Rita and Isabel's relationship

Rita and Isabel's relationship is founded on a decisive, unequal intervention: Rita finds Isabel seeking an abortion and takes her away from the route she was trying to follow. Rita understands the act as saving a child; Isabel experiences it as the beginning of a motherhood she did not choose. Their connection remains consequential across the twenty years before Isabel recounts it to Elena, but the evidence presents no friendship or continuing contact between the two women. Instead, the encounter returns through Isabel's account as an unresolved conflict over who had the right to decide what would happen to her body and her life.

The Encounter

On her way back from lunch with Elena to the Catholic school where she worked, Rita saw Isabel vomiting across the street. Isabel was on her way to an address associated with Olga, carrying a paper with the name and address. Rita initially felt disgust and hurried past, but then turned back, describing the reversal as the response to a voice warning her that Isabel was pregnant and going to the abortion provider. She offered help; Isabel refused, saying she did not need anything, but Rita persisted when she saw that Isabel could barely walk.

Conviction and Intervention

Rita argued that Isabel would regret having an abortion and appealed to Catholic teaching, the pregnancy, and the prospect of Isabel hearing babies cry in her head. Isabel rejected the premise that she already considered herself a mother and insisted she did not want one. Rita answered by treating motherhood as something already determined by pregnancy, and by framing the decision as one Isabel was not entitled to make. The dispute exposes a basic asymmetry: Rita speaks with certainty about abortion and motherhood, while Isabel is the person facing the consequences and explicitly denies that Rita can know what her experience will be.

When Isabel continued to resist, Rita took her by the arm and brought her to Elena's house. Isabel was exhausted and dizzy, and Rita was determined; the narration presents her as dragging Isabel away from the place she was trying to reach. This was not a decision reached between them. Rita's intervention prevented Isabel from continuing toward the abortion provider and contributed to Isabel becoming a mother despite her stated refusal. Rita, who was not a mother and would never become one, imposed her convictions on another woman's pregnancy without having lived the experience about which she claimed authority.

The Consequences for Isabel

Isabel later describes the intervention as the point at which she lost the strength she had managed to summon. Before Rita brought her home, Isabel had sought help to end the pregnancy; she had gone to her husband with the test results and asked not to have a child. Her account describes a marriage in which pregnancy followed sexual coercion, and a household in which her husband and his partner, along with nurses, controlled her during the pregnancy. Those circumstances belong to the wider history of Isabel's constrained choices; Rita's separate role was to stop her from reaching the abortion provider and bring her into Elena's home.

The long aftermath is not presented as a simple claim that Isabel regretted one choice. Isabel tells Elena that she lived with the experience of being a mother who had not wanted motherhood: the guilt and shame associated with not wanting to care for her daughter, and the conflict between her own feelings and the social expectation that a mother should welcome the role. She also says that Rita had warned her she would hear a baby crying in her head, though Rita had never undergone an abortion herself. The contrast makes Rita's warning part of the harm Isabel remembers: it supplied a lasting measure of guilt without giving Isabel the understanding that could come only from lived experience.

Remembering Rita Through Elena

For twenty years, Rita's action connects Isabel to Elena, even though the women do not meet again in the supplied account until Elena comes to Isabel's home after Rita's death. Isabel tells Elena that Rita treated her body as if it belonged to someone else, and sees Elena's present visit as another attempt to use her body for a purpose of Elena's own. The charge links the past intervention to the present investigation: in both cases, Isabel feels that another woman has arrived with an objective and expected her to serve it.

Isabel's account also revises Elena's understanding of her daughter. Rita had presented her intervention as knowledge of what Isabel would feel, but Isabel insists that Rita had never experienced either abortion or unwanted motherhood. The relationship therefore survives in the novel less as a mutual bond than as an unresolved ethical encounter. Rita's determination was framed by religious certainty, while Isabel's later testimony restores the perspective that certainty had overridden: the pregnant woman was not an idea or a moral lesson, but a person whose refusal and subsequent experience had to be heard.