Óscar Amalfitano and Rosa's Father-Daughter Relationship

Óscar Amalfitano and Rosa’s father-daughter relationship joins ordinary domestic closeness to the uneven realities of nationality, travel, and separation. Rosa has always lived with her father; at seventeen she is Spanish, while Amalfitano, fifty, is Chilean. Their family life is therefore both intimate and shaped by the differences that institutions make visible, especially when they travel together and are sorted into separate lines at customs.

Identity and Household

Amalfitano’s account of his home in Santa Teresa places Rosa at its center: she has always lived with him. The house has three bedrooms, and Rosa sleeps in her own room while Amalfitano sometimes remembers her mother alone in his office at night. These details establish a shared household while also showing the private spaces in which father and daughter are separately present: Rosa asleep, her father awake with memories of the past.

Rosa is seventeen and Spanish; Amalfitano is fifty and Chilean. The contrast is not merely biographical. It becomes an administrative fact whenever they cross borders, where their family connection does not prevent them from being treated as travelers with different legal and national status.

Travel and Separation at Customs

Rosa has had a passport since she was ten. On their trips, she goes through the gate for European Union citizens, while Amalfitano uses the gate for non-EU citizens. The division once upset Rosa so much that she cried and refused to be separated from her father. In another instance, the two lines moved at different speeds, and Rosa became lost; Amalfitano took half an hour to find her. The episodes show the same border procedure producing different pressures: an overt separation that Rosa resists, and a practical delay that temporarily divides them despite their traveling together.

Customs officers sometimes see Rosa, still a child, and ask whether she is traveling alone or has someone waiting outside. She explains that she is traveling with her father, who is South American, and is supposed to wait for him there. Her answer makes their relationship legible across the institutional divide, but it also leaves her responsible for waiting while her father is processed elsewhere.

Suspicion and the Family’s Past

On one occasion, officials searched Rosa’s suitcase because they suspected that Amalfitano might be using his daughter’s innocence and nationality to conceal drugs or weapons. The suspicion is explicitly unfounded: Amalfitano has trafficked in neither. The incident nonetheless reveals how the father-daughter bond can be read through suspicion at a border, with Rosa’s identity and luggage treated as possible cover for her father.

Amalfitano’s recollections of Rosa’s mother, Lola, locate the daughter’s childhood within a family history of departure. Lola left when Rosa was two, carrying the knife she had habitually taken with her. Her stated plan was to visit a poet living in the Mondragón asylum; she packed through the night and promised to return soon to Amalfitano and Rosa. The account does not describe Rosa’s later response to her mother’s absence, but it establishes that Amalfitano became the parent who remained with her.

Santa Teresa and the Wider Borderland

The father-daughter relationship is set against Santa Teresa’s expanding border economy. Amalfitano’s memories of travel echo the city’s physical geography: its highways lead outward, industrial parks are encircled by slums, and the maquiladoras mark the horizon. At the northern edge, a fence separates Mexico from the United States. The novel thus places the family’s experience of crossing and separation within a city structured by movement across national and economic boundaries.

Chucho Flores describes Santa Teresa as a city of factories, maquiladoras, migration, drug trafficking, and infrastructure unable to keep pace with demographic growth. His conclusion that the city lacks time gives the urban setting a pressure that contrasts with the slower, personal measure of Amalfitano’s recollections: a child crying at customs, a father searching the lines, and a family shaped by the person who left. In this context, their relationship is both a private bond and a point where nationality, mobility, and the fragility of family life meet.