Oscar Amalfitano and Rosa Amalfitano's Father-Daughter Relationship

Oscar Amalfitano and Rosa Amalfitano’s Father-Daughter Relationship is marked by close attention, frank disagreement, and a mismatch in how father and daughter read the people around them. Amalfitano warns Rosa away from Chucho Flores after questioning him about the killings of women in Santa Teresa; Rosa, who is still thinking through her relationship with Chucho, answers her father’s concern with affectionate disbelief. Their bond is neither simple estrangement nor easy agreement: she hears him, but does not accept his judgment, while he offers no clear proof for the danger he senses.

Family Intimacy and Unease

One night, after Rosa returns home, she finds her father speaking to the book that has been hanging from a clothesline in the backyard. She slips away to her room before he notices her, intending to read and think about Chucho. The scene sets her private deliberation beside Amalfitano’s solitary, eccentric behavior: she is trying to make sense of a relationship, while the familiar household already feels unsettled by her father’s preoccupation with the suspended book.

The two have met Chucho, and Amalfitano’s impression is sharply different from the boyfriend’s own account of the meeting. Chucho comes away feeling that it went well; Rosa suspects he is lying, because she cannot imagine anyone feeling comfortable under the look her father gave him. That contrast establishes how little the men’s encounter resolves for Rosa. Chucho’s confidence does not reassure her, and Amalfitano’s disapproval remains opaque rather than explained.

A Warning Without an Explanation

During their first described conversation with Chucho, Amalfitano asks him three questions: what he thinks of hexagons, whether he knows how to construct one, and what he thinks about the killings of women in Santa Teresa. Chucho says he has no opinion about hexagons, admits he cannot construct one, and calls the killings regrettable while asserting that the police are catching the perpetrators one by one. Amalfitano asks nothing further. His silence after Chucho’s answer leaves the exchange suspended, with the question about the killings carrying a seriousness the boyfriend’s brief response does not meet.

As Rosa walks Chucho to the door, Amalfitano tells her to be careful and says he has a bad feeling about the man, but gives no reason. Rosa translates the warning into the practical question of whether she should end the relationship. Her father answers yes: she should leave him. Their exchange is direct but not persuasive in the usual sense. Amalfitano gives a firm instruction without evidence Rosa can assess, and Rosa can recognize that he is worried without sharing his certainty.

Rosa calls him increasingly crazy, and Amalfitano insists that his concern is real. When she asks what they can do, he gives them sharply different answers: she should leave what he calls an ignorant, lying man, while he speculates that, when they return to Europe, he might check into the Clfnico for electroshock treatment. The remark joins paternal urgency to self-doubt. He speaks as someone who believes his warning, yet also entertains the possibility that his own mind requires medical intervention. His proposed treatment does not resolve Rosa’s choice or establish that his suspicion is correct.

A Second Encounter and a Changing Household

On another occasion, Chucho brings Rosa home with Charly Cruz and Rosa Mendez. Amalfitano has pleaded illness and returned early from the university, although he should have been teaching. Rosa hastens the visitors’ departure, but her father is unusually sociable and begins talking with Charly. The encounter shifts the household’s usual balance: Rosa is no longer the only link between her father and her social circle, and Amalfitano’s conversation with her friends becomes an episode she later remembers in increasingly distinct detail.

Rosa is in the kitchen pouring mango juice when the conversation begins. She can only reconstruct its opening afterward: perhaps she or Rosa Mendez was talking about films, perhaps Amalfitano posed one of his mischievous questions. Charly, rather than Rosa Mendez, answers a question about apparent movement by explaining the illusion created by the persistence of images on the retina. Amalfitano confirms that images linger briefly and asks who discovered the phenomenon. This recollected discussion gives Rosa’s account a particular limit: she was elsewhere when it began, and its details sharpen in memory as time passes.

In a later discussion, Amalfitano explains an image of a little old drunk who appears to laugh behind prison bars. The apparent confinement depends on which side of the disk is being seen; the viewer may mistake the arrangement and assume that the figure is trapped, when the prison is on the other side. Amalfitano extends the reversal by suggesting that the figure may be laughing at the spectators’ credulity. The example resonates with the father-daughter relationship without settling it: appearances may mislead, but Amalfitano’s warning about Chucho is still not supported by an explanation Rosa can verify.

Care, Judgment, and Unresolved Difference

The relationship’s defining tension is not that Amalfitano fails to care for Rosa, but that care reaches her as an unsupported verdict. He asks Chucho about the killings, listens to his assurance about police arrests, and then warns his daughter to leave him; Rosa, meanwhile, continues to think about the relationship and responds to her father with humor. Neither the warning nor her teasing ends their disagreement. Their exchange leaves both the affection and the uncertainty intact.

The book’s handling of their bond also depends on Rosa’s recollection. Some family moments are presented close to the conversation itself, while the later account of her father’s discussion with Charly is explicitly shaped by what she remembers and guesses. The resulting portrait does not grant either generation complete authority: Amalfitano’s anxiety may register a real danger, but his own comment about possible electroshock complicates his authority; Rosa’s skepticism protects her independence, but the account does not establish that her dismissal is safe. Their relationship remains a structure of mutual proximity and incomplete knowledge, with a father’s warning unable to become a shared understanding.