Bea’s Parents’ House

Bea’s Parents’ House is both a place of refuge and a storehouse of family memory. Bea returns to it from Madrid at a moment of upheaval, arriving with a giant suitcase at the home where she and her sisters grew up. Its gardens, cellar, and roof connect everyday family life to the surrounding landscape, while its familiar rooms carry memories of childhood mishaps, sibling rivalry, and the warmth Bea feels despite the tensions she expects to find again.

Setting and Surroundings

The house stands in a residential development on the outskirts of the village, in a somewhat rough-edged setting surrounded by vegetation and nearly adjoining the forest descending from the mountain slope. Bea remembers the landscape as unmistakably green, with trees, grass, and water visible in every direction. Having spent only three months in Madrid surrounded by asphalt, concrete, and paving stones, she first fully appreciated the privilege of growing up amid nature when she returned to Cantabria for the Christmas holidays. As an adolescent, she had longed for the city and even walked looking down at the pavement, imagining herself in a great metropolis. Leaving home made the abundance of its natural surroundings newly visible to her.

The neighborhood developed without a clear urban plan. Houses built later ranged from imposing structures of granite and broad slate roofs to simpler homes covered in climbing plants; Bea sees the result as harmonious despite its disorder. Her family’s house is not on the first, second, or even third line of the beach. The Cantabrian Sea becomes visible only in a small glimpse from the roof, which gives the roof its own place in the family’s life: Bea and her sisters spent many hours there, sunbathing by day and sharing beers or a joint at night.

The House and Its Spaces

The house was one of the first built in the development and is a source of pride for Bea’s parents. It has three levels if the attic is counted, a pitched roof, a large garage, and a cellar. The garage once served as a rehearsal space for Débora and the rock band she had as a teenager. The cellar became the sisters’ shared hangout, furnished with a foosball table, a ping-pong table, and whatever cushions and mattresses they could find. These spaces hold different strands of childhood: music and performance in the garage, and games and informal gathering below the house.

Inside are four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a kitchen with red wooden cupboards, and a living room with a large window overlooking the garden and vegetable patch. The garden faces south. Ángela grew courgettes and tomatoes there, but often forgot to pick them, leaving them to rot in the soil. A red-painted truck tire served as a swing. These details make the home’s family life concrete: it is a substantial house with room for its children, but also a lived-in place where a garden’s produce could be left unharvested and an old tire could become a plaything.

The Roof and Family Memory

The roof is not only a place for the sisters to gather but also the site of a frightening childhood accident. When León was three, he fell from it. At twenty-one, he still had a prominent scar on his jaw from the fall. Bea remembers the impact, León lying motionless, and blood flowing from his jaw. Irene reacted at once, took their father’s car, and drove him to the health center; Débora and Bea tried to stop the bleeding with the first cloth they could find. The roof’s place in the family’s happier routines therefore coexists with a memory of sudden danger and the sisters’ immediate response to it.

That mixture of ordinary intimacy and sharp recollection shapes how the house is presented. Its roof offers a view, a place to spend time together, and a setting for the sisters’ private rituals; it also preserves the memory of León’s injury. The house’s significance lies not in a single defining event but in the way its familiar spaces hold contrasting experiences without separating them.

Bea’s Return and the Family’s Rhythms

When Juan helps Bea unload her giant suitcase outside her parents’ home, the return is not emotionally simple. Before opening the door with her own keys, Bea hesitates over whether coming back is the right decision. She anticipates old arguments, reproaches, and rivalries between sisters, as well as the effort of trying to regain her place by pleasing different family members. Yet once inside, dragging her suitcase down the hall, she begins to feel the bodily warmth that the house has always brought her. The welcome is complicated: she has arrived seeking shelter from the chaos of her life, but knows that family life itself can reopen familiar conflicts.

The home’s atmosphere also changes with the presence of Bea’s father. He spends eight months a year at sea, and during that time the household becomes a matriarchy under the authority of Ángela and Irene. Irene partly takes the place of her father and resembles him in character, while Débora resembles him more closely in appearance. When Bea’s father comes home, he tries to reclaim authority, but his returns are temporary: just as he approaches imposing his will, it is time for him to go back to sea. Bea recalls the family as moving between eight months of a more relaxed life and four months under a stricter regime, a pattern she once assumed was normal in every household. The house thus registers absence as well as presence; its routines shift with the family’s changing balance of authority.

On Bea’s arrival, Débora announces the giant suitcase while holding a baby, and a three-legged dog comes over to sniff Bea. The dog belongs to Ángela’s habit of adopting animals from the pound, often those with little time left to live. Bea reflects that the family learned early to live alongside death, though, in her view, the children also learned not to become too attached in order to avoid grief. She connects that childhood response to her own later detachment from people. In this way, the home’s everyday inhabitants and habits become part of Bea’s understanding of how family life has shaped her, alongside the comfort she still feels as soon as she enters.