Not seeing straight

Not seeing straight is Giovanna’s image for the way powerful feelings can abruptly cloud judgment, turning ordinary social order into a black veil and making people collide with what they can no longer see clearly. Prompted by Tonino’s violence against Angela, the phrase expands from an explanation of one man’s behavior into a question about love, hatred, and the possibility that anyone can lose perspective.

The Phrase and Its Immediate Context

After Tonino has struck Angela, he is described as someone who usually controls himself but sometimes cannot see straight. Angela interrupts this account to say that she, too, was frightened. The phrase therefore arrives amid conflicting responses to the assault: an attempt to explain Tonino’s loss of control and the victim’s insistence that the violence frightened her.

On the way home, Giovanna hears Angela move between self-blame and condemnation. Angela recalls her swollen cheek and aching neck, says that even her parents had never slapped her, and insists that she does not want to see Tonino again. She also resents that Giuliana said goodbye only to Giovanna. At last, she admits that she was wrong to love someone she calls an animal, while still saying she could not have expected him to strike her or endanger the boys. Giovanna answers that Tonino and Giuliana are well brought up, but that there are moments when a person truly cannot see straight. Her reply does not erase the blow; it tries to hold ordinary respectability and capacity for violence together.

From Excuse to General Question

Walking home slowly, Giovanna cannot get the expression out of her mind. She sets it against the polished routine of everyday civility—greetings, hospitality, requests, and thanks—and imagines that beneath this apparent order a black veil may fall at any moment. The image describes more than a lapse in good manners: blindness means losing the ability to keep one’s distance, then crashing into things.

Giovanna asks herself whether this happens only to certain people or to everyone once an emotional threshold has been crossed. She also questions which state is more truthful: seeing clearly, or being blinded by the strongest and deepest feelings. Hatred and love are placed together as forces capable of distorting perception, so that clear sight is not presented as an uncomplicated measure of truth.

Earlier Relationships Reconsidered

The phrase turns Giovanna’s attention toward relationships already marked by concealed or painful attachments. She wonders whether Enzo, blinded by Vittoria, was unable to see Margherita, and whether her father, blinded by Costanza, was unable to see her mother. These questions make the image a means of rereading intimate harm: love may narrow a person’s vision until someone else’s presence or suffering falls from view.

Giovanna also includes herself. She asks whether the insult from her classmate Silvestro blinded her, connecting intense feeling not only with adults’ romantic entanglements but with her own response to humiliation. The sequence does not settle these questions or declare that every painful action has the same cause. Instead, it makes blindness a possibility Giovanna tests against distinct experiences of love, family conflict, and anger.

Roberto and the Limits of Clear Sight

Giovanna’s final question turns to Roberto. She wonders whether he, too, could be blinded, or whether he is always able to remain clear and serene under emotional pressure. The contrast gives the expression an unresolved edge: it may describe a universal vulnerability, but Giovanna still imagines that someone might escape it.

As a recurring image, not seeing straight binds the immediate scene of violence to Giovanna’s broader effort to understand how feeling alters perception. The black veil is sudden, yet its consequences are concrete: people fail to keep their distance, overlook others, or discover too late that what seemed orderly could give way to harm. The passage leaves open whether anyone can reliably distinguish clear sight from the blindness produced by powerful emotion.