The love affair between Vittoria and Enzo

Vittoria and Enzo’s affair, recalled in two conversations with Giovanna, is the defining love of Vittoria’s life and a challenge to the respectable family story Giovanna has been taught. Vittoria neither denies that she took Enzo from his wife nor accepts the judgment that this makes him a delinquent or her love a simple betrayal: she describes a bond so intense that its wrongdoing and its joy cannot be separated, and whose memory remains vivid seventeen years later.

The Dance and the Memory

Vittoria first tells the story while music swells in the small room where Giovanna has followed her. She stands by the window, moving to the rhythm as if the singer could carry the memory to the car where Giovanna’s father is waiting. The music prompts her account of meeting Enzo at a dance party: they danced together, she says, and that was the first time she saw him. The scene makes recollection physical before it becomes explanation; Vittoria’s body keeps time with a meeting that, by the calendar, happened long ago.

When Giovanna asks how long ago, Vittoria identifies the date as May 23, seventeen years earlier. Giovanna calls that a long time, but Vittoria answers that not even a minute has passed. The contrast gives the affair its defining tension: the years have accumulated, yet the remembered encounter remains immediate for her. The date and the dance are not incidental details in her telling; they are the fixed point to which her later insistence on Enzo’s enduring presence returns.

Love Against the Family’s Account

Giovanna asks whether Vittoria loved Enzo, then brings the question of his character into the open. In Vittoria’s account, the moral accusation belongs not to Enzo but to Giovanna’s father, Andrea. She says Enzo was a police sergeant who treated even criminals kindly and went to Mass every Sunday. Before meeting him, Vittoria says, she did not believe in God and had been persuaded by Andrea that God did not exist; seeing Enzo changed her mind. She describes him as the most good, just, and sensitive man she had known, recalls his lovely singing voice, and says he taught her to play the accordion.

Vittoria presents the affair as a rupture in her previous relation to men. Before Enzo, men disgusted her; after him, she drove away anyone who approached. Her recollection thus makes the love exclusive in both directions: Enzo is not just the man she chose, but the measure against which later intimacy failed. She rejects what Giovanna’s parents have told her, replacing their account with her own testimony and asking the girl whether she believes it.

Taking Enzo, Sharing His Illness

Giovanna later presses Vittoria on Margherita’s response: how could Margherita not be angry when Vittoria took her husband, and why did she later let Vittoria help her? Vittoria does not soften the act. She says she stole Enzo from Margherita and the children, and that she would rather have died than give him back. She calls this terrible, but argues that when love is strong, a person sometimes has to act; the good, in her view, cannot exist without the ugly, and she could not help herself.

Margherita was angry, Vittoria acknowledges, and took Enzo back, screaming and hitting. But when Enzo fell ill—an illness Vittoria says erupted within a few weeks of rage—Margherita became depressed and urged him to return to Vittoria, saying she would have sent him back sooner had she known he would become sick. By then, Vittoria says, it was too late. The two women went through his illness together, remaining with him until the last minute. The affair’s aftermath therefore does not settle into a simple contest between wife and lover: Vittoria remembers Margherita first as the wife who reclaimed her husband, then as a woman who recognized the depth of the lovers’ attachment and made room for Vittoria beside her.

Vittoria calls Margherita wonderful and sensible, and recalls her accepting that they had loved the same man and offering to let Vittoria love Enzo’s children too. She holds up this generosity as a rebuke to the supposedly important adults around Giovanna, asking whether her parents and their friends possess comparable greatness. Her defense of the affair depends not on claiming that no one was hurt, but on setting the harm beside Margherita’s compassion and refusing to let the family’s respectable language define the whole story.

Passion, Grief, and What Remains

In a later exchange, Vittoria says that she and Enzo had sex eleven times altogether. Afterward he returned to his wife, and Vittoria says she never did it again with anyone. She describes their physical intimacy in explicit detail and insists that Giovanna should tell Andrea that life is pointless without experiencing sex at least once with the passion and love Vittoria knew. The force of her account lies in its measure of fulfillment: Andrea, she says, did not deprive her of everything, because she had experienced everything with Enzo; it is Andrea who has nothing.

The declaration overwhelms Giovanna. She is thirteen, but Vittoria addresses her as an adult, abandons the proper speech expected in Giovanna’s household, and makes no effort to lower her voice in the cemetery, in front of Enzo’s portrait. Giovanna is tempted to cover her ears but remains still, unable to avoid Vittoria’s searching gaze. She later says the words never left her. The affair thus enters Giovanna’s memory not only as a story about the past, but as an encounter with an adult’s uncompromising claim that bodily pleasure, love, and grief belong together.

Narrative Significance

The affair is conveyed through Vittoria’s retrospective testimony to Giovanna rather than through a scene of the lovers together. Its story reaches the reader in charged fragments: a dance, a date, an accordion, a stolen husband, shared care during illness, and the insistence that the memory has not aged. The difference between the seventeen years on the calendar and Vittoria’s sense that not a minute has passed gives her recollection its emotional scale.

Vittoria’s account also unsettles the tidy division between respectable conduct and moral worth. She admits betrayal without retracting her love, recognizes the suffering around the affair, and remembers generosity emerging from the very relationships the affair damaged. For Giovanna, hearing this from her aunt—face to face and in language no one at home would use—makes the affair an alternative education in adult intimacy: love may entail injury, but it cannot be reduced to the injury, and its remembered intensity can survive both separation and death.