Lent

Lent is a recurring season of religious time whose observances shape Rita’s habits without making her faith uniform or wholly doctrinal. Her fasting and abstinence place her within a Catholic calendar of repeated bodily practices, while her mother Elena’s concealed disbelief reveals how religious language and ritual can persist even where belief does not.

Rita’s observances

Rita fasts and abstains not only on Good Friday but also on the Thursday before it, on Ash Wednesday, and on every Friday of Lent. These practices recur within the year, giving the season a physical measure: religious time is kept through what she does or declines to do. On Good Friday she also visits seven different churches, extending observance from private discipline into movement among sacred places.

The account sets these Lenten practices beside Rita’s other religious habits without treating them all as the same kind of observance. She wears a cross, avoids entering a church with uncovered shoulders, fasts for an hour before communion, and arrives at Mass before the Creed so that it will count. At Christmas she buys new pink underwear for herself and Elena, a custom she knows is not part of Church teaching. Her practices combine formal rules, inherited tradition, and personal choices rather than following a single, consistent standard.

A personal religious calendar

Rita’s relationship to religion is described as ambivalent: she sometimes skips Mass, especially when it rains, and does not confess every sin or pray every night. She says there are days when God does not deserve her praise. Yet she observes Lent’s fasts and abstinence and undertakes the demanding Good Friday circuit of seven churches. The contrast makes her religion appear assembled through particular commitments and refusals, not reducible to either complete devotion or rejection.

Rain itself can interrupt that calendar. Rita avoids church on rainy days because she fears being struck by lightning, even though this means missing Mass. Her practice therefore turns on more than the official season: weather, fear, ritual, and personal rules all affect whether sacred time is observed. The season recurs, but its observance remains a lived negotiation rather than an automatic submission to the calendar.

Elena and religious time

Elena has spent years presenting herself as a believer, in part because her husband Antonio was a practising Catholic and taught theology at a Catholic school. She privately doubts the existence of heaven, hell, purgatory, the soul, and eternal life. She understands Rita’s mixed relationship to faith against this family contrast: Rita was raised by one fervent Catholic and one mother who only pretended to believe.

Although Elena does not share Rita’s faith, religious time and language remain present in her thinking. Words associated with prayer, sin, penitence, the Creed, and resurrection continue to recur to her; their persistence marks the difference between inhabiting a religious vocabulary and accepting its doctrines. The Lenten calendar thus belongs to Rita’s practice, but the broader religious world it represents also shapes the family’s understanding of duty, death, and belief.

The calendar beyond Lent

The novel places seasonal observance alongside other forms of measured time. At a memorial Mass for Rita, Father Juan proposes a Sunday seven o’clock service, and Elena calculates that the hour conflicts with her medication schedule. In another episode, a Mass takes place on Corpus Christi, the Thursday after Pentecost; the church holds its service while Rita’s body remains undiscovered in the belfry, and rain rather than bells is heard outside. These occasions are not part of Lent, but they show how the religious calendar continues to organize communal time amid grief, bodily need, and death.

Lent’s significance lies in this coexistence of recurring ritual with individual experience. For Rita, it is marked by concrete acts of fasting, abstinence, and church visits; for Elena, the inherited language of religion survives without conviction. The season offers a pattern for observance, but the novel shows that the pattern is interpreted and lived differently from one person to another.