Susanna—Franco

Susanna and Franco’s connection reaches into the family home through monthly telephone calls, remembered Italian days, and Susanna’s longing for the life she associates with them. As the narrator observes it, the relationship is not defined by a declared status but by its unmistakable effects: Susanna’s voice and bearing change, her husband withdraws, and the household’s northern composure briefly gives way to a more vivid, difficult energy.

The telephone ritual

At least once a month, the telephone rings and an excited male voice asks to speak to Susanna by name. The narrator and his brothers watch her change even before she reaches the receiver. She tosses her hair aside—a gesture the children do not usually see—and seems to grow younger step by step. Her husband, watching from his chair, drops his book to the floor and leaves the room, sometimes with irritation and sometimes with a reproachful air. The exchange has become a family ritual: the call itself is expected, and so are the contrasting responses it produces.

Susanna speaks Italian fluently, and the narrator hears the two voices rise and answer one another in animated cascades of speech. The language does more than convey a conversation; it marks a shift in Susanna’s presence. She gestures with her free hand, holds herself differently, and speaks in a voice unlike the one her family normally hears. The account records Franco as exuberant through the receiver and Susanna as answering him with equal force, while leaving the content of most of their conversations undisclosed. What the children can perceive directly is the encounter’s intensity and its immediate effect on her.

A different Susanna

The calls most often come in the evening. When they end, Susanna is too stirred to settle easily into the household routine beside her husband, who likes to go to bed early and read. The narrator describes the change in her as almost visible: her hair, complexion, and eyes seem darker, and the pale, cold northern woman who picked up the phone appears suffused with warmth by the time she puts it down. She blows a strand of hair from her face and shifts restlessly from one heel to the other. The contrast turns a private telephone conversation into a bodily and domestic event, even though its details remain largely private.

That change matters because the family’s daily life is presented as orderly and restrained. Susanna’s animated speech seems to release what the narrator calls the harmonizing, cushioning manner she usually adopts. For a while, she is not simply accommodating herself to the household’s quiet rhythms. The calls make audible a liveliness that those rhythms do not contain, while her husband’s conspicuous departure makes the tension visible without explaining it away. The scene establishes neither a direct confrontation nor a clear account of his feelings; instead, a dropped book and an exit become the repeated, restrained counterpoint to the voices on the line.

Italy remembered and missed

Susanna’s connection with Franco is also carried by the stories she tells about their time in Italy. In one recollection, they rode a Vespa to the beach early in the morning, swam, and went directly to Mass in a small hilltop village, still wearing their wet bathing clothes. Their clothes left wet marks on the church wall as they squeezed past it laughing, watched disapprovingly by elderly women dressed in black. They then went to gather chestnuts. In the woods, Susanna remembers a hunter with shot songbirds hanging from his belt. As she and Franco rode along the winding roads smoking cigarettes, Franco steered with no hands and lit matches against warm walls to give her a light.

The specificity of these memories sets them apart from a general wish to return south. The Vespa, wet clothes, chestnuts, birds, and tiny matches make the shared past tangible: it unfolds through movement, warmth, laughter, and small acts of closeness. Susanna’s account presents Franco as the companion beside her in that remembered life, but the evidence does not specify what name or formal status either of them gives their bond. The narrator receives the memories as something almost fairy-tale-like, a lively alternative to the colder life he knows at home.

Longing within the household

Susanna’s yearning for Italy can also emerge as anger. She complains of the cold, the constant need to keep her shoulders raised, the headaches and fatigue, and the way she has become accustomed to treating fifteen degrees as summer. Even a warm evening outdoors with red wine seems to belong to another possible life. She resents the electric blanket her husband gives her, describing it as both insulting and dangerous, and says she wants to return to Italy. Her complaint turns climate into a measure of estrangement: the north is not merely uncomfortable but a place where, in her account, her alertness and energy have ebbed.

These complaints sit beside the telephone calls and memories rather than replacing them. Franco’s evening departure to celebrate with friends in Italy leaves Susanna alone with the energy the conversation has stirred; in the narrator’s image, she remains like a living thorn in the family’s apparent well-being. The relationship’s significance lies partly in that imbalance between the vivid life she recalls and the life surrounding her now. Through Franco, the narrator glimpses Susanna as someone with a past and desires that exceed her domestic role. The calls do not resolve her longing or explain the full history between the two; they repeatedly make that longing present, and make the family’s calm feel less complete than it appears.