Isabel

Isabel is a woman whose history binds Rita’s intervention in her pregnancy to a later reckoning with Elena over Rita’s death. Her account turns the question of motherhood away from doctrine and presumed maternal feeling toward bodily experience, constrained choices, and the lasting costs of being made to live a life she did not choose.

The Encounter with Rita

Twenty years before her conversation with Elena, Isabel was vomiting on the pavement while on her way to seek an abortion. She had a paper with an address and the name Olga, and was too unwell to walk easily. Rita, returning from lunch with Elena on her way to the Catholic school, first recoiled from the sight, then turned back and offered help. Isabel refused, but Rita insisted she could not continue in that condition and argued that she should not end the pregnancy. Isabel said she did not want to become a mother; Rita answered with religious conviction and claims about the child’s life and the guilt Isabel would supposedly carry. Isabel maintained that she did not consider herself a mother and did not want the pregnancy.

Rita noticed Isabel’s wedding ring and invoked the father’s right to have a say. Isabel replied that she did not care what he thought and disclosed that he had already harmed her. When Isabel became dizzy, Rita took her by the arm and brought her to Elena’s house despite her resistance. The narrator makes the imbalance in this encounter explicit: Rita, who was not a mother and would never become one, used the beliefs she had learned to compel another woman to continue a pregnancy. Isabel’s arrival was therefore not simply a rescue from physical distress; it was also the moment when Rita’s convictions overruled her expressed wishes.

Marriage, Pregnancy, and Constraint

In her later account to Elena, Isabel explains that she was not in love with her husband, Marcos. They were both virgins when they married, and their early attempts at intimacy did not succeed. Isabel describes a violent first sexual encounter and says that the assaults continued until she became pregnant; afterward, Marcos did not touch her again. Twenty years had passed since he last did so. Her account establishes that the pregnancy Rita treated as a moral choice arose in circumstances in which Isabel’s consent had been violated.

Isabel also identifies Marcos’s male partner as a presence in the abuse. The man had been with Marcos on the night Isabel was assaulted, she says, and she believes Marcos would not have acted alone. The same man was present when Rita brought Isabel to Elena’s home. During the pregnancy, Marcos and the partner helped keep Isabel under control. She says she was kept almost like a prisoner, sedated, and watched by nurses both day and night. The care arranged around her thus functioned as confinement: others made decisions and managed her circumstances while she was denied control over her own body.

The partner’s place in the household is also visible in the family photographs. Marcos named him as María Julieta Mansilla’s godfather, and Isabel says the two men traveled together and lived as companions. When Elena examines the framed family portrait, Isabel presents it as an image for other people to admire rather than a truthful account of the family. The photographs preserve an appearance of family unity while her recollections expose the violence and unequal power concealed behind it.

Motherhood and Lived Knowledge

Isabel distinguishes what she had thought about pregnancy from what she knew once she was pregnant. Before the test, her position against becoming a mother had existed as an idea; when the laboratory result came back positive, the decision was no longer hypothetical. She says that she knew what was inside her was not a child and that she needed to deal with the situation quickly. Her account directly contests Rita’s certainty that hearing a heartbeat would make Isabel want the pregnancy, as well as the broader presumption that a woman’s body automatically confirms other people’s beliefs about motherhood.

Isabel tells Elena that she knows what it is like to be a mother despite not wanting to be one. She describes the shame of not wanting to hold, comfort, or care for a baby, and the pressure of a society in which people insist that mothers should want motherhood. Her experience does not make her a universal authority on abortion; instead, she insists on the distinction between imagining an experience and knowing it from within. She draws a parallel with Elena’s Parkinson’s: descriptions can convey information, but the person who lives with the illness knows it in a way that observers do not. Isabel’s point is both personal and an answer to Rita’s earlier presumption that conviction gave her the right to decide for someone else.

Confrontation with Elena

When Elena visits Isabel years later, carrying her certainty that Rita would never have gone near a church on a rainy day because she feared lightning, Isabel challenges the word never. She recalls that she herself had once believed she would never consider abortion, only to encounter a pregnancy that transformed the question. For Isabel, a person’s assumptions about what she could do were not the same as knowledge acquired through experience. She asks Elena to consider what might have led Rita to act against her own expectations, rather than treating her known fear as proof that suicide was impossible.

Isabel also interprets Elena’s visit through the earlier encounter. She accuses Elena of coming not to settle a debt but to repeat the act of using Isabel’s body, this time by making her serve Elena’s need to understand Rita’s death. Elena denies that this was her purpose but, confused and unable to answer clearly, cannot explain why she came. Isabel repeatedly asks her to say it plainly. The disagreement reveals how the original violation has outlasted the afternoon when Rita brought Isabel into the house: Isabel sees Elena’s inquiry as another demand placed on her, while Elena struggles to make herself understood.

What Isabel Leaves Unresolved

Isabel does not claim to know why Rita died. Instead, she uses her own life to unsettle Elena’s certainty that Rita’s fears made suicide inconceivable. She proposes that a test or crisis might have confronted Rita with something she had never imagined doing, and speculates that Rita may have gone to the church despite the storm before climbing the tower and hanging herself. This remains Isabel’s hypothesis, not confirmation of Rita’s motive or final thoughts.

The conversation ends without an easy reconciliation or a settled explanation. Isabel has made Elena listen to the difference between believing one knows another person and recognizing the limits of that belief. Her testimony gives independent weight to a life previously defined by Rita’s intervention: Isabel speaks of what she wanted, what was done to her, and what motherhood felt like, while refusing to let either woman’s certainty stand in for her experience.