Diego Applies for a Huge Loan, Pledging the Family Business

Diego Applies for a Huge Loan, Pledging the Family Business marks the point at which Diego’s campaign to secure investment in the biomass power plant becomes a direct gamble with his family business. With a major energy company considering a competing project in Catalonia, Diego tries to make his own proposal impossible to refuse; he then goes to the banks for a million-euro-scale credit and puts the business behind the risk. The project’s prospects and his livelihood become inseparable.

The Investor at Risk of Choosing Elsewhere

Diego explains that the project has required repeated meetings with Cantabria’s government, the local council, and residents. After making the case so often, he says, the speech comes easily. Public and community persuasion, however, is only part of the challenge: alongside seeking regional, national, and European subsidies, he needs a major investor, specifically a large energy company willing to fund the project.

That investor had seemed secured, but it was also considering another proposal in Catalonia. The company would invest in only one project. Diego therefore faces not simply a general need to raise money, but a contest for a particular investor whose decision could determine whether his plant advances. His insistence that the company must choose this project gives urgency to the risk he is about to take.

A Risky Acceleration

Diego’s answer is to put in substantially more money himself. He wants to advance the project and make it attractive enough that the company cannot reject it. The source of that extra capital is uncertain: he says he will have to find the money wherever he can, and that he may have to mortgage everything. The plan is thus an attempt to improve the project’s appeal by increasing his own exposure to its outcome.

As he lays out the decision, Diego notices that he may be telling Bea too much, then asks whether she came to hear him give this explanation. The moment presents the investment problem as information he has not necessarily meant to disclose, even as he spells out its stakes. It also makes clear that his proposed commitment is not a minor adjustment to the project budget: he is contemplating putting his assets at risk to improve the chance of winning the investor.

The Bank Meeting and Its Collateral

At a later meeting, Diego says that the project is a couple of days ahead of his schedule and that decisions still need to be made, though he tells Bea that they are not serious ones. Bea is visibly pleased, nearly euphoric. Diego asks to get more comfortable because his new shoes are hurting his ankle. Bea remarks that she has never seen him in a suit; he explains that dressing formally helps him appear more serious to the banks, and that the day mattered because he had to ask them for a huge credit.

The credit comes at a severe price. Diego says that, rather than relying on luck, he has had to pledge the whole business as collateral. He explains the consequence plainly: if the power plant does not go ahead, he loses everything. The conversation supplies the concrete form of the earlier possibility of mortgaging everything. What had sounded like a way to make the proposal more competitive now places the family business itself behind the project.

The Personal Meaning of the Gamble

Bea struggles to reconcile the scale of the exposure with Diego’s manner. In her account, she wonders whether he can really mean it: he seems to treat the decision like a risky move in Monopoly rather than a wager on real life. The contrast is not between a safe and a risky choice—Diego has made the risk explicit—but between the catastrophic consequence he describes and the almost game-like composure with which he describes it.

Diego does not deny the danger. He says that the feeling of standing at an abyss makes him feel alive. His response turns the loan into more than a financing mechanism: risk itself has an acknowledged emotional force for him, even while the threatened loss remains concrete. Bea then asks whether he should have made the decision with his father-in-law. The supplied scene leaves that question unanswered, ending instead on the tension between Diego’s personal commitment, the business pledged behind it, and the family judgment Bea believes should be involved.