Bea’s father

Bea’s father is a seafarer whose repeated departures and homecomings organize the emotional seasons of Bea’s family. For years, he is away at sea for eight months of each year and home for four; the household develops its own authority and routines in his absence, while his returns bring gifts, anticipation, and an attempt to reclaim a place that has never been entirely vacant. His early retirement threatens to end that arrangement, making a familiar absence suddenly present as a question of how a couple and family will live together.

Identity and Background

Bea’s father works at sea, spending much of each year aboard ship and travelling to distant places. During the period Bea recalls, he is away for eight months and home for four. The pattern is not incidental to family life: it determines who directs the household, how the sisters understand parental authority, and what everyone expects when he returns.

His work also gives his homecomings a tangible character. He brings back objects and food from the places he has visited, including African masks, fertility figures, dolls representing different races and colours, and local foods. The gifts make his travels visible inside the family home; his return is a celebration as well as the reappearance of a parent who has been absent for most of the year.

Authority and the Household’s Two Seasons

While he is at sea, the household becomes a matriarchy led by Ángela and Irene. Bea describes the two of them as its captains. Irene resembles her father in temperament and, in his absence, partly takes his place; Débora, by contrast, is the daughter most like him in appearance. The family’s authority therefore does not simply disappear when he sails. It shifts to the women, especially Irene, whose warnings about what will happen when their father returns become a familiar feature of the sisters’ upbringing.

Those warnings rarely have lasting force. By the time Bea’s father comes home, the offence that prompted the threat has generally been forgotten, so the anticipated restoration of his authority does not amount to a reckoning. He tries to recover his lost throne, but with little success: whenever he is close to imposing his will, it is time for him to leave again. Bea presents this shifting order as ordinary in childhood, only later recognizing how unusual it might seem to people outside the family.

The household experiences the cycle as two different emotional climates: eight months of a more relaxed life followed by four under a stricter regime. Neither is presented as wholly bad. The sisters enjoy, or at least appreciate, the change between them. In the two weeks before their father is due to disembark, they become increasingly eager and tense, tidying the house, repairing disorder, settling arguments, and promising to behave so that he will meet the best version of his family. Their preparations do not guarantee lasting calm; even when things seem in order, family chaos soon returns.

Marriage and Life Apart

Ángela describes the eight-month separation as part of what makes her marriage work. In her account, four months together are enough to enjoy her husband, while eight months apart allow disagreements to fade rather than harden into enduring resentments. She also links the pattern to an intense sex life, speaking about it freely enough to embarrass her children. Her explanation makes absence more than a professional inconvenience: it is the structure through which she understands the durability and vitality of the marriage.

That arrangement is tested when communication at sea becomes more constant. After twenty-three years of seeing one another when they can and speaking sparingly while he is away, Bea’s father begins using Skype more often, following a new habit among his shipmates. Ángela objects to the expectation of constant connection. Her resistance is not a declaration that she does not want him; she says she does want to talk to him, but when he is home. The distinction exposes how firmly their marriage has been built around separation and reunion, and how unfamiliar daily remote contact feels within that established rhythm.

Early Retirement and an Uncertain Return

On what Ángela describes as his last voyage, Bea’s father is crossing the Maldives. They had spoken by Skype the previous day, and Ángela tells Bea that his retirement has been approved early. He is not yet sixty, but a problem with his hand has worsened, enabling him to have the retirement papers arranged. He is expected home in three weeks.

Bea greets the news as an opportunity for her mother to have him around all day. Ángela answers without conviction, wondering how he will adapt and how they will adapt together. The uncertainty reverses the family’s familiar anticipation: previously, his return was the eagerly awaited end of a long absence, followed eventually by another departure. Retirement removes that predictable departure from the immediate horizon. The book does not resolve how the couple adjusts to permanent proximity; it leaves the question open at the moment his old working pattern is about to end.

Place in the Family Narrative

Bea’s father is chiefly defined through the household’s responses to his absence and return, rather than through scenes centred on his own perspective. His authority is real enough to structure the sisters’ childhood expectations, yet limited by the women’s established leadership and by the shortness of his time at home. His influence is therefore both paternal and intermittent: the family anticipates him, prepares for him, and makes room for him, but does not stop functioning in his absence.

That wider family life also includes the sisters’ direct efforts to manage crises among themselves. When Juan struggles to understand Óscar’s diagnosis and Débora cannot explain why she had kept it from him, Bea tries to interpret her sister’s silence and later pushes her to speak with her husband. Bea helps Débora choose clothes for the meeting, agrees to look after the child, and sees her return the next morning radiant after a long conversation with Juan. These episodes do not show Bea’s father intervening; they instead illustrate a family in which the daughters and their mother actively handle intimate difficulties. Against that pattern, his retirement marks not simply a change in employment, but the possible end of the long absence around which the family has learned to arrange itself.