Mar del Plata

Mar del Plata is the recurring coastal setting of Elena and Rita’s holidays, a place where familiar arrangements make their strained mother-daughter relationship visible in its daily rhythms. The trips offer a change of scenery rather than a beach vacation: the pair avoid the sand and crowds, while their repeated walks, disputes, and small practical decisions turn the city into a stage for a relationship that follows them wherever they go.

A Repeated Holiday Destination

Elena and Rita travel to Mar del Plata every two years, continuing the custom until Elena’s illness makes movement increasingly difficult. In the years between trips, they stay home and spend their savings on necessary work: painting the house, repairing a broken pipe, replacing a worn mattress, digging a new sewage pit, and renewing patio tiles displaced by the roots of a paraíso tree growing beyond their fence. The alternating pattern links the journey to the pressures of their home life: travel is one of the few regular changes in a routine otherwise shaped by repairs, limited savings, and Elena’s declining mobility.

They rent a two-room place off Colón Avenue, one block before the avenue begins to climb and then descend toward the sea. Rita takes the bedroom, while Elena sleeps in the living-dining area, a division justified by Rita as a way to keep her mother near the kitchen when she rises early. Choosing the accommodation is itself familiar work. Rita circles classified advertisements for rentals within their budget, then favors owners who live close to their home so they will not have to travel far to arrange payment and collect the key. They inspect photographs together, though the pictures conceal grime and do not faithfully represent the rooms. Elena likes cleaning and, before her body limited her, found that scrubbing relaxed her and eased her back pain; within an afternoon she could make an imperfect apartment clean.

The City Without the Beach

The coast does not mean swimming or lying on the sand for Elena and Rita. They avoid the beach because it is too crowded and hot; Rita dislikes carrying the umbrella, and Elena will not go onto the sand without guaranteed shade. Instead, the holiday’s pleasures are modest and domestic: sleeping later, eating fresh-baked croissants at breakfast, cooking fresh fish, and changing the scenery around them.

Every afternoon, as the sun begins to disappear behind the apartment buildings, they walk the Rambla. They go south to north along the seafront and return north to south along the avenue. At the Hotel Provincial they turn around and head back south. This repeated route gives the holiday a dependable shape, but it does not make the relationship peaceful. They argue on the walks, and the dispute’s subject matters less than its established rhythm: one exchange calls up another, words strike like lashes, and each woman tries not to show that she has been hurt. Usually Rita walks several steps ahead, muttering as she withdraws from the confrontation; Elena follows at the distance they have settled into, and may later deliver her own retort. The arguments eventually give way to silence, but the next day brings the same walk and the same pattern.

Souvenirs and the Weather-Predicting Sea Lion

On one holiday, Rita notices a glass sea lion in a souvenir shop among shell necklaces, shell-decorated boxes, Torreón del Monje-shaped ashtrays, and novelty corkscrews. A sign says that the weather-predicting ornament turns blue for sun and pink for rain. Rita taps the shop window with a freshly filed fingernail and decides to buy it before they leave. Elena objects that it is a waste of money, and the disagreement becomes another opening for their sharper, more personal quarrels: Rita insists on spending as she pleases, while Elena disparages her judgment and Rita turns the criticism back on her mother.

The sea lion becomes more than a holiday purchase when Elena recalls it after Rita’s death. On the rainy afternoon Rita died, the glass ornament in her room had turned purplish pink, its signal that humidity was near one hundred percent and precipitation imminent. Its color connects the coastal holiday to the circumstances of Rita’s death: an object acquired during one of their repeated trips registers the weather on the day that their shared routine ends.

A Place Held in Memory

Mar del Plata remains associated not with a single excursion but with recurrence: the same kind of rental, the same route, and the same succession of arguments and silences. The pair do not mention the sea lion again during the holiday after their dispute over it, though on a later walk Elena jokes about giving Rita a priest-shaped corkscrew for Father Juan, and Rita rebukes her for the remark. Even the souvenirs become part of the setting for their familiar exchanges.

The city’s narrative significance rests in the contrast between repetition and change. The walks and holiday arrangements preserve a recognizable pattern, while Elena’s illness alters what she can do and Rita’s death gives the remembered weather-predicting ornament a new weight. Mar del Plata is both a real destination—defined by its rented rooms, avenue, seafront, and shops—and a measure of the years in which mother and daughter continued to travel together, arguing their way through the same afternoons.