Christmas

Christmas is an annual marker through which Elena measures both the continuing ties between Rita and Isabel and the possibility that those ties have outlasted Rita herself. In the novel, its recurrence is practical as well as emotional: it brings another card, another chance for news to have failed, and a familiar gift ritual that joins Rita and Elena across their differences.

An annual rhythm of cards

Rita sends Isabel a Christmas card every year. That regular exchange matters to Elena as she sets out to find Isabel and ask for her help in understanding Rita’s death. She knows Isabel will remember Rita, but she is uncertain whether Isabel knows that Rita has died. The yearly card makes that uncertainty concrete: if no one has told Isabel and she has not seen the death notice, she may send another card in December, wishing a happy Christmas and New Year to someone who can no longer receive it.

The notice itself arrived late. The Catholic school where Rita worked published an obituary two days after the burial, describing its administration, staff, and students as united in grief at her sudden loss. Elena considers that Isabel might have read it, but cannot rely on that possibility. Christmas therefore becomes an approaching test of whether information about Rita’s death has reached the person who still writes to her. The date does not resolve Elena’s uncertainty; it gives that uncertainty a recurring deadline.

The holiday inside Elena’s search

Elena’s concern about a future card accompanies her immediate effort to find Isabel. She is going to explain who she is, tell Isabel what she knows about Rita’s death, and appeal to a debt from the past. Her purpose is urgent, while the card exchange belongs to a slower calendar: if she cannot reach Isabel now, December will bring the familiar gesture around again. The possible card makes the cost of delay legible without establishing that Isabel will remain unaware. Elena can imagine the mistake, but does not know whether it will happen.

Christmas also helps connect the search in the present to Elena and Rita’s earlier visit to Isabel. Nearly twenty years later, Elena remembers the old house in Belgrano and its heavy wooden door with bronze fittings, but not the street name. The remembered meeting and the anticipated December card occupy different kinds of time: one is a scene Elena struggles to reconstruct, while the other is an annual routine she knows by repetition. Together they show why her journey is not only a search for a place. She is trying to recover a relationship and act before another cycle of correspondence passes without the truth being shared.

A gift and a difference in belief

Christmas has a second, more intimate recurrence in Rita’s habit of buying a new pair of pink underwear for herself and another for Elena. Elena exchanges the pair meant for her for black ones. Rita understands that the custom is not prescribed by church teaching, but gives the gift anyway; Elena’s response makes their difference visible in an ordinary domestic act rather than in an argument about faith.

That small exchange sits beside the varied practices through which Rita makes religion her own. She observes fasts during Lent and before communion, visits seven churches on Good Friday, and follows rules about how to dress and when to arrive at Mass. Yet the Christmas gift belongs to custom rather than doctrine, as Rita herself recognizes. For Elena, the color is not a command to accept Rita’s choice: she quietly substitutes black. Christmas thus holds the two women’s habits together without making them identical. Rita offers a recurring sign of care; Elena receives it on her own terms.

What the saved cards preserve

After Rita’s death, Elena keeps the folder of Christmas cards sent by the Mansillas among Rita’s belongings. It is stored with other remnants of her daughter’s life, including her address book, photographs, papers, and a carefully clipped announcement of the birth of Isabel and Marcos’s daughter, María Julieta, on March 20, 1982. The cards and the birth announcement preserve different points in a long connection: one records a repeated exchange, the other a dated family event. Neither tells Elena what Isabel now knows about Rita’s death.

The folder gives the yearly greeting a material afterlife. It is no longer simply an exchange between two living correspondents: Elena has saved the evidence of its repetition, even as she fears another card may be addressed to Rita after her death. Christmas consequently gathers affection, habit, and belated knowledge into a single recurring date. Its significance lies not in a reunion or a resolution, but in the contrast between a ritual that can continue and the person whose absence gives that continuation its painful meaning.