Ingrid's country house is a rural home near San José in Cabo de Gata Natural Park, with stables and a garden. It matters not simply as a backdrop to Ingrid and the narrator’s relationship, but as a place where work, private intimacy and danger occupy the same rooms. The house’s practical details—a sewing workroom dominated by a bed, a fireplace with kindling, and a garden being planted with olive trees—give its episodes a domestic scale while allowing abrupt changes in their emotional register.

Setting and Layout

The narrator describes a back room in the country house as a workroom, though its large bed takes up most of the space. An archway leads from it to a shower room. Ingrid’s three sewing machines stand on a long table beside fabric rolls and garments she redesigns for markets in Europe and Asia. The room therefore belongs to both her livelihood and her private life: the equipment and unfinished work share space with the bed rather than occupying a separate, purely commercial workshop.

Other furnishings establish the room’s particular character. The bed is covered with dense cotton sheets that Ingrid brought from Berlin; she distinguishes their whiteness from sheets that have yellowed. A swept stone fireplace stands nearby, with a basket of kindling and a small axe resting on a log. At the time of the lovers’ visit, the outdoor temperature is forty degrees, so the fireplace is prepared for a season that has not yet arrived. The room holds signs of future use alongside the work and intimacy of the present.

Work, Privacy, and the Snake

The house makes the overlap between labor and personal life especially clear. Ingrid’s sewing equipment and garments are not incidental decoration: they locate her in the work of redesigning clothes, while the bed occupies the center of the same room. In this setting, private closeness is not separated from the material arrangements of her daily work. The house is neither presented as an isolated retreat from activity nor reduced to a workplace; its meaning comes from those uses coexisting.

That shared domestic space becomes the setting for an unexpected encounter. After Ingrid and the narrator leave the shower room, they see a snake emerge from the kindling basket and cross the floor. Ingrid takes the small axe from the log and kills it. The narrator is frightened, but does not want Ingrid to see that fear; afterward, the narrator approaches her and removes the axe from her hand. The episode gives the fireplace’s ordinary winter preparation a sudden consequence: the stored kindling has also concealed a threat inside the room. A place associated with work and intimacy becomes, without warning, a place requiring action and caution.

The Summer House and the Garden

In a later episode, the country house is described as a summer house shared by Ingrid and Matthew, a home they have made together in Spain. On arrival, Ingrid looks for her reels of thread and empties vintage-shop clothes from a basket onto the floor. She tells the narrator that olive trees need planting and that the planting holes must be dug first. The instruction puts the narrator in the position of a visitor expected to take part in practical work, rather than remaining an observer of the household.

The garden’s planting is presented as an ongoing project. Ingrid says she has already planted four trees and assigns two for the narrator to plant; a seventh is intended for Leonardo. She goes into the garden in new boots and a helmet and returns with a sapling to give him. The exchange connects the country house to its surrounding land through a specific task, while also making the garden a setting for hospitality and gift-giving. Work at the house includes both Ingrid’s sewing and the slower labor of establishing trees.

Narrative Significance

The country house gathers several strands of Ingrid’s life into one setting: her clothing work, her shared home with Matthew, her relationship with the narrator, and the household’s practical engagement with the garden. Its spaces resist a simple division between public labor and private retreat. The sewing machines sit beside a bed; the fireplace’s kindling becomes the point from which the snake appears; and the garden’s planting involves both the narrator and Leonardo.

These details also give the house a changing role across the narrative. In the lovers’ visit, its interior supports privacy but cannot guarantee safety. In the later summer-house episode, attention shifts from the bedroom and workroom to clothing, planting and visitors. The house is thus defined less by a single atmosphere than by the activities and encounters it accommodates: making garments, sharing a home, responding to danger, and assigning work in the garden.