Rosa Amalfitano and Rosa Mendez's Friendship

Rosa Amalfitano and Rosa Mendez’s friendship is a rare source of companionship for Rosa Amalfitano in Santa Teresa, and a meeting point between two markedly different ways of understanding intimacy and the city. Rosa Mendez’s stories—about lovers, a policeman, and narcos—give their quiet visits an unsettling vividness; Rosa Amalfitano answers with skepticism, humor, and her own habit of testing whether familiar ideas are really true. Later, amid the danger surrounding Chucho Flores, Rosa Amalfitano takes the hand of Oscar Fate and leaves. The friendship’s importance lies not in a tidy resolution, but in the ordinary history of closeness that precedes that moment of escape.

Meeting and everyday companionship

Rosa Amalfitano was lonely in Santa Teresa when she met Rosa Mendez at Charly Cruz’s video store, where she went to rent films. She liked Rosa Mendez at once. According to Rosa Amalfitano’s account, Rosa Mendez worked at a supermarket by day and as a restaurant waitress at night; she loved movies, especially thrillers. Her perpetual cheerfulness and bleached-blond hair, striking against her dark skin, were among the qualities that drew her friend to her.

Rosa Mendez introduced Rosa Amalfitano to Charly Cruz, the video-store owner. Rosa Amalfitano had seen him only a few times before, but found him relaxed and easygoing. He sometimes lent her films or let her rent them without charge. She spent whole afternoons at the store, talking with Rosa Mendez and Charly Cruz or helping Charly Cruz unpack new shipments. The friendship thus began in a place organized around movies and informal hospitality, before Chucho Flores entered Rosa Amalfitano’s life.

Their closeness also extended beyond the store. Rosa Mendez lived alone in an apartment on the fourth floor of an old five-story building in Colonia Madero, with no elevator. She paid a great deal for it. At first she shared the apartment with two friends; one left to try her luck in Mexico City, and Rosa Mendez fought with the other. Afterward, she chose to live alone, although the rent meant working a second job. Rosa Amalfitano sometimes spent hours at the apartment, lying on the couch, drinking agua fresca, and listening to her friend’s stories. Sometimes they said little; sometimes they talked about men.

Different experience, shared conversation

Rosa Mendez was twenty-four and described having had four lovers who had changed her in some way. Rosa Amalfitano’s experience was less varied, and their conversations made that difference plain without breaking their intimacy. Rosa Mendez recalled that her first lover, a young man who worked at a maquiladora, left her to go to the United States. She remembered him fondly and said he had left the least mark on her, yet he was the lover she missed most. She could not explain the contradiction. When she repeated that he had left the least mark, Rosa Amalfitano laughed, and Rosa Mendez laughed too, though she did not quite know why.

Rosa Amalfitano teased her friend that she sounded like a bolero. Rosa Mendez replied that boleros were true: their words came from deep inside and were always right. Rosa Amalfitano countered that they only seemed authentic, while actually being false. Rosa Mendez eventually stopped arguing, tacitly yielding to the authority her friend seemed to possess as a college student. But the exchange did not erase the difference between them. Rosa Mendez’s feelings did not fit neatly into Rosa Amalfitano’s skeptical account of romantic language: the absent lover could have left little lasting mark and still be the one she missed most.

The friendship gives both women room to speak in their own registers. Rosa Mendez’s stories are physical and metaphorical; Rosa Amalfitano listens, questions, and sometimes sharpens her friend’s account by restating it in more startling terms. Her skepticism is not simply dismissal. It turns Rosa Mendez’s images into a shared conversation, testing where metaphor ends and experience begins.

Mountains, caves, and desert air

One of Rosa Mendez’s most memorable stories concerns sex with a policeman. She calls it the best, but struggles to explain why: it is like being with someone who is not quite a man, like becoming a little girl again, or like being taken by a rock or mountain. The image develops into a scene of submission and enclosure: she imagines remaining on her knees until the mountain says it is over, and being filled with something she cannot name. When Rosa Amalfitano asks whether she means semen, Rosa Mendez rejects the crude interpretation and locates the feeling instead in a cave inside the mountain.

Rosa Amalfitano extends the image back to her friend, describing sex with a policeman as being taken by a mountain inside the mountain itself. Rosa Mendez agrees. The language turns the body into a landscape at once overwhelming and enclosed; the two friends build the image together through question, correction, and recognition. Rosa Mendez also tells Rosa Amalfitano that she likes her Spanish use of “foliar” for having sex, because people from Spain speak so prettily. Rosa Amalfitano calls her weird, and Rosa Mendez answers that she has always been that way, even as a child.

Rosa Mendez’s account of sex with narcos shifts the landscape from solid to nearly immaterial. It feels, she says, like being taken by the air—not ordinary air, but desert air: a blast with its own inexplicable smell, so much air that breathing becomes difficult and suffocation seems possible. Rosa Amalfitano condenses the contrast into two images: the policeman as a mountain, the narco as desert air. Rosa Mendez confirms the distinction, adding that sex with a narco always happens in the open. Their exchange binds private experience to the desert around Santa Teresa, while leaving the violence and power inside the metaphors unresolved.

Danger and departure

The friendship’s wider context grows more threatening when Rosa Amalfitano is caught up with Chucho Flores. After Oscar Fate enters the room where Chucho and Corona are, Chucho points to a corner Fate had not noticed. Rosa Amalfitano is sitting in an armchair with her legs crossed, snorting cocaine. Fate asks her to leave with him rather than ordering or pleading. She smiles sympathetically but does not seem to understand at first. When he holds out his hand, she gets up and takes it.

The scene makes the difference between companionship and immediate safety stark. Rosa Amalfitano’s friendship with Rosa Mendez had been formed through afternoons at a video store and hours on a couch, listening to stories; here, the action narrows to a hand extended and accepted. As she leaves with Fate, Corona grabs his arm and raises a hand holding what appears to be a blunt instrument. Fate strikes him with an uppercut, then realizes Corona has a gun and takes it away. The departure thus passes through sudden physical danger rather than resolving into a simple rescue. Rosa Mendez’s friendship remains part of the account of who Rosa Amalfitano has been in Santa Teresa, even as the crisis carries her beyond that earlier, everyday refuge.