Look, look, look

Look, look, look is Vittoria’s insistent appeal for Giovanna to see beyond the account of family life supplied by her parents. Repeated during visits and encounters, the command makes looking an active, difficult practice: Giovanna must notice what she has been taught to overlook, while also confronting the forceful judgments through which Vittoria directs her attention.

The Command and Its Context

During visits to her father’s relatives, Giovanna realizes how little she remembers them, perhaps never having properly learned their names. Vittoria turns this uncertainty into an argument against Giovanna’s parents, whom she blames for depriving the girl of the warmth of relatives who may be uneducated or ungainly in speech but are generous in feeling. Striking her large breasts with her broad, gnarled hand as she speaks about the importance of the heart, Vittoria urges Giovanna to compare the family she is meeting with the household in which she was raised. She accuses her of wearing horse-like blinders: she looks, but fails to see what might disturb her. The repeated command, “Look, look, look,” gives that accusation its blunt, memorable form.

The journey through Naples makes the appeal concrete. In a green Fiat 500, Vittoria takes Giovanna to relatives in Cavone, the Campi Flegrei, and Pozzuoli. Their small, drab apartments contain objects Giovanna has been taught to regard as crude or vulgar; Aunt Anna’s is the only home where she sees books, and there are mysteries. Yet the relatives welcome her with easy familiarity. They speak in a cordial mixture of dialect and Italian, and Giovanna tries to answer in kind, making room in her hypercorrect Italian for Neapolitan cadences. They neither ask after her father nor send greetings to him, but they make clear that their hostility is not directed at her. They call her Giannina, a name her parents never use, and she finds herself relaxed, funny, and unusually open to affection. The visits show that looking can unsettle the values she has inherited while revealing a form of belonging she had not known.

Looking at Parents, and at Vittoria

The command also governs Vittoria’s recurring demands that Giovanna report on her days. Giovanna initially offers broad, admiring accounts: her father studies, is respected, and publishes in a famous journal; her mother loves him, is intelligent, and edits or rewrites romance stories. Vittoria rejects this praise as evidence that Giovanna loves her parents simply because they are her parents. Unless she recognizes them as bad people, Vittoria warns, she will become like them, and Vittoria will no longer want to see her. The appeal to see clearly therefore comes with an emotional price: attention is measured by whether Giovanna accepts Vittoria’s indictment.

When Giovanna tries to satisfy her with more particular observations, she describes her father’s different voices: affectionate, imperious, cold, and contemptuous, the last sometimes slipping into dialect when he is irritated. She also says that her mother is somewhat dominated by Costanza and sometimes annoyed by Costanza’s husband, Mariano, who is her father’s close friend but jokes cruelly. Vittoria dismisses these disclosures as insubstantial gossip and calls Mariano an imbecile. Her reaction exposes a tension in the command: she demands close scrutiny, yet does not readily accept what Giovanna sees when it fails to support her own conclusions.

The physical image of seeing is bound to intimacy as well as conflict. At times Vittoria puts her hand beside Giovanna’s and points out that they have the same hands; when their thumbs bump, Giovanna is moved and longs to embrace her. At other times Vittoria rebukes her as her father’s daughter, mocks the way her mother dresses her, and says her parents are ruining her. She tells Giovanna to look carefully at them and not let them deceive her. The same insistence that offers recognition and closeness also presses Giovanna toward estrangement from her parents.

A Motif of Misreading

The recurring command resonates with a moment when Giovanna overhears her parents discussing her school performance. After her mother reports the teachers’ complaints, her father rejects adolescence as an explanation and says that Giovanna is getting Vittoria’s face. The remark reaches her through a door her parents believe is closed. It teaches her that the family’s surface ease conceals judgments she was not meant to hear, and that the comparison with Vittoria carries a history of ugliness and spite in her father’s eyes. In this context, looking is not simply seeing a visible face: it involves hearing what adults try to keep hidden and recognizing the meanings attached to family resemblance.

The phrase also sits against the family’s management of what Giovanna may notice. Before visits to Vittoria, her parents’ unusual tension becomes familiar to her, and she is told to pretend not to hear if Vittoria says something. Their effort to protect her from upsetting encounters resembles the very blinding Vittoria accuses them of creating. Yet the text does not make Vittoria’s vision an uncomplicated truth. Her forceful readings of the family coexist with her contempt, anger, and refusal of some of Giovanna’s specific observations. “Look, look, look” thus names both a demand for attention and a conflict over who gets to interpret what that attention reveals.