Oscar

Oscar is Miraijin Carrera’s boyfriend, a Barcelona-based arrival at Marco Carrera’s final gathering, and a figure whom Marco comes to regard as a male counterpart to Miraijin: a leader whose energy is contagious and whose presence carries hope for a new world. His brief but consequential place in the novel is measured less by a long shared history than by the solidarity he offers at the end of Marco’s life.

Identity and Introduction

Oscar travels from Barcelona to the house at Bolgheri after Miraijin arranges for Marco’s loved ones to gather. He arrives alongside Giacomo Carrera from America, Luisa Lattes from Paris, and Marina Molitor and Greta from Germany; Daniele Carradori comes from Lampedusa. With Oscar, nurse Rodrigo, and the Spanish members of the escort, the house becomes unusually international. The journeys converge on a private farewell, but Oscar is not simply a visitor accompanying Miraijin: Marco singles him out as someone whose character has already made an impression.

Marco met Oscar only a few months earlier, during chemotherapy, when Oscar came to see Miraijin, who had moved to Florence to assist her grandfather. Marco was suffering, yet he could appreciate Oscar’s strength and even benefit from it. The encounter establishes the quality that defines Oscar in Marco’s account: his vitality travels outward, affecting others rather than remaining a private reserve.

Place in the Final Gathering

Miraijin’s organization gives the gathering the shape of hospitality rather than a vigil. She arranges carefully prepared rooms and meals of fresh fish, homemade pasta, and garden vegetables, even though Marco can no longer eat and has been fed for months through a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube. The care lavished on the guests acknowledges that they will return to their own corners of the world; the gathering is meant to honor living people even as they assemble around a man who has decided not to resume treatment.

Oscar’s presence belongs to this effort to keep the occasion from collapsing into unrelieved sorrow. Marco wants those gathered to feel free to leave for the house, the beach, or wherever they choose rather than remain out of obligation. The scene registers each person’s response: Giacomo struggles to hold himself together, Miraijin is embraced by Oscar, Luisa looks sad but steady, and Marina briefly meets Marco’s gaze before lowering her eyes. Oscar’s embrace is both intimate and public, a visible act of support within a room where affection and impending loss are inseparable.

Relationship with Miraijin and Marco

Oscar is Miraijin’s boyfriend, and his physical closeness to her is evident when he holds her around the shoulders during Marco’s address. Their relationship is not elaborated through a separate history, but the gathering presents them as a pair: Miraijin has taken responsibility for bringing people together, while Oscar stands beside her and shares the emotional weight of the occasion.

Marco’s judgment of Oscar extends beyond his role as Miraijin’s partner. He calls him a kind of male version of her, describing both as leaders and drivers, and sees in him great hope for the new world. The comparison makes Oscar’s importance relational: Marco understands him through the energy he recognizes in Miraijin, but also grants him an identity and promise of his own. The hope Marco associates with Oscar is not a claim that he can undo death; it is a confidence in the capacity of the living to carry connection forward.

Farewell and Significance

At the close of his encounter with Oscar, Marco tells him to hold on and embraces him. Oscar answers, "Claro," then adds, "Su vida es mi vida." The declaration, in Spanish, makes their farewell more than a conventional expression of sympathy: Oscar identifies his life with the life of another, placing himself within a bond that Marco is leaving behind. Marco has only recently come to know him, yet the exchange gives their relationship a concentrated intimacy, founded on recognition and solidarity rather than years of shared past.

Oscar then shakes Miraijin’s hands, brushes her lips with his own, and steps aside. The gesture returns the focus to her and to the network she has assembled, while his parting words remain as a compact statement of the gathering’s emotional logic. Marco’s death is approaching, but the scene refuses to make death the only fact in the room: Oscar’s embrace, his connection to Miraijin, and his declaration of shared life place care among those who remain at the center of the farewell.