Isabel's unwanted pregnancy

Isabel's unwanted pregnancy is the history behind a rescue that is also an act of coercion: Rita prevents Isabel from reaching an abortion provider, insisting that the pregnancy must continue, while Isabel insists that she does not want to become a mother. The pregnancy later continues, but its outcome does not resolve the conflict over who had the right to decide. Through Isabel's account of the violence and control surrounding her marriage, the novel distinguishes motherhood as a lived condition from motherhood as an identity imposed by others.

Discovery and the attempted abortion

Twenty years before Elena visits Isabel, Rita finds her near their home while hurrying back to work at Sacred Heart Catholic School. Isabel is bent over and vomiting on the pavement, holding a paper with an address and the name Olga. The address is where she intends to go to obtain an abortion. She has already confirmed the pregnancy with a laboratory test. Rita initially recoils from the sight, but stops, turns back, and offers help. Isabel refuses it; Rita nevertheless recognizes that she is unwell and continues trying to intervene.

Their encounter takes place across a literal boundary as well as a moral one. Rita refuses to step onto the checkerboard-patterned pavement where Isabel is standing, a pattern she also forbids Elena to walk on. From that side of the street, she argues with Isabel about the pregnancy. Rita invokes sin, the life she believes Isabel carries, and the possibility that hearing a heartbeat will change Isabel's feelings. Isabel answers that she does not want a child and does not consider herself a mother. She says she has always known she did not want motherhood, and that continuing the pregnancy would make it impossible for her to live as she wants. The disagreement is not a misunderstanding: Isabel repeatedly states her decision, while Rita treats that decision as one Isabel is not entitled to make.

Rita's intervention and its consequences

Rita also insists that the father has a right to a say and urges Isabel to trust God's will. Isabel rejects both claims. She says she does not care what her husband thinks and indicates that he has already harmed her. Rita counters by calling the pregnancy a child and urging Isabel to give it a name. Her appeals combine religious doctrine, warnings of future guilt, and the assertion that Isabel is already a mother. Isabel's replies make clear that these arguments do not represent her own beliefs or wishes.

When Isabel becomes dizzy, Rita takes her by the arm and brings her to Elena's home. Isabel is exhausted, and Rita is determined. She leaves Isabel in a bedroom while she goes to the train station, where the town's taxi rank is located, then returns with a taxi and takes Isabel away from the abortion provider's address. The decisive fact is not simply that Rita offers assistance: she uses her strength and control of the situation to prevent Isabel from carrying out her stated intention. The pregnancy continues. Rita's intervention therefore turns a disagreement about motherhood into a decision imposed on Isabel, even as Rita understands her action as saving a life.

Marriage, coercion, and enforced motherhood

Years later, Isabel explains to Elena that the pregnancy followed sexual violence within her marriage to Marcos. She says she had not loved him and that, after a difficult start to their sexual relationship, he forced her. He stopped touching her once she became pregnant. Isabel further reveals that Marcos's male partner was present during the assault and helped keep her under control during the pregnancy. The partner appears in a photograph on the mantel, where he is also identified as the godfather of María Julieta Mansilla, Isabel's daughter.

Isabel describes the months of pregnancy as a period in which other people controlled her circumstances. She was kept nearly as a prisoner, sedated, and watched by nurses during the day and at night. Her husband and his partner arranged this supervision, and she says she allowed it. Before that, after learning the test results, she had gone to Marcos to tell him she did not want a child. He struck her and said he would be ashamed of her; he also threatened divorce, except for the pregnancy. A nurse from his clinic later gave Isabel the address for Olga after seeing her distressed. That address is the one Isabel carries when Rita finds her.

The revelation changes the meaning of Rita's rescue without making it less coercive. Rita prevents an abortion, but she does so in a story where Isabel has already been denied meaningful control over sex, pregnancy, and her own living conditions. The claim that Isabel has a choice because she is pregnant is contradicted by the circumstances she recounts: the pregnancy was unwanted, arose from violence, and was followed by surveillance and confinement. Her eventual motherhood cannot be used as proof that Rita was right to override her.

Memory, experience, and Elena's understanding

When Isabel tells Elena what happened, she challenges the idea that another person's suffering can be fully understood through description alone. Elena knows this distinction from her own experience of Parkinson's disease: she may have heard explanations of the illness, but its consequences became real to her only after they entered her body and changed what she could do. Isabel's account extends that recognition to pregnancy, shame, and sexual violence. Elena listens, but Isabel's history also unsettles her; the story of the woman Rita once brought home is no longer a simple account of rescue or religious conviction.

Isabel's experience returns to the question Elena has brought to her: what could have led Rita to die? Isabel does not claim to know Rita's motive. Instead, she asks what ordeal could have confronted Rita with an action she had never imagined taking, just as the positive pregnancy test had confronted Isabel with a choice and a reality she had not wanted. She asks what might have made Rita go to the church in the storm and climb the belfry. The parallel is suggestive, not conclusive: Isabel's unwanted pregnancy explains the stakes of Rita's earlier intervention, but it does not establish why Rita later died. By placing the two women's experiences beside one another, the novel makes maternal identity a contested and consequential question, while leaving Elena to face the limits of what she can know about her daughter.