Franco

Franco is an Italian friend from the narrator’s mother’s past whose recurring phone calls briefly transform the atmosphere of the family home. Though the account offers little about his life beyond these calls and her memories, his presence makes her distance from Italy—and the vitality she associates with it—impossible to miss.

Identity and Place in the Family’s Life

At least once a month, a man’s excited voice called and asked to speak with the narrator’s mother, Susanna. The narrator identifies him as Franco. Their calls take place across a striking distance: when it is nine in the evening in the family’s northern German home, it is also nine in Rome, two thousand kilometers away. Franco remains outside the household, but his voice repeatedly enters it by telephone.

The Calls and Their Effect

The narrator’s mother begins to change even as she walks toward the phone. She seems to grow younger, tosses her hair aside, and speaks fluent Italian with Franco. Their conversation becomes a lively exchange: his exuberance comes through the receiver, and she answers in kind, gesturing with her free hand and speaking in a voice the narrator describes as entirely different from her usual one. Her habitual softness and impulse to keep things harmonious fall away; in their place is speech that is loud, clear, and overflowing with animation.

The calls affect the household as well as the two speakers. The narrator’s father, watching from his armchair, throws down his book—sometimes with irritation, sometimes with reproach—and demonstratively leaves the room. When Franco hangs up, he is setting off to celebrate with his friends, while the narrator’s mother is left restless and visibly stirred. The contrast is pointed: Franco can leave the conversation and go out into the Roman evening, but she remains in the northern home, unable to settle back into its ordinary routine.

Memories of Italy

The narrator’s mother recalls riding with Franco on a Vespa early in the morning to swim at the beach, then going straight from the shore to Mass in a hilltop village while still wearing their wet bathing clothes. Afterward, they laughed together as they edged along the church wall toward the scooter, aware of the wet marks left on their clothes. The memory continues through collecting chestnuts in the woods, where they encountered a hunter with shot songbirds hanging from his belt, and riding along the bends in the road while smoking cigarettes.

One detail makes the recollection especially vivid: Franco could steer the Vespa without using his hands, and he lit the narrator’s mother’s cigarette by striking small matches against warm walls as they rode. These are not presented as a general account of their past but as a sequence of precise, shared episodes—swimming, church, chestnuts, and the risky ingenuity of lighting a cigarette in motion. In the narrator’s telling, her memories make Franco inseparable from the warmth, freedom, and physical liveliness she misses.

Narrative Significance

Franco is drawn chiefly through the change his calls produce in the narrator’s mother. Before the phone rings, she belongs to the family’s northern domestic routine; during the conversation, Italian becomes a language in which she moves and sounds differently. Afterward, her heightened energy makes that routine seem inadequate. The narrator presents the calls as a recurring interruption rather than a single dramatic revelation: each one exposes the distance between the life his mother has and the life she remembers with Franco in Italy.