Due amori

The narrator recalls his early years in a boarding school, becoming drawn to a reserved schoolmate, Raimondo, whose calmness provokes both admiration and harassment from an overbearing supervisor, Don Giuseppe. Shared punishment and confidences bind the narrator, Raimondo, and another pupil into an intimate friendship that encourages frank exchange and mutual support. The recollection follows youthful loyalties, the sting of shame and pride, and the awkward emergence of romantic feeling, as Raimondo struggles silently with fear of ridicule and obligations toward Clelia. Memory and remorse frame these episodes as part of an adolescent passage into deeper feeling.