Verano

Verano is both a season in the chronology and a recurring measure of emotional change. It frames the return to the House of Armentia on a Thursday afternoon, shadows the aftermath of Alice Espanet’s alleged killing of her twins, and becomes personally vivid to the narrator in Avignon, where a second beer finally brings the sense that summer has arrived.

Summer at the House of Armentia

The opening summer scene is fixed in a small, ordinary detail: the nanny, Mélanie, comes back to the House of Armentia on a Thursday afternoon after her four hours off. She has spent the time cycling and meeting a young man; now she locks her bicycle at the back, brushes at the mud on her sandals, and enters cautiously. The house is quiet. The season’s heat and leisure sit beside the unease of the house itself, as Mélanie checks the kitchen, living room, and the room used as her employer’s studio.

The summer setting also places the scene within the story’s larger chronology. Two weeks after Alice Espanet allegedly killed her twin children, the case is already fading into a “gray and viscous” memory for the media and respectable citizens. At the House of Armentia, flowers left by well-meaning visitors are wilting and the teddy bears offered to the children are losing their brightness. Meanwhile, the narrator is far away, at the newly opened obstetric unit of Hospital de Basurto, beginning an induced labor. Summer thus holds together two sharply different forms of aftermath: public remembrance already growing stale, and the narrator’s immediate physical passage into childbirth.

The narrator’s seasonal signal

For the narrator, summer is not simply a calendar period. Each year she experiences what feels like a heavenly summons: a clear signal that the season has arrived and that it has changed her mood and her face. Sometimes the signal precedes summer itself, arriving with the first hot day in May. It may come through particular sensations—a night looking at the stars from the grass, the distant echo of a fiesta, or a first mint-heavy mojito—or as a less defined feeling shared by the people around her.

That year, the signal comes in Avignon, in front of the papal palace, with the first sip of a second beer. The narrator recognizes it as summer even though August is already well advanced. The moment links the season to a change in bodily freedom as well as perception: she does not have to breastfeed Erik, and can drink without worry for the first time in a long while. The arrival of summer is therefore intimate and belated, registered not by a date but by a small act and the narrator’s sudden recognition of herself in the season.

A frame for distance and return

The Avignon scene belongs to a later visit: the narrator has seen Léa only about five times since their year together, meeting every two or three years and making occasional trips to London, Paris, or each other’s home cities. Their friendship survives the gaps; they resume conversation as if they had last met the day before. Against that durable connection, summer becomes another kind of return, a recurring sensation that restores the narrator to a familiar version of herself.

The season consequently carries contrasting temporal effects. At the House of Armentia, summer marks the setting of a crisis whose offerings and public attention are already fading. In Avignon, it returns as a personal recognition, arriving late but unmistakably. Verano connects these moments without erasing their difference: it is at once the background to loss, a marker in the chronology of the narrator’s childbirth, and a recurring sign of renewed feeling.