Amalfitano begins hearing the voice

Oscar Amalfitano begins hearing the voice on the night before an excursion, and the encounter turns an ordinary night at home into a test of what he can trust: his senses, his reasoning, or the voice’s claim to kinship. The voice first frightens him, then draws him into conversation, finally sending him back to the small tasks of caring for his household. The event remains unresolved as either a supernatural visitation or a crisis of perception, while its aftermath unfolds against the continuing violence and civic unrest of Santa Teresa.

First Encounter

The voice speaks to Amalfitano for the first time the night before the excursion. He allows that he might have heard it earlier and mistaken it for part of someone else’s conversation or for a dream, but this time he is certain it addresses him. It greets him by name and tells him not to be afraid. The reassurance has the opposite effect: he is afraid enough to hurry to Rosa’s room, check the window latch, and wake her by switching on the light.

Amalfitano does not tell Rosa what he has heard. He says only that he is nervous and thought he heard a noise. After kissing her cheek and stroking her hair, he leaves the room with the light still on. He goes into the yard to look for someone, but finds no one. The geometry book he has hung on the clothesline is there with socks and Rosa’s pants; the gate and street reveal only a dog heading toward Avenida Madero. Returning inside, he locks the doors and windows, takes a short kitchen knife from a drawer, and sits at the table beside a history of German and French philosophy. His bodily precautions precede any explanation: he searches, secures the house, and arms himself while still trying to decide whether the experience is real.

A Conversation About Fear and Kinship

The voice returns with an apology and asks Amalfitano not to treat the encounter as an invasion of his freedom. He is startled by that formulation and opens a window to look outside, but sees no source for the voice. Its manner is at once intimate and evasive: it offers reassurance, yet speaks as if it too faces difficulty and needs forgiveness.

In a later exchange, the voice asks Amalfitano to be a man and uses homophobic language. It then insists that it is speaking figuratively and claims admiration for certain poets, painters, and government clerks. The episode does not make this contradiction disappear; the voice’s stated detachment from the insult sits uneasily beside its repeated use of it. Amalfitano remains in his office rather than fleeing or waking Rosa, and eventually tells the voice that he is listening.

The voice proposes that Amalfitano treat it as his grandfather and call it “nono.” It asks personal questions but also tells him that he is free not to answer. Amalfitano answers that he will not run away. The voice admits that it can barely see and says it is managing to keep one foot in Amalfitano’s house. It calls this the first day of what it hopes will be a long, mutually beneficial relationship. The language establishes a relationship without establishing the speaker’s actual identity: the voice offers a familial role, but its account of where it comes from remains uncertain.

Calm, Madness, and the Voice’s Advice

The conversation turns on the voice’s insistence that calm is the one thing that will not let Amalfitano down. It declares that ethics, duty, honesty, curiosity, love, bravery, and art can all fail him. Amalfitano objects that bravery and love for one’s children do not. The exchange makes calm less a settled answer than a disputed principle: Amalfitano is frightened, but he pushes back rather than accepting the voice’s bleak account of human attachments.

He asks whether calm is the opposite of madness. The voice says no and reassures him that he has not lost his mind, describing their encounter as an ordinary conversation. Its assurance cannot settle the question for him. The next day, Amalfitano considers the possibility that he is going mad and recognizes that the prospect does not extinguish his happiness or excitement. At the same time, he imagines the consequences for Rosa if his condition worsens: she might return to Barcelona with enough money to make a start there, while he might be confined in an asylum in Santa Teresa or Hermosillo. His speculation keeps the uncertainty concrete, connecting a frightening possibility to his responsibilities as a father.

The voice also directs Amalfitano toward mundane action. It tells him to check that the doors and windows are shut and to do something useful, suggesting that he wash the dishes. Amalfitano follows the instruction: he cleans the dishes and kitchen surfaces, drinks water from the tap, and puts dirty clothes into the washing machine at five in the morning. He looks again at the geometry book hanging motionless in the yard, then finds nothing else to tidy and sits down, answering the voice in fragments. The household routine gives the conversation a practical consequence: instead of resolving the voice’s identity, it channels his alarm into work that benefits himself and Rosa.

Explanation, Aftermath, and Setting

When Amalfitano directly asks whether the voice is his grandfather’s ghost, it rejects that explanation and calls itself the spirit of his father. It adds that his grandfather no longer remembers him, whereas his father will never forget him. This is a claim, not proof. The voice gives no account of how it arrived, and it asks Amalfitano to accept its reassurance that he has nothing to fear. Its advice remains plain and domestic: wash, secure the house, and go to sleep.

Amalfitano does as instructed, falls asleep after six, and wakes at nine when Rosa calls him. Although he feels unusually well, he finds his morning classes incomprehensible. At lunch he avoids Professor Perez and other colleagues, chooses a distant table, and thinks over the night. He is surprised that the possibility of madness does not diminish his excitement. His first encounter with the voice therefore changes neither his uncertainty nor his ability to continue ordinary life; it leaves both uneasily in place.

He rejects belief in ghosts on materialist grounds, while recalling the supernatural beings people discussed during his childhood in southern Chile. He does not rule out a ghost, but tries other explanations first. He considers a lost soul, a seer in Hermosillo, and the possibility of his father’s spirit, then reasons that the voice’s Mexican vocabulary does not sound like his father’s, even though its homophobic streak seems more plausible to him. The scene does not confirm any of these possibilities. Instead, its movement between philosophical skepticism, memory, and speculation preserves the voice as an unresolved presence.

The episode also places Amalfitano’s private fear in a city marked by public violence. During the same night, the Santa Teresa police find another teenage girl’s body. The following afternoon, as Amalfitano walks through the central plaza, he sees women protesting outside the town hall, demanding an end to impunity and corruption and transparency in the investigation of women’s disappearances and killings. Professor Perez invites him to a dinner for three feminists from Mexico City; Rosa accepts, and Amalfitano does not object. The voice’s warnings and the public protest are not connected by an explanation, but their juxtaposition sets domestic vulnerability beside the city’s unresolved crisis.

Narrative Significance

The first conversation establishes the voice through speech and action rather than through a verified supernatural source. It names Amalfitano, adopts the language of family, contradicts itself, and makes practical demands. Its authority is therefore provisional: Amalfitano listens and obeys some instructions, but questions its claims and weighs them against his own beliefs and obligations.

The episode’s tension rests on the gap between sensation and explanation. Amalfitano reacts before he can interpret: he checks Rosa’s room, searches outside, locks the house, and takes a knife. Later, he can entertain the possibility of madness without surrendering either his skepticism or his happiness. The geometry book on the clothesline recurs as a fixed object within this unsettled night, visible first during his search and again while he carries out the voice’s instructions. The experience ends not with a revelation about who is speaking, but with sleep, the next day’s work, and the continuing questions of how Amalfitano can protect Rosa—and what kind of world surrounds them.