Rita—Roberto Almada

Rita and Roberto Almada’s relationship is a late-blooming, imperfect romance that Elena can neither accept without condescension nor dismiss as meaningless. Its intimacy is uncertain even to her, but its consequences are concrete: Rita calls Roberto her boyfriend, brings him into family life, and cares for Elena in ways he later tries to take over. After Rita’s death, Elena must reckon with Roberto not only as the man who loved her daughter, but as a witness whose interpretation of that death she rejects.

A Late and Tentative Romance

Roberto has been part of Rita’s neighborhood for years: he is the son of the hairdresser, and he has worked at the bank since he was eighteen. Yet Elena resists the name Rita gives their relationship. When Rita calls him her boyfriend, Elena argues that someone of her age cannot have one and insists that Roberto’s name should be enough. The exchange exposes a gap between Rita’s understanding of her own life and her mother’s permission to define it. Elena’s dismissive language also draws on Roberto’s physical difference: she calls him a cripple to provoke Rita, while neighborhood children had called him a hunchback when he was young.

Elena imagines that little happened between the couple beyond a few kisses and awkward groping, perhaps in the plaza at sunset behind the monument to the nation’s flag, or at Roberto’s house before his mother returned from the beauty salon. This is speculation, not knowledge. She considers them two lonely people who had remained spectators to love before Rita entered the game late in life, at about the age Elena had been when widowed. Even while judging their romance as undignified, Elena recognizes that Rita did choose to enter it. Her account therefore holds two incompatible impulses together: she minimizes the relationship, yet cannot quite reduce it to nothing.

Shared Convictions and a Shared Fear

Roberto’s first dinner at Rita and Elena’s home becomes an official introduction, though he and Rita have known each other for a long time. He brings strawberry-flavored sparkling wine, the last alcoholic drink Elena remembers having. The visit makes the ordinary intimacy of the relationship visible: Roberto is not merely a man Rita sees privately, but someone welcomed into the household and described as practically family.

Rita and Roberto are linked, in Elena’s retrospective account, by their convictions as much as by romance. Both can present broad, arbitrary judgments as certainties, prescribing how another person should experience a life they themselves have not lived. Their deepest shared point is their fear of churches. Rita’s aversion is associated with rainy days; Roberto’s fear is not limited to the weather and extends to churches in any conditions. The resemblance gives their bond a private logic, even as their shared habit of issuing judgments makes that bond less idealized than a conventional love story.

Roberto’s fear has a history separate from Rita’s. As a child he was taken by his mother, Mimí, to Lima, where she had followed a tango dancer who was not Roberto’s father. The dancer eventually rejected them, leaving them without money or other connections in the country. Mimí learned hairdressing and stayed rather than return home and admit what she considered a failure. Roberto grew up there with a conspicuous hump; while his friends went to the Bridge of Sighs with girls, he went alone to look up at the Chapel of the Hermit. The account situates his fear and isolation in a difficult childhood, without making either a complete explanation of the adult relationship.

Care, Money, and Elena’s Unease

After Rita dies, Roberto offers to deposit Elena’s pension cheque so she will not have to wait in line. Elena objects to his concern for her health, tells him to go to hell, and accepts the help anyway. Rita had previously taken care of the banking, and Roberto’s position inside the bank gives his offer a practical value Elena cannot afford to ignore. His support thus follows a path opened by Rita’s absence, but it does not erase Elena’s distrust or their history of hostility.

Roberto also tells Elena that he misses Rita. Elena resents hearing this, partly because she imagines she would resent the words in the letters Roberto wrote to her daughter. She has kept those letters tied with a ribbon Rita chose, inside an empty heart-shaped chocolate box, but refuses to untie them. She fears what their words might disclose more than she wants to know what the couple did together. The unopened correspondence preserves their intimacy as a presence Elena can neither verify nor fully exclude from her understanding of Rita.

Grief and Competing Accounts of Rita

Roberto listens when Elena speaks about Rita’s death, but Elena concludes that listening did not mean he would act on her conviction that someone killed her daughter. She learns from the report that he accepted the suicide explanation and said Rita had not been herself, was interested in little, and did not laugh much. Elena rereads the statement, particularly the claim that Rita did not laugh much, and rejects it as evidence of how little Roberto understood. She had considered him a listener; his acceptance of the official account turns that apparent closeness into another form of deafness in her eyes.

Elena’s judgment of Roberto as a possible killer is similarly shaped by her view of their physical mismatch. She thinks he could not have overpowered Rita, whom she regards as a match for very few people. That reasoning does not establish what happened; it records Elena’s attempt to measure the unknown against what she believes she knows of her daughter and Roberto. His grief, his practical care, and his acceptance of suicide remain in tension, leaving their relationship to Rita unresolved even after she is gone.