No one ever said love is easy. Sometimes is the most difficult battle a woman has to take. When do you decide it's enough? That you suffered to your limit? How can you decide to leave the man you love more than anything in the world?
The book details the dysfunctional marriage between Anton and Adela, with the associated ups and downs, for about six years.
She, a priest's daughter, orphaned as a child, is raised by maternal grandparents along with two younger sisters. She has a typical peasant childhood, with work, cheerfulness, stories by the bonfire and long days while sun bathing. They are poor but happy. Grandfather Tatu, a veteran of World War II, lures her to the world of books where she finds her escape.
When she turns 14, her grandfather dies, and her grandmother is left alone to raise them. It's extremely difficult, and it forces Adela to leave school after only eight classes and follow the path of work so her family has food. There are hard years ahead, with hunger and lack.
A few years later, we meet Adela on the field, working. She's tired, hungry, exhausted. She is 18 years old.
Anton is 30 years old and, materially speaking, he has lacked nothing. He comes from an old Romanian family, privileged and wealthy. However, he has his baggage of deficiencies. A father obsessed with money that accepted to have a baby only on the promises that he will receive jewels from his father-in-law raised him. But he is deceived and begins to show his true face. He torments his wife and child for 30 years, and although he eventually dies, it affects them. Anton's mother's sin is that she loved her husband and always preferred to close her eyes when he terrorized his child.
Anton is not a typical man, he has many vices and follows each one conscientiously.
The huge piece of field Adela is working on is his. While drinking, Anton quarrels with his mother and leaves there, though he rarely ventures among the peasantry.
Adela is tired and hungry and he, to upset his mother, takes her and brings her home.
The irony is that his mother, Smaranda, seizes the opportunity. Adela is poor but beautiful, honest and good-natured, and above all else, has no one to take her part if something happens. Smaranda chooses her to be Anton's wife. He accepts carelessly, but puts a condition: never expect children from him.
Six years of marriage follow, in which she loves him madly and witnesses his decay and depravity.
Can her love be enough to save him?
"I loved you madly, passionately, with blood. I hated you worse. I cursed you, and I adored you. I could never be indifferent to you. I always vibrated at you, in shades of colors, from the red of jealousy to yellow sunny summer days where we first met and to the purple starry nights of love. You were my hope, light, heat. And also the worst hole, my emptiness."
