Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is named as one of the days on which Rita fasted and abstained, part of a pattern of religious observance through which she assembled a faith of her own. In the novel, the day matters less as a described ceremony than as a marker of how Rita practiced religion through repeated bodily disciplines and selectively followed traditions.

Place in Rita’s Religious Practice

Elena recalls that Rita fasted and abstained on Ash Wednesday, as well as on the Thursday and Good Friday, and on every Friday of Lent. The reference places Ash Wednesday within a recurring annual cycle of restraint rather than presenting it as a one-time event in the plot. The evidence does not describe a particular Ash Wednesday service or say that Rita received ashes; it identifies the day through the practices she kept.

Those observances formed part of a broader, carefully maintained repertoire. Rita wore a cross, visited seven churches on Good Friday, avoided entering church with uncovered shoulders, fasted for an hour before communion, and arrived at Mass before the Creed so that her attendance would count. Yet she skipped Mass when it rained, despite her other religious habits. Her practice was therefore neither simple conformity nor rejection: it joined observance to personal conditions and choices.

A Faith Made of Rituals and Personal Rules

Elena understands Rita’s religion as assembled from rituals, folklore, and traditions more than from consistent adherence to dogma. Rita did not attend Mass every time, did not confess all her sins, and did not pray every night; she could also say that there were days when God did not deserve praise. Alongside these qualifications, she kept the fasts and abstentions associated with Ash Wednesday and Lent. The contrast makes the day part of a lived faith whose meaning emerges through repeated conduct, not through a portrait of unvarying belief.

The narrative also distinguishes Rita’s practice from Elena’s concealed disbelief. Elena did not believe in the soul or eternal life, a conviction she had barely admitted even to herself while married to Antonio, a practising Catholic who worked at a Catholic school as both porter and theology teacher. Elena connects Rita’s ambivalence toward faith to growing up with one fervent Catholic parent and one who only pretended to believe. Ash Wednesday’s place in Rita’s observances thus belongs to a family history in which religious practice and private belief do not neatly coincide.

Significance in the Narrative

The mention of Ash Wednesday helps establish the concrete, habitual texture of Rita’s religion. Her fasting and abstention are bodily acts repeated within the calendar, alongside other observances that she adapts to her own rules. That pattern complicates any simple division between belief and unbelief: Rita’s practice is selective, but it is also sustained and specific.

The day is not identified as the date of a major scene, nor does the text connect it directly to Rita’s death. Its significance is instead cumulative: Ash Wednesday is one element in the annual religious rhythm through which Elena remembers her daughter and tries to understand the difference between Rita’s faith and her own.