has been trying to interpret a household marked by concealed anxiety and by adult behavior she finds hard to trust. The rule therefore asks for an ethical response before she possesses a settled account of the people to whom she owes it.

From Duty to an Attempt at Closeness

The encounter changes what Giovanna tries to do. She considers honoring her parents out of the question, yet wonders whether she can at least find ways to get a little closer to them. That distinction makes the rule practical without suggesting that she has achieved reconciliation: she begins with an attempt to alter the relationship rather than a declaration that her doubts have disappeared.

Her effort with her mother begins unevenly. Giovanna does not discuss the telephone call her mother made to Vittoria, and continues at times to direct orders, rebukes, recriminations, and accusations of betrayal at her. Her mother remains impassive, as though able to make herself deaf at will. The silence between them is therefore not a clean slate; Giovanna’s approach is complicated by a specific grievance that remains unspoken.

Seeing Her Mother Differently

Over time, Giovanna’s attitude begins to soften as she watches her mother in the hallway: carefully dressed and combed even when no one is expected, her bony back bent for hours over her work. The sight makes visible a person consumed by suffering. Rather than erase the conflict, this observation gives Giovanna a different way to regard the mother she has been accusing.

The comparison with Vittoria sharpens that change. Giovanna recognizes that her mother and Vittoria are enemies and that their education and cultivation are unequal, yet she recalls Vittoria’s enduring faithfulness to Enzo as something she had considered a mark of greatness. She then wonders whether her mother is displaying an even nobler soul. The movement from judgment toward attention gives the command its most concrete consequence: honoring her parents begins not as unquestioning approval, but as a difficult effort to see her mother beyond Giovanna’s anger.