Nella and Costanza’s friendship and betrayal

Nella and Costanza’s friendship and betrayal is shaped by an intimacy that predates its rupture: Costanza has long been a familiar presence in Nella’s home, yet she has also been involved with Nella’s husband, Andrea, for years. When the affair’s consequences become visible, their friendship is recast through silence, separation, and the return of a bracelet that carries the history neither woman can comfortably name. The novel presents their bond not as a simple opposition between loyalty and betrayal, but as a relationship caught inside overlapping marriages, concealed attachments, and unequal knowledge.

A friendship inside a family network

Costanza is Mariano’s wife and Nella’s old friend; the families’ lives are closely connected. Mariano and Andrea have been friends since university, and Mariano is often at the family home. The girls, including Angela and Ida, grow up around the adults’ conversations and shared social world. Costanza is therefore not a stranger entering Nella’s marriage from outside: she has been a visitor for as long as Giovanna can remember, and her familiarity makes the concealed relationship more painful in retrospect.

The adults’ relationships form a tightly connected circle in which friendship, marriage, and secrecy overlap. Nella and Mariano’s apparent closeness becomes legible to Giovanna through a small, ambiguous encounter: while sitting together at a table, their ankles touch beneath it. Nella barely participates in the conversation, while Mariano watches her and speaks to her in a low, unusually tender voice. Giovanna cannot tell what the gesture means, but she senses that the adults’ exchange has a significance hidden from the younger people present.

The affair comes into view

After the adults’ gathering, Giovanna replays what she has seen and considers telling Vittoria, who has urged her to watch closely. She decides against it, fearing that Vittoria would turn the scene into an accusation and use it to attack Nella. That choice leaves Giovanna carrying an impression she cannot verify, while the adults’ relationships continue to change around her.

The rupture becomes unmistakable after Costanza brings Giovanna a bracelet. Nella gives no visible response when Giovanna asks how it looks; she simply says that it looks good and leaves the room. Costanza follows her out and does not return to the family home. Mariano, too, disappears from the household’s social circle, and Giovanna sees Angela and Ida less often. The brief exchange and abrupt departures mark a change in the women’s friendship without explaining it to Giovanna directly.

Angela later recounts a violent argument between Andrea and Mariano at Mariano’s home. A conversation that began among the subjects the men habitually debated escalated into shouting and insults; Costanza left, and Andrea ran after her. The children cannot understand the dispute at first, though they suspect that sex rather than politics lies behind it. The scene makes the crisis between the two households public, while leaving its full history obscured.

The bracelet and the hidden history

In the aftermath, the bracelet becomes a focus for what the adults have not explained. Costanza had worn and prized it for years, and her return of it to Giovanna is described by Nella not as a gift but as a restitution. Costanza’s trembling fingers as she helps Giovanna put it on, Nella’s controlled response, and the word used to characterize the transfer all suggest that the object is bound to a painful account of ownership and obligation.

Giovanna later recognizes the bracelet in a family photograph kept in a dictionary: it is on the arm of Andrea’s mother. Nella had looked at the photograph repeatedly, recognizing Andrea but not noticing the bracelet. Its identification forces a new reading of the object’s path through the family. Giovanna understands that it links the family’s past to Costanza’s years of wearing it, and she resolves not to return it to Vittoria. The bracelet is at once an heirloom and evidence: its passage between women materializes a history that had remained concealed in ordinary family life.

Separation and the shape of betrayal

Andrea and Nella take almost two years to decide to separate, though they live together only intermittently during that period. Andrea disappears for weeks at a time; Giovanna initially fears that something terrible has happened, and learns only later that he has been living in a house in Posillipo provided to Costanza by her parents. Costanza, meanwhile, is now in lasting conflict with Mariano. The affair has thus entangled both marriages, though the evidence does not present Nella and Costanza as having a direct confrontation or a full reconciliation.

During the prolonged breakdown, Nella and Andrea repeatedly agree that Giovanna should not see Vittoria. Nella’s friendship with Costanza is no longer an ordinary part of the family’s social life: Costanza has left the house, Mariano has vanished from it, and the shared circle of adults has broken apart. Yet Costanza later appears outside Giovanna’s school, more elegant than before but with swollen eyes, and invites her to a small family gathering with her daughters. Her reappearance shows that the connection has not simply disappeared, even as its terms remain unsettled.

Narrative significance

The relationship is disclosed through fragments rather than a single explanatory conversation: an ankle touched beneath a table, a visit ending in silence, a reported quarrel, a bracelet returned, and an old photograph newly understood. Because Giovanna is both a child within the families and a witness to their tensions, she receives signs before she can assemble their meaning. Her developing interpretation is therefore provisional, shaped by what she observes and by what the adults withhold.

The contrast between the women’s restraint and the men’s open quarrel gives the betrayal its particular form. Nella says little when Costanza returns the bracelet; Costanza helps Giovanna put it on with trembling fingers; Andrea and Mariano’s conflict, by contrast, erupts in shouting and rupture. The women’s friendship is neither explained away nor repaired in the available events. It remains a damaged bond whose history survives in the family’s fractured social ties and in an object that moves between generations and households.