Alice Destroys Her Own Paintings

Alice Espanet’s destruction of the paintings at Ritxi’s winery turns an art exhibition into a scene of deliberate wreckage—and later into contested evidence. The episode begins with an overheard insult, ends with Alice insisting that the couple go home to see the children, and returns in court as a question not only about her anger but about Ritxi’s failure to seek help.

The winery and the insult

The incident unfolds during a cold, unpleasant spring day in La Rioja, a landscape Alice Espanet dislikes. The vines look like charred stumps, and even their autumn colors would quickly overwhelm her; she prefers cool shades. Ritxi, meanwhile, has overseen the renovation of the winery since his father’s death, adding a large glass structure to the original centuries-old stone building. Alice walks around the old building, careful to stay on the path because she has brought no spare shoes and does not want to sink into the mud.

Her attention turns inward as the walk stalls. She doubts her choice of an all-black outfit and wishes she had brought a brighter scarf. A severe headache forces her to stop and lean against the wall. She takes a few breaths and lights a cigarette from the packet she always carries, although she hardly smokes. Then, shivering, she hears a voice coming through an open, tilted window.

The speaker is the communications employee, talking on the phone about the exhibition. She dismisses the work as a cheap copy of Louise Bourgeois, repeated nine times, and predicts that the pieces will nevertheless sell quickly because people want to please Ritxi. She also complains that she has spent an hour making a catalogue for what she considers a worthless show. The remark connects the paintings to both artistic judgment and the social machinery around the exhibition: the pieces are being presented, marketed, and sold in a setting shaped by Ritxi’s standing.

Alice throws her cigarette to the ground and crushes it beneath her black shoes. Half an hour later, when Ritxi emerges from a brief meeting, the insult has become the immediate prelude to a much larger act. The narrative gives no further account of what Alice thinks as she listens; instead, it places the overheard dismissal beside the physical evidence she leaves behind.

The destruction

In the tasting room, none of the paintings remains intact. Alice has taken a bottle reserved for the reception and smashed it violently against the table. With the bloodied broken neck, she has torn through the paintings; in some cases, her force has also broken their wooden frames. Wine has spread across the floor and walls, turning the wreckage into a scene the narrator describes as having a horror-film quality.

The bottle is not incidental to the scene: it is both the object she breaks and the instrument with which she damages the canvases. The reserved reception wine, intended for the exhibition’s hospitality, becomes part of its destruction. The broken glass, blood, torn pictures, and spilled wine make the result more than a simple cancellation of the show. The room now displays an act whose visible violence is difficult to reconcile with the tidy commercial occasion for which the works had been prepared.

Alice announces that the exhibition is over and says she wants to go home to see the children. She drops what remains of the bottle and prepares to leave. Ritxi, his throat tight with emotion, asks her to wait in the car while he speaks to his employees and finds a way to explain what has happened. The scene thus ends with an abrupt division of tasks: Alice leaves the damaged room, while Ritxi stays to face the people and workplace affected by her act.

Ritxi’s account in court

Even after the destruction, Ritxi does not seek help. At the trial, he is asked to explain why he did not react differently. The communications employee had photographed the wreckage without being asked, and those images are shown to the jury. In the narrator’s account, they reveal a near-apocalyptic scene and the fury of Alice’s attack on the art. The photographs carry the episode beyond the winery: what Ritxi might have treated as a private disturbance has become a visual record presented in court.

Ritxi does not describe the event as wholly inexplicable. He offers four possible explanations. First, he invokes what he calls an artist’s customary, even pathological, dissatisfaction, illustrating the idea with Kafka, who had asked a friend to burn his writings. Second, he suggests insecurity about presenting deeply personal work in public; although he is not an artist, he says he can understand that vulnerability. Third, he raises jealousy, discreetly but unmistakably referring to the communications employee’s physical attributes. Finally, he minimizes the practical damage: although the scene looked dramatic, other people cleaned it up quickly with a cloth and a mop.

His explanation shifts between recognizing Alice’s emotional exposure and reducing the aftermath to a repairable mess. It also places the employee’s appearance among the possible causes, even as he presents that point obliquely. The account is carefully prepared and delivered with confidence. When the prosecutor suggests a connection between the aborted exhibition and the later events under examination, Ritxi becomes defensive, conveying through his body language that further discussion of the exhibition is a waste of time.

Meaning and unresolved questions

The destruction matters not just as an outburst but as a scene whose meaning changes with its setting. At the winery, Alice’s command that the exhibition is over turns the insult into action, and her wish to see the children supplies the immediate destination she names as she leaves. At trial, the same act is divided into possible motives, photographed evidence, and a dispute about its relevance. Ritxi’s explanations make the violence legible in several different ways without settling which, if any, is sufficient.

The narrator does not close that gap. After observing that Ritxi may have been right to resist the prosecutor’s proposed connection, the narrative withdraws into uncertainty rather than declaring the incident either trivial or decisive. His coworkers’ quick cleanup can account for the physical repair of the room; it cannot, by itself, resolve why he did not seek help, what Alice’s act meant, or how the exhibition should be understood in relation to the case. The episode remains suspended between a ruined display and the courtroom’s competing accounts of what that ruin reveals.