Nada de sufrir por lo que nunca fue, por lo que no es y por lo que no será

Nada de sufrir por lo que nunca fue, por lo que no es y por lo que no será is the phrase Bea repeats to herself after deciding to end her sexual encounters with Diego. It becomes less a sign that she has stopped caring than a verbal effort to contain feelings she believes she should never have allowed to develop.

The phrase in context

Bea’s resolve follows a hospital visit to Fin, after which she wants to retreat to her room and stop disguising her sorrow. At home, she considers calling Diego under some pretext, then holds back. The decision to stop seeing him hurts like the loss of a relationship, even though, as she reminds herself, no relationship existed between them.

Self-reproach and recognition

In her inward reckoning, Bea calls the encounters sex without commitment: at first she counts two, then corrects herself to five over two days. She had intended sex to help her retaliate against Víctor, forget him, and reassure herself that she was still young and attractive. Instead, she recognizes that her emotional response to Diego reflects how fragile she remains after Víctor, and that she became attached before she had recovered from that earlier relationship.

Her account of Diego is similarly divided between attraction and caution. She sees that he can seem to open up and then retreat, and concludes that he is not ready to move forward because he has not overcome the death of his wife. He lives with his in-laws and, in Bea’s view, holds on to the past; she also acknowledges that he has not lied to her about his situation. She recalls that pretending to be his late wife in front of his mother-in-law was ill-advised, but feels he made no effort to understand why she did it. The phrase thus accompanies a recognition of their incompatible readiness, not a claim that their encounters meant nothing to her.

Repetition as attempted closure

Bea first declares that Diego is over for good and tells herself that suffering would be foolish. She then lies down repeating the mantra until she falls asleep. Its wording reaches across three kinds of absence—the unrealized past, the absent present, and the foreclosed future—while the repeated return to the words reveals how difficult it is to accept that closure. The phrase gives Bea a discipline of refusal, but the scene leaves her grief audible within the very repetition meant to silence it.