Aún recuerdo el piano de aquella niña que había en Sevilla

The expression “Aún recuerdo el piano de aquella niña que había en Sevilla” is a song lyric that gives Macarena Bruner a way to voice grief for her great-aunt Carlota and the lost love between Carlota and Captain Manuel Xaloc. In the novel, its remembered music links private sorrow to a family history shaped by intercepted correspondence, prolonged waiting, and the effort to keep a vanishing world alive.

The lyric and Carlota’s story

Macarena recalls a song sung by Carlos Cano, with lyrics by Antonio Burgos, and says that hearing it makes her want to cry. Its words evoke a girl in Seville and a piano; for Macarena, the song opens onto Carlota’s romance with Captain Manuel Xaloc, which she calls a beautiful love story that ended in misfortune.

Carlota wrote to Xaloc almost every week for years after he emigrated to America. Her father, Luis Bruner, bribed local postal officials to prevent the letters from reaching their destinations. Over six years, Carlota received none, and the family believes Xaloc received none from her either. When he returned, she had lost her reason, spent her days watching the river from a window, and could no longer recognize him.

A family archive of waiting

The letters were not destroyed. After Carlota’s death in 1910, they were stored in the trunk that held her belongings. As a child, Macarena explored that trunk, trying on Carlota’s dresses and jet necklaces and reading the letters one by one. It also contained travel leaflets and records of journeys, including the Universal Exposition in Paris and a visit to Tunis, where Carlota saw the ruins of Carthage and brought back ancient coins. Among old lace and moth-eaten muslin, the trunk preserved fragments of a life as well as the romance that came to define it for Macarena.

Macarena’s recollection of the song leads into a legend she believes: on moonlit nights, Carlota returns to her window while her lover’s ghostly schooner casts off on the Guadalquivir River and sails away downstream. As a child, Macarena watched from her room, hoping to see them. She remembers a pale silhouette at the window and, below, the white sails of an old ship gliding through the mist until they disappeared. The legend gives a spectral image to the history of separation: the beloved returns only as an apparition, and the ship remains in motion without bringing him back.

Memory as a personal battle

Macarena explicitly describes her struggle as a battle against time and forgetting—not merely a defense of Father Príamo Ferro’s cause. She sees herself as belonging to an extinguishing social caste, with no place left for people like her family or for the memories and tragic stories they carry. Her personal war includes defending her family name, the things she loves, Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas, and Carlota’s memory. The lyric’s backward glance thus belongs to a present-tense act of preservation: remembering is one way Macarena resists the disappearance of both a family world and the story housed within it.

Carlota’s letters make the song’s recollection more than elegy. In one, she insists that she still expects Xaloc to return and imagines white sails coming upriver. She waits in the tower where she saw him leave, sitting in a rocking chair during the siesta and watching the river. Her hope persists even as the evidence of isolation and distress gathers around it. The recurring white sails connect the written voice of the waiting woman with the ship in Macarena’s childhood vision, while the intercepted letters explain how hope could endure without reply.

Echoes of missed chances

The story of a love thwarted by silence resonates with another remembered encounter in the novel. Octavio Machuca recounts seeing a beautiful woman pass him in Seville and exchanging a glance with her. He thought he should rise and stop her, but convention and fear of being recognized held him back. He consoled himself with the thought that she would pass again; she never did. He tells the episode without visible emotion, as a bare account of an irreversible missed opportunity. Set beside Carlota and Xaloc’s enforced separation, Machuca’s memory underscores how private feeling can be defeated by social restraint—and how a lost moment becomes a story only after the chance to change it has passed.

The lyric also touches the present through Macarena’s own intimate history. She tells Lorenzo Quart that she became pregnant and that Pencho Gavira pressed her to end the pregnancy, insisting that it was too soon and that there were already too many problems. The evidence does not make the two stories identical: Carlota’s letters were intercepted by her family, while Macarena describes pressure from her husband. But both accounts place a woman’s desire and choices within forces exerted by family or social circumstance. The song’s remembered girl and piano therefore carry more than nostalgia; they sound through a novel in which love, memory, and the power to shape one’s life are repeatedly constrained.