«No hay mal que por bien no venga»

«No hay mal que por bien no venga» is a saying about unexpected good emerging from misfortune. In the novel, its recurrence turns a familiar consolation into a family inheritance: Bea uses it to understand the time she regained with her mother, and Ángela invokes it when describing where she wants her ashes scattered.

Bea’s Return and Its Unexpected Consequence

After Ángela’s death, Bea reflects that the painful events involving Víctor and the woman from the television news brought her back to her family home. That return gave her months with her mother, time she now recognizes as precious. The saying helps her hold both truths together: what had seemed like a terrible rupture also made possible a period of closeness she might otherwise have missed.

Ángela’s Ashes and the Chapel

The expression appears again in Ángela’s instructions for her ashes. She asks her family to scatter them at the cliff where Irene arranged for the Romanesque chapel to be moved. The place had been one of Ángela’s favorites, though she had teased Irene about turning it into a destination for pilgrims. Ángela imagines that her choir friends, the priest, and many of her patients may take the scattering as a sign that she has finally embraced religion; she is content to let them think so, joking that a mass or two cannot hurt her.

A Saying Passed Between Generations

The two uses connect personal grief to the novel’s pattern of finding unforeseen consequences within painful events. For Bea, the saying makes her return home legible in retrospect; for Ángela, it accompanies a wry acceptance of the chapel’s new meaning and her family’s eventual farewell. Its repetition does not erase loss: Bea’s mother is dead, and the ashes disappear into the sea. Instead, the phrase offers a way to recognize what misfortune made possible while still facing what cannot be undone.