Débora and Juan’s Marriage

Débora and Juan’s marriage is defined by the gap between their shared commitment to family life and the strain that follows when care, trust, and communication fall out of balance. They marry, announce a pregnancy only three months later, and become parents soon afterward. Their early marriage is tested when Óscar arrives a month ahead of schedule while Juan is in Turkey, and later by Débora’s determination to manage nearly every aspect of the baby’s care herself. When Juan finally voices how excluded he feels, Bea becomes an intermediary; after a tense period, Débora seeks a long conversation with her husband, and returns home appearing renewed. The relationship’s defining pattern is not effortless harmony but the attempt to resume direct communication when family pressure has made it difficult.

Marriage and the Arrival of Óscar

Débora is two years older than Bea and has been married to Juan for about a year and a half when Bea returns home. The narrator describes her sister as enthusiastic and changeable, drawn to ecological causes and other pursuits with great energy, though liable to lose momentum. Marriage, in Bea’s view, has helped Débora become more centred without turning her into a different person. The portrait is affectionate but teasing: Débora retains her independent, impulsive character even as she builds a household with Juan.

Their transition to parenthood comes quickly. Débora announces that she is pregnant three months after the wedding and explains that she did not want to wait because she was already over thirty. The account treats the decision as characteristic of her directness: she offers an explanation although no one has asked for one. Her pregnancy and the arrival of a baby make the marriage a new practical partnership, one whose expectations are tested almost immediately.

Óscar is born a month early while Juan is in Turkey. Débora has family with her, but Juan’s absence becomes a source of worry for him afterward. When he tells Bea that Débora will not let him bathe the baby or take over ordinary care, he wonders whether she has not forgiven him for missing the birth. Bea reassures him that he could not have known the baby would come early and that Débora was not alone. His gratitude suggests that the absence still weighs on him, even though Bea regards it as an unavoidable circumstance rather than a failure of commitment.

Parenthood and Unequal Care

When Bea arrives, Juan describes a striking change in Débora’s behaviour: she keeps Óscar close, wants to do everything herself, and will not even let Juan bathe him. This troubles him because Débora had long criticised men who failed to share household work and childcare. In the new family arrangement, the woman who had objected to unequal care appears to be taking all of it upon herself. Juan insists that he can change a nappy and bathe his son, even if he cannot breastfeed him. His complaint is not that he has been given too many duties, but that Débora’s protectiveness leaves him with too few.

The tension becomes visible at a family meal. Bea notices Juan looking to her for help and asks whether Débora will let her hold the baby. Débora challenges Bea’s maternal instincts, and Bea retorts that Débora is acting like a kangaroo with a pouch. Juan intervenes, corrects his wife when she uses a diminutive rather than Óscar’s name, and asks her to let Bea hold him. Débora eventually passes the baby over, warning Bea not to wake him, but soon takes him back. When Juan suggests that their mother might hold Óscar and assess whether anything seems wrong, Débora becomes upset and leaves the room with the baby in his pram. Juan describes her as a lioness with her cubs, unsure whether to admire her or seek help for her. The scene turns an abstract disagreement about parenting into a visible contest over who may care for Óscar.

Bea’s mediation has limits. She tries to reassure Juan and to make space for him as a father, but Débora’s resistance is not resolved by one family conversation. The episode also shows the family’s habit of drawing others into a couple’s difficulty: Juan appeals to Bea, Bea steps in, and their mother is proposed as another person who might settle the disagreement. That support can offer relief, but it also makes the marriage’s private tensions part of the larger family’s shared business.

Anxiety, Trust, and Disclosure

A later concern about Óscar intensifies the strain. Juan believes the child is growing unusually and is disturbed that Débora has not explained what she knows. He wonders whether she is hiding a genetic cause and asks whether Óscar might have inherited dwarfism from his biological father. Bea rejects the leap in his reasoning and offers another explanation: Débora may have delayed telling him because she finds bad news difficult to deliver and lets difficult matters go unaddressed. Débora remains silent while Bea speaks for her, a silence that makes Juan more suspicious rather than reassured.

This episode shifts the conflict from the distribution of childcare to the reliability of what the spouses tell one another. Juan is frightened by the possibility that something important has been kept from him; Bea tries to prevent his fear from hardening into an accusation. The material does not make Débora’s silence a resolution or supply a full account of what Juan understands at that point. Instead, it shows how uncertainty can magnify the earlier imbalance: a husband who already feels excluded from care now fears exclusion from knowledge as well.

Attempts to Reconnect

Débora and Juan’s marriage is also caught up in the wider pressures on the family. When Bea’s actions threaten Irene’s political work on the biomass power plant, Irene worries that a public scandal could undermine two years of effort and jeopardise more than a hundred jobs. She asks Bea to keep Débora and León from speaking and warns that Débora may make matters worse if she thinks Irene is directing her. In this family, the couple’s private relationship sits within a web of sisters, shared loyalties, and public consequences; the same relatives who support one another can also become conduits for tension.

Later, Bea urges Débora to stop lamenting and act, and pointedly asks whether Bea herself had acted or simply run home to her parents. Bea then calls Juan and puts the phone into Débora’s hand when her sister initially refuses to take it. Débora agrees to see him. Before leaving, she asks Bea to help choose clothes: faded blue skinny jeans with holes at the knees and a violet, low-cut sweater. She refuses Bea’s suggestion of chemical hair dye, consistent with her preference for natural products, and asks Bea to look after Óscar because she wants to meet Juan alone.

Débora does not return that night. She sends Bea a message at midnight saying the conversation is taking a long 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 says that she and Juan had not spoken so much, or about so many things, in a long time. The scene marks an important effort to restore conversation between them, though it does not establish that every source of conflict has disappeared. Their marriage is left as a relationship capable of renewed closeness, but one that has to be actively reclaimed through honesty and time together.