Sofia submits her application to finish her doctorate in America

Sofia submits her application to finish her doctorate in the United States during a night of acute conflict with Rose. Galvanized by her mother’s wish for an amputation, she stays awake writing and presses Send at sunrise; the act gives her desire for distance a practical form, but the evidence does not establish whether she is accepted or leaves.

Background: Caregiving and dependence

The application grows out of a relationship organized around care and its repeated failures. Rose calls for water, and Sofia brings it in different forms, trying to understand what her mother wants; even when she boils it without chilling it, it is still wrong. The small task becomes a measure of how little communication remains between them. Sofia no longer speaks to Rose after learning of the amputation wish, which she experiences as the replacement of conversation by a surgeon’s knife.

Their dependence is not simply constant or settled. At one point, Sofia walks with Rose by matching her pace, describing her own legs as her mother’s legs, though Rose had earlier walked alone to a local shop for hairpins. Later, Sofia finds herself limping even when her mother is not with her, as if her body has retained the shared gait. This involuntary echo makes separation difficult to imagine as a clean break: the caregiving rhythm has entered Sofia’s own movement.

The crisis and the application

Rose’s stated wish to have her limbs amputated shocks Sofia and intensifies an already precarious sense of reality. She feels unable to live with the violence of the intention and describes her own footing as uncertain. Yet the threat also galvanizes her. Rather than resolving the conflict through another conversation, Sofia turns toward a decision she can make alone: she stays awake through the night preparing an application to complete her doctorate in the United States, explicitly wanting to be as far from Rose as possible.

The work unfolds on a shattered digital page beneath the desert stars. Sofia hammers at the keyboard as her sentences take shape, then watches the sun rise. The movement of the Earth around the sun becomes a counterpart to her own sense of spinning, but the passage culminates not in reflection alone: she presses Send. The application is thus both an academic step and an immediate act of separation, made under the pressure of a family crisis rather than in response to any stated deadline.

Consequences and significance

The decisive consequence established here is that Sofia has submitted the application; acceptance, travel, and the completion of her doctorate remain unresolved. The act changes the direction of her response to Rose’s crisis from sleepless distress to an attempt at departure. It does not erase their bond: the earlier involuntary limp shows how deeply their shared pace has become embodied, even as Sofia seeks distance.

The event also gives the novel’s recurring images of brokenness and movement a concrete turn. The damaged digital page becomes the surface on which Sofia forms a possible future, while the sunrise marks the moment she commits that future to an institution beyond her present life in Almería. Her choice offers no guarantee of escape, but it converts a wish to be elsewhere into a submitted application.