Rita is found hanged in the church belfry on a rainy day

Rita is found hanged in the church belfry on a rainy day, an event whose circumstances make her death impossible for Elena to accept as an uncomplicated suicide. The rain matters because Rita had spent her life avoiding the church whenever a storm threatened. Yet the body is there, discovered by children sent to ring the bells, while the service below proceeds before the congregation learns what has happened. The scene joins private knowledge, public ritual, and a material mystery that neither the family nor the authorities can settle at once.

Background and the significance of the rain

Elena treats the weather as evidence. Rita feared lightning from childhood, after her father explained that the cross atop the church attracted it. She also avoided the Inchauspes’ house, whose pool was then the neighbourhood’s only one, and steered clear of other places and situations she associated with bad luck. These precautions were habitual rather than a sudden response: when she began working at the Catholic school at seventeen, only weeks after her father’s death, she made excuses to avoid being sent to the chapel in bad weather. She cited pressing work, a stomach ache, or a headache, and sometimes pretended to faint. For Elena, these repeated acts make Rita’s presence at the church on a rainy day a contradiction that demands explanation.

Rita’s avoidance had grown into a network of small rules. She watched where she stepped, kept away from the church in rain, and followed protective routines when she encountered a redhead or heard someone mention Liberti, whom neighbours regarded as unlucky. Such conduct had already constrained her movements; Elena understands that a sudden reversal would be even harder to explain. The details do not prove what happened in the belfry, but they give Elena a specific reason to reject the assumption that Rita went there by choice.

Discovery in the belfry

Some boys assigned by Father Juan to ring the bells for the seven o’clock mass found Rita. They ran down the stairs and through the nave to the sacristy, where Father Juan at first dismissed their report. When they insisted and brought him upstairs, he recognized Rita but did not say her name. He picked up the overturned chair beneath the body, stood on it, and checked her pulse. The rope hung from the yoke that held the bronze bell; it was old and worn, and the report Elena later read noted that scaffolding boards from an earlier cleaning of the dome had also been left in the belfry.

Father Juan sent the boys back to the sacristy and called the police. He asked Inspector Benito Avellaneda to wait until after mass, since parishioners were already arriving and the service fell on the Thursday after Pentecost, Corpus Christi. In Father Juan’s view, the congregation could pray, but nothing could now be done for the dead woman. Benito Avellaneda agreed that the service should not be interrupted, while acknowledging that the death would be a severe blow to the community. He asked about Rita’s family and learned that she had only her sick mother. The priest said he did not know how Elena would take the news; the inspector replied that the authorities would handle it.

The service and the fall

The congregation began mass unaware that Rita’s body hung above them, only a short distance from the altar. Around twenty people sat among empty pews, their wet umbrellas laid across the seats. Father Juan noticed from the altar that the stairway to the belfry could be seen from below, a detail he had not registered before. The first police officer entered during the service, removed his wet hat, made the sign of the cross, and sat in the last row. Two more officers arrived after communion. Their uniforms and concealed firearms stirred unease; parishioners picked up their purses, uncertain whether danger was present or merely following the actions of others.

As people returned from communion, a creak was followed by a thud. The congregation looked upward, and the officers hurried up the stairs. The rope had finally snapped: the body’s weight undid the knot, and Rita fell onto the belfry floor. Father Juan remained at the altar long enough to give the final blessing and send the congregation home. When people pressed him for an explanation, he said only that someone had hanged themselves in the belfry, withholding Rita’s identity. Once the church had emptied, he went upstairs to join the officers and the coroner.

Investigation and unresolved meaning

The officials documented the scene with notes, photographs, and a chalk outline on the concrete floor. An officer carefully wound the rope that had been around Rita’s neck and placed it in a plastic bag, labeling it Evidence #1. The rope’s worn condition and the fact that it had held her weight long enough for her to die sharpen the physical puzzle; the report also records the abandoned scaffolding boards. The account identifies these as among the few pieces of evidence found, not as a solution to the question of how Rita came to be there.

Elena’s conclusion is more certain than the investigation’s. She insists that Rita’s lifelong fear and avoidance could not have changed on the day of her death. If Rita reached the church in the rain, Elena believes, someone must have taken her there, whether she was alive or already dead. Benito Avellaneda suggests that it could have been someone or something, but offers no explanation; Elena rebukes him for speculating without knowing. The event therefore leaves two kinds of uncertainty in view: the sparse material record cannot explain the death, while the familiar claim of suicide cannot account for Rita’s established habits. The rain, which others might treat as incidental, remains for Elena the detail that makes the accepted account fail.