The novel is structured non-chronologically, beginning after the central tragedy has already happened and then moving backwards through Lidia and Giovanni’s relationship until the final pages reach their first meeting. The book opens in 1994. Lidia is living in an almost empty apartment with only a table, four chairs, a bed and a few other essentials, and she is seeing an analyst because the people around her believe she needs help. The analyst keeps encouraging her to imagine a future rather than existing entirely inside the present or her memories. Lidia finds this extremely difficult. She borrows possible desires from other people: perhaps she wants a dog, perhaps plants on the terrace, perhaps furniture. Once she admits that she and Giovanni should perhaps have had a child, because her life might be different now. Giovanni has been dead for two years, and his absence survives in tiny sensory details, particularly the disappearance of cigarette smoke from her clothes, hair and car. A new man has begun visiting her. Lidia deliberately forgets his name and continually compares him with Giovanni. He is blond, physically stronger, courteous, hesitant and careful about boundaries; Giovanni had been dark-haired, volatile, intrusive and incapable of maintaining any emotional or physical distance from her. The new man offers to help Lidia buy furniture and suggests replacing her rug with a blue one. He brings sparkling wine and apologises whenever he thinks he may have offended her. Rather than reassuring Lidia, his kindness often irritates her because she has learned intimacy through Giovanni’s cruelty and unpredictability. Nevertheless, she decides that this anonymous man can become part of the future she is being encouraged to construct. She crosses the physical distance between them, kisses him and begins undressing him while rapidly describing the life they might have: he can sleep there, they can buy a bookcase and sofa, replace the rug, go to restaurants. She thinks that an unknown body and an uncertain future are preferable to remaining trapped in memory. But when the man pulls back and looks directly at her, Lidia puts her hand over his eyes before continuing to kiss him. That gesture becomes meaningful only after the rest of the novel has shown why being looked at mattered so much to her.
The story then moves to 1990–1992 and reconstructs Lidia’s life with Giovanni in fragments. One of the earliest present-time episodes occurs in August 1991, when nineteen-year-old Lidia and twenty-two-year-old Giovanni are driving home from their honeymoon in Puglia. They have married extremely young after finishing school and rented a small house in the suburbs. Their honeymoon has been intense: excessive food and alcohol, almost constant sex, and the sensation of having escaped everyone else. Lidia is deeply in love with Giovanni but already knows that he is capable of hurting her with language. His moods shift without warning, and she has learned to monitor tiny changes in his vocabulary because they often predict a migraine, a drunken episode, anger or rejection. She nevertheless regards this unpredictability as something she must accept if she loves him completely. On the drive home Giovanni develops a severe migraine. He orders Lidia to grab the steering wheel while he takes medication, eventually stops the car, sweats and trembles, and lies with his head on her thighs while she covers him to keep the light away. Lidia finally takes over the driving. Then she notices saliva leaking from one corner of his mouth and realises that the entire left side of his face has collapsed. Giovanni sees what has happened and panics. This medical crisis leads to the discovery of a serious brain tumour, a rare glioma in an extremely delicate area close to the brainstem. The novel then jumps further backwards. Five months before the honeymoon, on Lidia’s nineteenth birthday, Giovanni has dinner with her family. Her mother Anna is the dominant figure in the household: financially intelligent, harsh, practical and almost incapable of uncomplicated tenderness. Lidia’s father is gentler but passive, a shepherd who leaves most decisions to his wife. Her older brother Alessio has behaved irresponsibly with money, accumulating debts while building a life with the young Sofia, with whom he has a baby, Luca. During the birthday dinner Anna humiliates Alessio over his loans. Afterwards Lidia tells Giovanni that she cannot continue living there. He simply agrees that they will leave. Crying against him, Lidia experiences the abandonment of her old life almost as liberation: she consciously chooses Giovanni’s body, the person who makes her feel desired and visible, as her future. This choice gradually displaces another possible future. Lidia is clever and had wanted to study medicine, perhaps becoming a paediatrician, but university begins to feel like a life that might separate her from Giovanni.
The novel keeps travelling backwards into the formation of their unhealthy bond. Lidia’s dependence on Giovanni is connected above all with his gaze. She has numerous moles across her body, and years earlier girls at school humiliated her in a changing room by using a blue permanent marker to connect the moles on her back as though they were points on a map. Lidia froze rather than defending herself, later desperately scrubbing her skin in the bath. Anna helped her clean the marks but also told her that she should have fought back and needed to become tougher. Giovanni transforms that source of shame into erotic attention: he counts Lidia’s moles, touches them and later kisses them. She becomes obsessed with having him look at her during sex and hates positions in which she cannot see his eyes. Yet the same man who makes her feel visible repeatedly frightens and humiliates her. Before they properly establish their relationship, she sees Giovanni touching another girl’s hair and kissing her. He sees Lidia watching but does nothing. Devastated, Lidia stops seeing him and imagines returning to the life she had before. Giovanni becomes intoxicated and obsessively tries to find her. At the traditional bonfire for the Immaculate Conception in December 1990, he reappears. Lidia tries to walk home without him, but he follows her through the dark countryside, eventually catches her, grabs her by the hair and forces her to turn around. Instead of ending the relationship, she eventually leads him to an abandoned farm building. There they reconcile and have sex, with Lidia repeatedly insisting that he look at her. His physical suffering is somehow easier for her to deal with than her own emotional pain: when he is vulnerable, she knows exactly what role to occupy. Another frightening incident occurs at a nightclub. Lidia is dancing with Giovanni’s friend Valeria when a stranger presses himself against her. Giovanni attacks the man badly enough to leave his face covered in blood, then drives Lidia away recklessly, speeding on wet roads. He finally stops and collapses into a rage, pounding his own knees. Lidia immediately becomes his caretaker, strokes his head and assures him that everything is fine. When he asks whether she was frightened, she lies and says she was not. The pattern is established: Giovanni frightens or hurts her, then becomes vulnerable, and his vulnerability turns Lidia’s fear into care.
