University of Barcelona

The University of Barcelona marks a decisive transition in Oscar Amalfitano’s life: after his contract there expires, he accepts a position at the University of Santa Teresa, following a period in Argentina that he later connects to the coup in Chile and his forced exile. The university is not described as an institution in its own right; its significance lies in the moves, disruptions, and reflections clustered around Amalfitano’s academic career.

Amalfitano’s departure

When a young colleague in Santa Teresa asks why Amalfitano chose that university over the University of Barcelona, Amalfitano explains that his contract in Barcelona had run out and that Professor Silvia Perez persuaded him to take the new job. He had met Perez in Buenos Aires and seen her twice more in Barcelona. Before he arrived, she rented a house and bought furniture for him; Amalfitano repaid her before receiving his first paycheck, wary of leaving room for misunderstanding. His departure from Barcelona thus emerges through practical arrangements as well as professional change, while the new appointment becomes the next step in a life already shaped by displacement.

Exile and movement

The Barcelona appointment belongs to a longer chain of migration. Asked why he had been in Argentina in 1974, Amalfitano says that the coup in Chile had obliged him to choose exile. He later describes exile not simply as a wound or fixed destiny but as movement that may help abolish what people ordinarily understand as fate. The university therefore sits at a crossing between professional mobility and political dislocation: Amalfitano’s academic work continues across borders, but those borders have been crossed under unequal circumstances.

A limited institutional presence

The University of Barcelona enters the account chiefly through Amalfitano’s recollection and his colleague’s comparison with Santa Teresa. No broader institutional history, university life, or direct conflict involving the Barcelona university is supplied. That restraint matters: the place functions less as a developed setting than as a point on a route whose meaning is clarified retrospectively, through the expired contract, the move to Santa Teresa, and Amalfitano’s account of exile.