Deafness and refusal to listen

Deafness and refusal to listen is a recurring motif that joins Elena’s physical experience of Parkinson’s to her struggle to have her account of Rita’s death taken seriously. Her feet seem deaf to the commands of her brain, while people around her hear her words but decline to act on them. The motif also complicates Elena’s claim to know what happened: Isabel listens, but does not accept a mother’s certainty as proof.

The body as a figure of deafness

Elena experiences her feet as no longer answering her. She understands that her illness disrupts the messages by which her brain directs movement, and imagines her brain as a dethroned king whose orders go unheard. In her private vocabulary, the illness and the messenger carrying the brain’s signals form part of a repeated sequence she recites while waiting for her medication to work. The image of deaf feet is therefore rooted in the daily limits of her body, not merely an abstract comparison.

The language of deafness extends from that bodily experience into Elena’s attempts to communicate. She knows that shouting at her feet would not make them move, so she waits and repeats names, streets, and medication terms instead. At Plaza Constitución, a man offers help and calls her a grandmother; Elena does not answer him, continuing past as if she too were deaf. The moment reverses the usual direction of the image: a body that has been interpreted and addressed by strangers refuses a response, while the man’s offer rests on his reading of her visible helplessness rather than on what she says or wants.

A case closed to testimony

After Rita’s death, Elena insists that it was not an accident or suicide, and holds to the detail that it was raining. She believes Rita would not have gone near a church on a rainy day because she feared lightning. Yet the coroner and police inspector do not give her account the hearing she seeks. Inspector Benito Avellaneda initially meets her, but the official conclusion remains suicide; after he is ordered to close the case, he sees her only outside working hours and repeats the same explanation. The rain, central to Elena’s reasoning, carries no investigative weight for the police.

The meetings with Benito Avellaneda show the difference between being heard and being listened to. At first, Elena demands leads and explanations while he nods without meaningfully responding. He later acknowledges that it was raining, but does not take the investigative action she hopes for. In their meetings he reads pages from the report, sometimes returning to material they have already discussed. Elena concludes that there has been no real search for leads, and brings her own: Rita’s diary, address book, a handwritten list of people who knew her, and the places she had visited shortly before her death. The effort exposes an institutional imbalance: Elena is expected to accept the official account, while her attempt to supply evidence does not reopen the case.

The pattern reaches beyond the police. Rita’s co-workers and neighbours offer sympathy or repeat the conclusion of suicide, but Elena wants them to remember and report what they know. Roberto Almada listened to her at first, yet accepted the suicide explanation and did not act on her suspicions; Elena eventually tells him not to visit. Father Juan continues to meet her, but she finds that his attentive, confessional manner does not provide the answers she wants. Even the school director’s memorial tree fails to address her question. Across these encounters, apparent sympathy and actual attention come apart: people may listen, nod, or express understanding without engaging with what Elena is asking them to do.

Listening at Isabel’s house

Elena’s journey to Isabel brings the motif into a more intimate setting. She asks Isabel to help investigate Rita’s death and invokes a debt from the past. When she explains why she believes Rita did not die by suicide, she returns to the rain and her daughter’s fear of lightning. Isabel does not immediately confirm that she understands; at one point she fills the silence by asking whether Elena wants to put down her teacup. The ordinary exchange makes the distance between hearing words and grasping their significance visible.

Isabel eventually asks how Elena can be sure. Elena answers with the rain and Rita’s fear of lightning, but Isabel challenges the assumption that a person can never do what she once feared or thought impossible. She does not dispute that it rained; she says that this fact alone is not enough. Her response is neither the dismissive repetition of the police verdict nor simple agreement. She lets Elena speak, waits through pauses, and questions the conclusion Elena draws from her evidence. Listening here includes both patience and disagreement.

The limits of certainty and the motif’s significance

Elena treats motherhood as a source of knowledge about Rita: she believes that a mother knows and loves her child, and that this bond allows her to reject the suicide explanation. The novel sets that conviction beside the repeated failure of others to take her testimony seriously. But Isabel’s questions also expose a limit in Elena’s reasoning. The fact of the rain and Rita’s fear of lightning do not, by themselves, establish what Rita could or could not have done. Elena’s experience of being ignored is real; it does not make every inference she draws certain.

The motif thus refuses a simple opposition between a knowing Elena and deaf people who are wrong. Her illness makes communication with her own body unreliable, and her physical dependence shapes how strangers address her. Meanwhile, the people who can move freely may fail to listen, while Isabel’s attentive silence gives Elena room to speak and then challenges her to consider what she cannot know. Deafness names both a bodily estrangement and a social failure of attention; the recurring demand to be heard becomes inseparable from the harder question of what listening can establish.