Juan

Juan is Débora’s husband, Óscar’s father, and a firefighter whose public refusal to evict elderly residents gives him a reputation for integrity. In Bea’s family life he is both a steady, practical presence and a participant in a painful marital crisis: Débora’s secrecy about their son’s achondroplasia leaves him frightened and suspicious, while her later decision to let him share in Óscar’s care opens a route toward reconciliation. His return at a protest against the biomass power plant brings his public conscience back into the story, now entangled with the political and family pressures surrounding Irene.

Identity and Public Reputation

Juan is not yet thirty when Bea returns to Cantabria, and he has been married to Débora for about a year and a half. He is tall, strong, and a firefighter by profession, but his public standing rests on more than the heroic image his appearance inspires. He and two fellow firefighters refused to help evict two elderly women from their seized homes, insisting through their actions that their work was to put out fires, not dispossess people of homes they had lived in all their lives. The refusal brought national newspaper coverage and a pending trial. Bea had proudly shown his photographs around her architecture studio, presenting him as her brother-in-law and admiring both his physical presence and his integrity.

That public profile contrasts with Juan’s quiet manner in private. When he collects Bea at the station, he expects the conversation to stay with safe subjects such as the weather, road conditions, and, if she asks, his work. His willingness to take her suitcase is similarly unshowy: she is exhausted and in pain, so she hands it over without pretending otherwise. For Bea, who has just endured other passengers’ looks of disapproval, his practical help and undemanding company make his arrival a relief.

Marriage and Parenting

Juan’s concern about his marriage emerges first through the way he describes caring for Óscar. Débora rarely lets the baby out of her arms and will not even let Juan bathe him. He had expected to change nappies and take part in ordinary childcare, and he is capable of doing so; the exception he acknowledges is breastfeeding. His frustration is sharpened by the contrast between Débora’s long-standing complaints about men who fail to share domestic and parenting work and her own refusal to let him share the work now that they have a child.

The disagreement also extends to Óscar’s vaccinations. Juan wants to take the baby to the paediatrician and have him vaccinated, while Débora resists. He regards the refusal to vaccinate, rather than vaccination itself, as the greater folly, and his concern adds a concrete health decision to his wider anxiety about being excluded from his son’s care. Bea hears about these tensions during her journey with him, even as she would rather avoid discussing the troubles that brought her home.

The underlying crisis becomes explicit when Juan learns that Óscar has achondroplasia. He is told that his son is expected to grow no taller than roughly a metre ten or a metre twenty. The news is difficult for him to absorb, but what most immediately unsettles him is that Débora has not told him during the months since the diagnosis. He wonders whether she has concealed the reason because it is genetic and asks Bea whether the child’s father might have been a man with dwarfism. Bea rejects that suspicion and tries to explain that Débora may simply have been unable to find a way to deliver bad news. Débora says nothing, and her silence intensifies Juan’s fear that more has been kept from him. His distress is therefore not only about Óscar’s physical difference; it is bound up with the loss of trust between the parents and his feeling that he has been shut out of his own child’s life.

Separation and Attempted Reconciliation

As the marriage crisis worsens, Bea intervenes rather than leaving the couple to avoid one another. When Débora challenges her for coming home to take refuge with their parents, Bea answers by calling Juan on her mobile phone and making Débora speak to him. Débora initially resists, but eventually agrees to meet him. She asks Bea to help choose clothes for the encounter: skinny, faded-blue jeans with torn knees and a violet, low-cut sweater. She refuses Bea’s suggestion that she dye her hair, preferring her natural hair treatment and rejecting chemical products. For this meeting she also asks Bea to keep Óscar, because she wants to see Juan alone. Once the family knows what has been happening, Débora is no longer as unwilling to be separated from her son.

Débora does not come home that night. At midnight she sends Bea a message saying that the reconciliation will take time and that she will explain the next day. When she appears at eleven the following morning, she is radiant despite having stayed awake all night. She tells Bea that she and Juan talked for a long time and also had sex twice. Juan is willing to try again and has forgiven her, though Débora acknowledges that the night was difficult and that she had feared they might not manage it. Their renewed relationship does not erase the injury caused by her secrecy; it marks a decision to face it together rather than remain apart.

Family Presence and Civic Conflict

Juan’s place in the wider family is often practical. When Bea meets Gollum, the dog threatens to mark her suitcase, and Débora manages to pull him away. The family story also gives Juan a brief place beside Óscar during an encounter with a dwarf performer: the baby looks toward Juan, who has crouched beside him, and Juan tells the child to stay still. The moment offers a small image of his closeness to his son amid the larger dispute over how much of Óscar’s care Débora will allow him to share.

Later, Juan appears with several firefighter colleagues at the mass demonstration against the biomass power plant. They are wearing their work uniforms, which Bea reads as making their opposition to the plant visible. She is especially hurt because she had not known that Juan and his colleagues opposed it, and she suspects that he persuaded them to take part. His presence links the public controversy to the family: Irene has built her governing agenda around the plant and fears that opposition from her own relatives will undermine the project. Juan’s stand at the protest recalls the moral independence behind his earlier refusal to evict the elderly women, while placing that independence in direct tension with Irene’s political commitments. The narrative does not make him a political spokesman; it shows him arriving where he believes people are needed, even when his presence complicates loyalties within his family.