Nella’s depression and fixation on Andrea

Nella’s depression and fixation on Andrea persist after their separation, shaping her body, attention, and sense of what makes life meaningful. She continues to blame the man who betrayed her, yet worries that without her care he will come to harm; her memories of their happier years repeatedly draw her back toward him. Through Giovanna’s changing view of her mother, this attachment is recast from apparent weakness as a severe, compromised form of fidelity.

Identity and Background

After a long period of despair, Nella appears physically diminished: she is described as skin and bones, smokes even more than Vittoria, and sits at her work with increasingly rounded shoulders. The image of her bent like a hook trying to catch an elusive fish makes her suffering visible as a posture as well as a condition. Her distress is not presented as a single outburst but as an ongoing narrowing of her life and attention.

That narrowing has a particular focus. Although Nella is Andrea’s ex-wife, she seems increasingly preoccupied with his health and survival. Giovanna sometimes thinks her mother regards him as close to death, or even already dead without anyone else knowing. Nella has not stopped blaming him; resentment remains active. But it is now mixed with apprehension that, outside her guardianship, he will lose both his health and his life. Her attachment therefore holds together accusation and caretaking rather than resolving into either forgiveness or indifference.

Fixation in Daily Life

Nella’s concern surfaces in small, practical remarks. She asks that Andrea be told he cannot always eat panzarotti and pastacresciuta, adding that the food is bad for him. The sincerity Giovanna hears in this warning surprises her: even while separated from him, Nella retains the habits of someone who feels responsible for his well-being. Her care is not abstract nostalgia; it speaks in the idiom of daily food and bodily maintenance.

The same preoccupation appears in Nella’s work and conversation. When Giovanna skims the stories her mother corrects and often rewrites, she finds that they repeatedly feature an extraordinary man who has died. Visitors, usually teachers from the high school where Nella teaches, hear her invoke Andrea’s opinions: despite his faults, he is right about a particular matter, or he says or thinks something worth repeating. Nella’s respect for his judgment persists in public, even as her private history gives her ample reason for anger.

Her attention extends to the newspaper. When Nella learns that Andrea has begun writing with some frequency for l’Unità, she buys it in addition to the newspaper she generally reads, shows Giovanna his byline, marks sentences, and cuts out the articles. The sequence makes her attachment concrete: she does not merely remember him but follows his words, preserves them, and brings them into the household. To Giovanna, such conduct is difficult to reconcile with the violence she imagines anyone might feel toward a person who had done what Andrea did to Nella. She assumes her mother, too, must once have dreamed of destroying him. What she sees now, however, is bitterness alternating with a quiet cult of memory.

Memory, Betrayal, and Fidelity

The change in Giovanna’s understanding begins with watching Nella rather than arguing with her. She has never told her mother about the phone call Nella made to Vittoria, and her own efforts at closeness remain uneven: she still raises her voice with orders, rebukes, recriminations, and accusations of betrayal. Nella typically does not react, seeming able to become deaf at will. Yet Giovanna gradually attends to details she had previously passed over: Nella is carefully dressed and combs her hair even when she has nowhere to go and expects no visitors; her bony back bends for hours over her work. The sight softens Giovanna’s aggression and prompts her to compare her mother to Vittoria.

That comparison initially seems to favor Vittoria. Giovanna had regarded Vittoria’s continued bond with Enzo, dead for a long time, as a mark of greatness. But she begins to distinguish the two women’s circumstances. Vittoria’s love had been returned: Enzo had always loved her. Nella, by contrast, had been betrayed in what Giovanna considers the vilest way, yet has kept her feeling intact. Her life still seems to acquire meaning when Andrea chooses to phone and thereby bestow attention on her. Giovanna is startled by the possibility that what she had called weakness might instead be strength: not an absence of injury, but the capacity to remain attached after injury.

Nella herself articulates the division between outward speech and inward thought. When Giovanna asks why she never says anything bad about Andrea, Nella answers that what she says is one thing and what she thinks another. She admits that she sometimes lets herself go in her thoughts, but then returns to the years when they were happy and forgets that she hates him. The phrase gives shape to the contradiction running through her conduct. Memory does not erase the betrayal, and hatred does not cancel the years of happiness; instead, recollection repeatedly alters the force of hatred.

Giovanna’s Response and the Meaning of the Attachment

Giovanna’s changed reading of Nella also changes how she judges her own conduct. Once, in a matter-of-fact tone, she tells her mother that if Nella likes Mariano, she should take him. The suggestion does not settle Nella’s attachment to Andrea. In the later exchange, Nella insists that Andrea remains Giovanna’s father, and she describes him as younger than Giovanna: a child, extraordinarily intelligent but hypnotized by his games, liable to be hurt if nobody keeps an eye on him. She says she should have understood him when she was a girl, but then mistook him for a grown man. Her account combines criticism of his immaturity with the protective language of someone who still feels responsible for him.

Giovanna does not simply adopt her mother’s judgment of Andrea. She sees him rarely, no longer goes to the house in Posillipo, and has eliminated Angela and Ida from her life. She cannot understand why he left her and Nella to live with Costanza and her daughters. Whereas she once considered him far superior to her mother, she now doubts that he possesses greatness of soul. When he occasionally comes to take her to school, she listens closely to his complaints but tells herself they are false: he wants her to believe he is unhappy, or at least only slightly less unhappy than he was in the apartment on Via San Giacomo dei Capri. She does not believe him.

Even so, Giovanna deliberately tries to restore some virtues to Andrea—not out of affection, which she thinks she no longer feels, but to make sense of Nella’s enduring love. She recalls the father she adored as a child and makes an effort to speak cordially when they meet, discussing school and teachers and sometimes complimenting his explanation of a difficult passage by a Latin writer or his haircut. Nella’s attachment thus has a consequence beyond her own private life: it compels Giovanna to reconsider both parents, separating her present judgment of Andrea from the question of whether her mother once loved someone of substance.

Narrative Significance

The account refuses to make Nella’s loyalty either a simple virtue or an uncomplicated pathology. Her care for Andrea is set beside his betrayal, her respect beside her blame, and her helpless waiting for contact beside the sustained work of remembering a shared past. Giovanna’s first impulse is to measure the situation by what she would do to a betrayer; her later attention to her mother’s body, habits, and words makes that moral certainty harder to maintain.

Nella’s fixation also supplies a counterpoint to the novel’s other forms of fidelity. Giovanna has admired Vittoria’s loyalty to Enzo because it was reciprocated; Nella’s loyalty has survived without that assurance. The difference forces Giovanna to ask whether devotion proves the beloved’s worth or reveals something about the person who continues to love. Her emerging answer is cautious: she can recognize strength in Nella’s way of loving absolutely without deciding that Andrea deserves it. The attachment remains unresolved, sustained by memory and care, but never cleansed of the anger that memory cannot finally abolish.