Roberto Matese

Roberto Matese is a university teacher and Giuliana’s fiancé whose first appearance transforms Giovanna’s life before they have exchanged a word. Ten years older than her, he occupies an uneasy double role: a respected intellectual and participant in a circle committed to public questions, and the focus of a young narrator’s intense, self-conscious infatuation. Their friendship develops only in occasional meetings, usually in Giuliana’s company, so the relationship remains shaped as much by distance and longing as by conversation.

Identity and Introduction

Roberto is introduced at a crowded gathering in the Pascone parish church. Don Giacomo calls him over to sit beside him, and the room’s attention turns toward the young man as he rises. Giovanna notices his tall, stooping frame, dark face, blue eyes, unruly hair, and beard. The scene is filtered through her perception: she imagines him suspended by a golden chain, and recalls that the church seemed to fall silent. The impression is less a detached portrait than the beginning of an emotional upheaval.

At almost fifteen, Giovanna has felt no comparable attraction to a boy. Roberto’s appearance alone produces what she describes as a sudden pain in her chest and the conviction that her life is about to change. She wants him, imagines that she must have him, and turns to prayer as the only hope that can keep her from collapse. The intensity arrives before knowledge: she has not heard him speak or learned what he feels, yet already makes him the center of a wish that governs her attention.

Roberto’s name enters another conversation through Giovanna’s account of Giuliana. She tells her father that Giuliana is intelligent, five years older than she is, and engaged to a clever man studying in Milan; when asked who he is, she names Roberto Matese. The name connects the young man first seen in church to Giuliana’s existing relationship, establishing a boundary around Giovanna’s fascination even as it gives her a reason to encounter him again.

Meetings and the Growth of an Attachment

Roberto does not often come to Naples, and the occasions when Giovanna sees him are rare. Gradually, however, the meetings form a small, irregular routine: when circumstances allow, they talk for a few minutes, always with Giuliana present. The limits matter. Giovanna and Roberto become friends, but not through private courtship or a steady succession of meetings; their connection takes shape in brief conversations embedded in Giuliana’s company.

The age and experience gap intensify Giovanna’s self-consciousness. Roberto is ten years older, a university teacher, while she is still a high-school student. After seeing him, she repeatedly reviews what each of them said, worries that she tried too hard to keep up, and fears that she made herself ridiculous. Her memory turns his irony into apparent mockery and recasts her own efforts to impress him as embarrassing. The friendship therefore brings not uncomplicated confidence but a cycle of anticipation, conversation, and anxious self-judgment.

Even as she doubts that Roberto could feel fondness for her, Giovanna’s attention remains fixed on him. The distance between her imagined importance to him and the modest, occasional reality of their contact is part of the relationship’s structure. She invests brief exchanges with lasting significance, while Roberto’s presence is also bound to his engagement to Giuliana and to the occasions on which Giuliana brings them together.

Giuliana, the Parish, and Public Life

Giuliana is both Roberto’s fiancée and the person who makes Giovanna’s access to him possible. Their meetings take place in her company, and Giovanna’s knowledge of his engagement is present from the outset. This arrangement places her desire inside an existing bond rather than a mutual, openly pursued romance. Roberto’s importance to Giovanna does not erase that constraint; it makes her careful attention to his relationship with Giuliana part of her own emotional involvement.

Roberto’s place in the parish community is distinct from the purely private figure Giovanna first projects onto him. When he appears at the church gathering, Don Giacomo welcomes him into the proceedings, and the parishioners’ response gives his arrival public weight. Later, Don Giacomo tells Giovanna that Roberto will not return and that the church will hold no more initiatives of that kind. Giovanna is upset and asks whether people liked the gatherings. The announcement marks a loss not only of a setting where she could see Roberto, but also of the communal activity associated with him.

Giovanna sees another dimension of Roberto at a dinner with Giuliana and his circle. The guests are courteous but strained by tensions and enmities; Roberto’s voice, gestures, and gaze draw them together. Giovanna recognizes that their shared affection for him helps bind people who might otherwise have little reason to be together. In this setting he appears larger than he does in their conversations: not simply Giuliana’s fiancé or the man Giovanna longs to impress, but a social presence who helps create a sense of fellowship.

The group’s discussion gives that fellowship a political and ethical substance. They talk about injustice, hunger, poverty, and the conduct of those who take from others. They consider whether the law can be a remedy when it fosters injustice, and what response is possible when state power protects it. Giovanna understands little of the debate, but registers its seriousness and the participants’ commitment; she is especially struck by the women’s passionate involvement. Roberto thus opens, through the company gathered around him, a world of argument and civic concern that exceeds her immediate preoccupation with being liked by him.

Character and Narrative Significance

Roberto’s influence depends on the contrast between the person Giovanna initially imagines and the broader figure she gradually observes. Her first response is bodily and absolute, preceding speech or knowledge. Subsequent encounters are brief, mediated by Giuliana, and followed by embarrassment and doubt. The narrative lets those unequal scales coexist: an intense private attachment grows around limited contact, while the man at its center is also engaged in relationships and work beyond Giovanna’s vision.

He is significant, too, because Giovanna encounters him in several overlapping contexts. At the church, he belongs to a community whose activity is later curtailed. In the company of Giuliana, he is a fiancé and a conversational companion. At dinner, he becomes the focus around which a circle of people coheres and debates injustice. Each context enlarges the image that began with the sudden shock of seeing him, without resolving the uncertainty at the heart of Giovanna’s attachment: she can watch Roberto and listen to what others reveal about him, but the evidence here does not establish that he returns her feelings.