Repentance and the training of conscience

Repentance and the training of conscience is a moral idea Roberto explains to Giovanna when she returns to Milan to retrieve the bracelet. He defines compunction as a practice of pricking the conscience, a kind of ethical needlework. For Giovanna, the discussion is more than an account of Roberto’s essay: it briefly restores the intimacy she has pursued, then reveals the gulf between being useful to his thought and being recognized as a person with her own spiritual and intellectual demands.

Roberto’s Definition

Roberto is working on an essay about compunction, which he describes as training to prick the conscience. He extends the phrase into a figure of needle and thread traversing fabric, as though conscience were material from which a garment is made. The metaphor makes moral reflection a process rather than a single verdict: conscience must be repeatedly pierced and worked through. The novel does not supply the essay’s argument in full, but the image gives its subject a practical, almost craft-like form.

When Giovanna later reports the topic at home, Mariano is first bewildered by the word and then curious. He turns to Nella and remarks that Giovanna says she barely knows Roberto Matese, yet Roberto has spoken to her about compunction. His response registers the unusual weight of the conversation: an abstract moral subject becomes evidence of a connection that Giovanna herself has trouble naming or explaining.

The Milan Visit

Giovanna had expected Roberto to meet her at the station, as he had met her and Giuliana before, but he is not there. By telephone, he explains that he thought she was coming directly to his house and that he is finishing an essay due the next day. Disappointed, she follows his directions by metro. He greets her cordially, and they eat a dinner prepared with help from the concierge.

Neither mentions the bracelet nor Giuliana. Instead, Roberto talks through the ideas for his essay, and Giovanna listens in the voice that had enchanted her. She is again drawn into the intimacy of his books, desk, meal, and work; she feels that he needs her to clarify his thinking and that she has become necessary to him. After dinner he gives her the bracelet without ceremony, making no reference to Giuliana, as though that relationship had been erased from the evening. The essay and the returned object thus occupy the same encounter but carry different emotional weight: the bracelet is treated as an ordinary possession, while the conversation gives Giovanna the attention she has come hoping to receive.

Compunction and Unspoken Distress

Giovanna’s attention does not remain on Roberto’s explanation. She is preoccupied by Giuliana, whom she has just seen in Milan and whose despair she knows at close range. Remembering Giuliana in the bathroom, masking her distress before a mirror, and beside Roberto at the restaurant and in bed, Giovanna struggles with the contrast between that recent presence and her own solitary place in Roberto’s house. While Roberto continues speaking, she catches fragments of his words about sleeping and the sofa bed, but the conversation no longer reaches her as he intends it.

She tells him she is tired and scared. Roberto offers that she can sleep with him, but their remarks arise from different understandings: he is thinking about the difficulty of opening the sofa bed, while Giovanna’s words carry the strain of the journey, Giuliana’s despair, and her fear of making an unforgivable mistake. She refuses and curls up on the couch. The mismatch gives the scene its moral pressure. A discussion about training conscience unfolds beside Giovanna’s own urgent effort to judge what she owes Giuliana, what she wants from Roberto, and what returning to him means.

The Limits of Intimacy

On the couch, Giovanna considers why she has come back. She understands that her desire for Roberto is not reducible to physical attraction. She wants his respect and wants to discuss compunction and the suffering of people who lack food and water while God is imagined as sated. She wants to be more to him than an attractive young person with whom a brilliant man might amuse himself. The ethical subject of his essay therefore becomes inseparable from the recognition she seeks: she longs for a relationship in which thought and moral seriousness make her visible as a whole person.

That hope is shadowed by her belief that such recognition will not come. Roberto, she thinks, assumes she has returned for one kind of betrayal, not for the more serious betrayals she has in mind. In the morning he asks why she came back; she can only say that she no longer knows. He does not touch her or press her for an explanation, but simply wishes her good night and withdraws. The episode leaves compunction suspended between concept and lived test: the conscience-piercing discipline Roberto describes is also the painful self-scrutiny through which Giovanna confronts desire, responsibility, and the limits of the intimacy he offers.

The Idea’s Narrative Role

The novel presents compunction through three linked settings: Roberto’s intellectual work, Giovanna’s private reckoning in Milan, and the family conversation in which Mariano hears the term repeated. The sewing image gives an abstract moral concept a concrete method, while the surrounding events show that moral attention does not automatically resolve emotional conflict. Giovanna can listen closely to Roberto and still be divided by what she has witnessed; the returned bracelet can settle a practical matter without settling her attachment or her concern for Giuliana.

The concept also marks a contrast between speaking about conscience and responding to another person’s distress. Roberto’s essay gives compunction a disciplined vocabulary, but Giovanna’s experience makes it personal: she tries to understand her own motives and the consequences of the choices she fears making. Her wish to discuss God and hunger alongside the essay shows that she seeks not merely proximity to Roberto’s learning, but a shared engagement with moral suffering. The episode’s unresolved ending preserves that distinction between being admitted into someone’s conversation and being met in the fullness of one’s concern.