Casino de Madrid is significant as the setting of Bea’s first meeting with Víctor, a night she later recalls as the starting point of upheavals that reached far beyond her private life. In the midst of a public crisis, the place becomes a marker of the alternate life she believes she might have had if that encounter had never happened.

Role in the Narrative

Bea recalls meeting Víctor at Casino de Madrid two months before the scene in which she is pursued through the street by journalists and television cameras. She contrasts that earlier night with the wedding she had expected: discreet despite its ostentation, and still in the process of being prepared. The casino thus stands for the point at which her private romantic story began to diverge from those expectations.

Recollection and Consequences

During the demonstration, with press behind her and a television presenter ahead, Bea imagines how events might have unfolded had she not met Víctor at the casino. In her counterfactual account, she would have been nervously preparing for her wedding, while her sister would not be facing the loss of her mayoralty and Diego would not be at risk of losing his fortune. The recollection does not establish the casino as the sole cause of these crises; it shows how Bea, cornered by their consequences, gathers them into a single origin story. The place gains its narrative force through that retrospective association: one meeting becomes, in her mind, the hinge between anticipated domestic privacy and a life exposed to public scrutiny.