Sexual revolution

Sexual revolution enters the novel as both a political label and a personal challenge to inherited rules about love, marriage, and exclusivity. In Valentin’s account of Jane Randolph, it means refusing to treat conventional marriage as the inevitable measure of a successful relationship: Jane’s choices are shaped by what she has witnessed at home and by her determination to preserve room for her own development. The idea is not presented as a settled doctrine. Molina’s contrasting hope for lifelong love makes the conversation a dispute over what freedom and commitment might mean to different people.

Jane’s Background and the Inherited Model

Valentin introduces Jane as a revolutionary first in matters of sexual freedom. She comes from a moderately comfortable bourgeois family and grows up in a two-story house in Caballito, watching her parents’ marriage become a source of distress. In Valentin’s account, her father deceives her mother by concealing his need for relationships outside the marriage, while her mother presents herself as a martyr and criticizes him in front of their daughter. Jane’s skepticism toward marriage and, more precisely, monogamy is therefore connected to a specific family example rather than offered as an abstract preference. The household’s apparent respectability does not shield her from its conflicts; it becomes the example she does not want to reproduce.

The narrative gives this history through Valentin speaking to Molina, who asks him to explain what he means. Their exchange places Jane’s ideas inside a personal story, not a theoretical exposition. Valentin identifies her early commitment to sexual revolution, then describes the circumstances that give it meaning: the mismatch between her parents’ needs, their concealment and resentment, and Jane’s unwillingness to accept that pattern as the natural form of adult life.

Education, Independence, and Choice

Jane is raised to be a proper young woman through piano lessons, French, and painting. After the lycée, her family has her enroll at the Catholic University, although she wants to attend the state university. She meets a student there, and they fall in love and begin an affair. He leaves his parents’ home, takes night work as a telephone operator, and rents a small apartment where they spend time together. Jane later moves in with him; her family initially resists but eventually accepts the arrangement and expects the couple to marry.

That expectation does not determine Jane’s decision. The student wants marriage, but she doubts it because she does not want to repeat the family history she has observed. She has one abortion, which, as Valentin recounts it, strengthens rather than diminishes her resolve. She believes that having a child at that point would restrict her freedom and prevent her from maturing and pursuing her own development. The account thus links sexual autonomy to education, work, and the ability to shape a future, not only to the terms of a romantic partnership.

Jane takes a reporting job at a magazine, doing street assignments to gather information for articles. Through this work she meets a young man in the political division. She feels drawn to him and judges that her relationship with the student has stagnated: the couple remains attached, but, in Valentin’s telling, they are too young to settle for that attachment without knowing what either wants. Jane proposes opening the relationship. The student accepts, and she begins seeing the reporter while her living arrangements remain unsettled; at times she stays with the student, and eventually she moves permanently to live with the reporter. The change is presented as a negotiated departure from exclusivity, followed by a further change in her domestic life.

Competing Ideas of Love

The account makes sexual revolution a conflict between inherited expectations and individual choice, but it does not reduce the conflict to a simple opposition between freedom and affection. Molina responds to Valentin’s distrust of marriage by expressing a wish to live beside a man he loves for the rest of his life. Valentin counters that such a hope cannot undo the mismatch between Molina’s desire and the other man’s desire for a woman. Their disagreement makes visible a gap between the kind of enduring, exclusive love Molina longs for and Valentin’s suspicion that conventional romantic ideals can conceal unequal or impossible arrangements.

Jane’s story offers another answer. She remains attached to the student while proposing that they see other people, and the student agrees; the relationship does not end at the instant exclusivity is questioned. Yet their earlier attachment does not settle what they want, and Jane eventually makes a different life with the reporter. Her choices therefore complicate both the assumption that love must lead to marriage and the assumption that attachment alone is enough reason to remain together. The account gives her actions and circumstances, while the larger conversation leaves the value of lifelong partnership open to disagreement.

The Conversation as a Test of Freedom

The novel’s form makes these ideas part of a changing relationship between Valentin and Molina. Molina says he likes the film Valentin is recounting but wants to participate rather than listen silently for hours; Valentin’s laughter and Molina’s anger briefly interrupt the telling. Elsewhere, Molina objects to Valentin’s manner of speaking and asks him to keep the exchange at a certain level. These moments show that the discussion of personal freedom unfolds through a conversation in which each man negotiates how much space to claim and how to address the other.

Later, Valentin describes their cell as a place where, in relation to one another, they can decide how to behave without outside pressure. He compares their situation to being alone together on an island and identifies his discomfort with receiving kindness without being asked to give something in return. After their sexual encounter, he tells Molina that he has no regrets and increasingly regards sex as innocent. These later exchanges do not establish that Jane’s choices caused or directly explain their intimacy. They do, however, extend the novel’s recurring question: whether closeness must follow prescribed roles and exchanges, or whether people can make a different arrangement between themselves. Sexual revolution is consequently presented less as a formula than as a contested possibility, tested in Jane’s decisions and in the men’s effort to speak about freedom, attachment, and care.