Amalfitano first hears the mysterious voice

Amalfitano first hears the mysterious voice on the night before an excursion, and the encounter turns a domestic night into a crisis of perception. He cannot be sure whether he might have heard the voice before, mistaken it for part of another conversation, or encountered it in sleep; now, however, it addresses him unmistakably. The voice claims that nothing is wrong, but its reassurance does not prevent fear. Amalfitano goes to Rosa’s room, checks the window latch, and tells her that he thought he heard a noise. The episode’s decisive shift is not an explanation of who is speaking, but Amalfitano’s gradual movement from trying to exclude an intruder to answering a voice whose presence remains unexplained.

The First Night

The voice greets Amalfitano by name and asks him not to be afraid. He nevertheless wakes Rosa and checks that she is safe and that the window is latched. Once she settles again, he searches the yard and porch, looks toward the street without leaving the gate, and finds no person there. The only movement he notices is a dog heading toward Avenida Madero. His scrutiny of the surroundings offers no material source for what he has heard.

Returning indoors, Amalfitano locks the doors and windows and places a short, sturdy knife beside a history of German and French philosophy. The ordinary objects acquire the practical weight of precautions taken in uncertainty: the house is secured, a potential weapon is within reach, and the possibility of an unseen speaker cannot be tested by looking outside. The voice continues, saying that the encounter is difficult for it too and asking Amalfitano to relax. He shuts his eyes, tries to identify the auditory experience in psychiatric terms, splashes water on his face, and sits again with his head bowed. His attempts to classify or manage the event do not make it stop.

When the voice asks him not to regard its presence as a violation of his freedom, Amalfitano opens a window and looks out at the neighboring wall, whose embedded shards catch the streetlights. He can see no speaker. The exchange thus keeps two explanations in tension: Amalfitano experiences the voice as a direct interlocutor, while the scene supplies no external evidence that anyone else is present. The conversation proceeds without resolving that uncertainty.

From Fear to Conversation

The voice returns to the question of Amalfitano’s sexual identity, pressing him with insulting language and then disclaiming hostility toward gay people. Amalfitano is frightened, but he stays in the room and listens. The voice next proposes that it is his grandfather, his father’s father, and that he can call it “nono.” This is not a stable identity: later the speaker says it is Amalfitano’s father, while offering “pops” as another name. The shifting familial claim makes the voice intimate without making it verifiable.

Amalfitano asks whether it is really his grandfather’s ghost. The voice rejects that account, saying the grandfather no longer remembers him, whereas the father will never forget him. It also insists that Amalfitano has nothing to fear from it. The exchange gives him a relationship through which to continue speaking, but not a reliable account of the voice’s origin. Amalfitano’s questions remain unanswered in any demonstrable sense; instead, the speaker redirects attention toward what he should do next.

The voice proposes calm as the one thing that will not fail, while arguing that ethics, duty, honesty, curiosity, love, bravery, and art all let people down. Amalfitano objects that bravery and love for one’s children do not. That objection marks a change in his response: he is no longer only seeking reassurance but disputing the voice’s general claims, and he reports feeling calm. When he asks whether calm is the opposite of madness, the voice denies that the conversation means he has lost his mind. Its assurance is part of the exchange, not independent proof about the cause of the experience.

The House and Its Immediate Dangers

The conversation turns from abstract claims to Amalfitano’s life in Santa Teresa. The voice asks whether he teaches philosophy and Wittgenstein, and challenges him to think about whether his hand is really a hand. It also mentions his plans for the yard, his daughter, and the murders committed daily in the city. The juxtaposition brings domestic routines and philosophical questions into the same unsettling field: the yard needs plants and tools, Rosa needs care, and the city’s violence remains present even inside the house.

At four in the morning, Amalfitano hears a car start outside and goes to the window. He sees a black car whose driver looks at him as it passes roughly thirty feet from the house. Amalfitano returns indoors; the voice says it did not like the driver’s appearance and warns that things seem to be coming to a head. The episode does not establish that the driver is connected to the voice or to any particular danger. It does, however, place an unresolved encounter on the street beside the equally unresolved voice in the house, leaving Amalfitano with both ordinary and inward sources of apprehension.

Work as a Form of Composure

After claiming to be Amalfitano’s father, the voice gives him simple instructions: check the doors and windows, do something useful, and wash the dishes. Amalfitano follows the advice. He cleans plates, a pot with pasta and tomato sauce, forks, glasses, the stove, and the table; he drinks water from the faucet and smokes cigarettes. At five in the morning he puts the dirty clothes into the washing machine and starts a normal cycle. These tasks give the night an observable sequence after the conversation has made its source uncertain.

The voice describes this activity as a way to relax and as something useful for Amalfitano and Rosa. It tells him that his headache, buzzing ears, and racing pulse will pass, and compares the conversation to an endoscopy, but painless. Amalfitano continues to answer in brief whispers while cleaning. The voice’s instructions do not explain why he heard it; instead, they organize his immediate conduct around household work and care for his daughter.

Amalfitano falls asleep after six without undressing, and Rosa wakes him at nine. He feels unusually well, although he finds his classes that morning incomprehensible. At lunch he avoids Professor Perez and other colleagues, including the dean, and sits at a remote cafeteria table. His improved sense of well-being therefore coexists with disorientation and withdrawal: the night has ended in sleep and ordinary routine, but it has not restored his academic concentration or clarified what happened.

Narrative Significance

The episode places an unverified voice inside a sharply particular domestic setting: Rosa’s room, the locked doors and windows, the knife beside a philosophy book, the laundry, and the clothesline. Its movement between philosophical provocation, family identity, concern for Amalfitano’s daughter, and warnings about Santa Teresa prevents it from settling into a single role. It can sound reassuring and demanding, intimate and insulting; its advice sometimes steadies Amalfitano, even as its presence unsettles his grasp of what is real.

The scene’s ending is practical rather than explanatory. Amalfitano has neither discovered an external speaker nor dismissed the voice; he has followed its instructions, slept, and returned to a day in which he feels better but cannot teach as usual. The episode makes calm a contested, temporary achievement rather than a final answer. The voice promises no dependable account of the world, while the small tasks of washing and caring for Rosa offer Amalfitano a way to continue within it.