Elena—Rita

Elena—Rita is a mother-daughter relationship shaped by shared routines and sharp conflict, then tested by illness, caregiving, and death. Elena understands motherhood as an enduring bond and a source of knowledge about her daughter; the novel complicates that certainty with their years of arguments and Rita’s plainly expressed exhaustion. When Rita dies, Elena’s sense of herself as a mother survives, but it also becomes the basis for her determination to challenge the conclusion that Rita died by suicide.

A Shared Life of Habit and Friction

Elena and Rita’s life together included holidays in Mar del Plata every two years, a pattern that continued until Elena’s illness made travel increasingly difficult. In the years they stayed home, they used their savings for repairs: among them, replacing a worn mattress, fixing a pipe, and renewing patio tiles displaced by a tree’s roots. Their shared domestic life was therefore not an idyll but a sequence of practical decisions and repeated arrangements.

On holiday, they rented a small house near Colón Avenue. Rita slept in the bedroom, while Elena stayed in the living-dining area, close to the kitchen because she rose early. They avoided the crowded beach and walked the Rambla each afternoon instead, going one way beside the sea and returning along the avenue. These recurring walks gave their conflicts a familiar setting and rhythm: the subject could change, but each woman answered the other sharply until Rita moved ahead, and the two fell silent.

The weather-predicting glass sea lion, which Rita bought in Mar del Plata, condenses this mixture of ordinary attachment and antagonism. Rita wanted the souvenir; Elena objected that it was an impractical expense. Their exchange became another argument about each woman’s character and judgment, and they did not discuss the sea lion again. Yet the object remained in Rita’s room, turning purplish pink on the rainy afternoon she died. It connects a modest shared holiday to the weather that Elena later treats as crucial evidence about her daughter’s death.

Care, Dependence, and Its Limits

Elena’s advancing Parkinson-Plus syndrome changes the balance of their relationship. Rita arranges a salon appointment around Elena’s medication schedule, planning several personal-care services rather than only the toenail trimming Elena says she needs. Elena resists going. Rita’s insistence is not presented as simple vanity: she explains that she is the person who sees and assists her mother every day, and that the changes in Elena’s appearance and needs are part of the work she herself has to witness and manage.

The episode also reveals the intimacy and strain contained in ordinary care. Rita helps Elena get up, prepares for her needs through the day and night, and assists with tasks Elena can no longer perform independently. Rita’s resentment is explicit, but it arises within this ongoing labor, not outside their attachment. Elena, for her part, experiences Rita’s effort partly as an attempt to make her change, while Rita describes it as the reality of living with and caring for her mother. Neither account cancels the other.

At a medical consultation, Dr Benegas explains that Elena’s condition is Parkinson-Plus and warns that her abilities may decline more quickly than expected. He tells Rita that she will need to consider arranging care for her mother. Rita challenges his account by naming the accumulating difficulties Elena already faces and asks what further decline can mean. When he invokes a reversal of the parent-child roles, Rita rejects the idea that she can simply become Elena’s mother. Elena says she wants to remain in her own home and can manage there; Rita’s protest makes clear that the future has become a burden she does not know whether she can bear.

Afterward, Rita and Elena walk home without speaking, Rita in front and her mother several steps behind, repeating the spatial pattern of their quarrels without the argument. Rita shuts herself in her room. Elena begins dinner and reads the care pamphlets Dr Benegas has given her, examining unfamiliar symptoms and trying to understand what they might mean for her own body. The doctor’s proposed support does not resolve their conflict: the scene leaves them together in the same home, but facing illness from sharply different positions.

Love, Anger, and Maternal Knowledge

Elena thinks motherhood carries a promise of knowledge: a mother knows her child and loves her. She believes she loved Rita even though she rarely said so and their relationship was marked by distance, arguments, and little physical affection. Her claim is not that they lived harmoniously; she makes the bond endure precisely through those absences. She also wonders whether she remains a mother after Rita’s death, and whether the loss has taken from her the name that defined her.

That conviction coexists with Elena’s difficulty accepting what Rita’s caregiving reveals. Rita knows the practical details of Elena’s dependence because she attends to them, while Elena’s account of their bond emphasizes what she feels and what she believes a mother can know. The gap between them is not merely a failure to love. It is also a conflict over whose experience counts: Elena’s sense of maternal understanding, or Rita’s daily experience of providing care and contemplating its demands.

The conflict becomes especially consequential when Elena interprets Rita’s death. The coroner, the investigating inspector, and Roberto Almada accept suicide; Elena believes Rita was murdered, although she cannot identify a motive or prove who was responsible. She insists that the rain changes the meaning of the event. Her certainty rests partly on her identity as Rita’s mother, but the narrative does not make maternal knowledge equivalent to proof: Elena acknowledges that she cannot establish the truth alone.

Death and the Bond’s Afterlife

Elena takes charge of Rita’s funeral arrangements, choosing the casket, its fittings, and a wreath bearing the words Your Mother. When asked whether anyone else in the family can help, she answers that there is no family, though people from Rita’s life attend, including Father Juan, Roberto Almada, and Mimí. The contrast reveals Elena’s isolation within the role of mother even as the funeral gathers a wider circle around her daughter.

After the funeral, Elena asks Roberto not to visit her anymore. She reads his statement in the report that Rita had not been herself and had not laughed much, and rejects his judgment of her daughter. Her response shows both her intimacy with Rita and the limits of that intimacy: she treats her own knowledge as superior to the account of someone who also knew Rita. The death has turned their old disputes over judgment into a question with irreversible stakes.

Because Elena’s body cannot carry out an investigation, she decides she needs another person to act where she cannot. She travels toward Buenos Aires to seek Isabel, whom she has not seen for twenty years, and hopes to enlist her help because Elena believes Isabel has a debt to repay. The journey extends rather than resolves the mother-daughter bond: Elena acts in Rita’s name, using her conviction that she knows her daughter to pursue an answer that she cannot reach alone. Rita is gone, but motherhood remains the identity through which Elena interprets the loss and organizes what she does next.