Clarice

Clarice is James’s mother and Amaia Salazar’s mother-in-law, a vivid presence in the family’s preparations for and life after a new baby’s arrival. She brings energy, money, and certainty into the household, but her generosity repeatedly crosses into interference: in her view, preparing the nursery, planning childcare, and arranging a baptism are matters she can take in hand. The resulting friction makes her both a comic force and a test of how firmly Amaia and James will define their own family life.

Arrival and Household Presence

Clarice comes to Pamplona with her husband, Thomas, for the birth of Amaia and James’s daughter. Though she has been there only ten days, Amaia feels that Clarice has already fulfilled every expectation of an intrusive mother-in-law. The tension begins with the question of the baby’s room. Several rooms in the house are empty, and Clarice finds it strange that the parents have not prepared a separate bedroom. Amaia, by contrast, has restored an old wooden cradle from Engrasi’s home and wants the baby close to her and James, especially while she is breastfeeding and getting up for night feeds. Their disagreement is therefore more than a difference in decorating: it exposes competing ideas about who decides what a new family needs.

Clarice’s presence is accompanied by a contrast in manner between the couple. She moves energetically through the household, while Thomas sits in the living room reading the newspaper, apparently unmoved by his wife’s activity. Amaia finds it difficult to reconcile this quiet, yielding-seeming domestic presence with Thomas’s role as the director of a financial empire in the United States. The contrast helps define Clarice as the more visibly forceful of the two, without suggesting that Thomas shares or directs her interventions.

The Nursery and Competing Ideas of Care

Three days before Amaia returns home to find it, Clarice has arranged a fully furnished nursery without her daughter-in-law’s agreement. It includes wardrobes, a changing table, a chest of drawers, rugs, lamps, and a cradle; its decoration is saturated with pink clouds, lambs, bows, and lace. Clarice presents the room with evident satisfaction, showing Amaia its storage and furnishings and treating the princess-worthy cradle as its crowning feature. James waits at the door looking uncomfortable and apologizes to Amaia on his mother’s behalf, aware of how the surprise may land.

Amaia reads the room not simply as an extravagant gift but as an attempted takeover of space in her own home. She keeps her composure largely because she sees James’s discomfort, even as Clarice moves among the new furnishings with the enthusiasm of a salesperson. Clarice’s good intentions, as James frames them, do not remove the conflict: Amaia already has a cradle with family history, restored by James and dressed with bedding sewn by Engrasi’s friends, and she does not want the infant sleeping in a separate room merely because the house has spare bedrooms.

The disagreement also touches the kind of care Amaia intends to give. She rejects advice that babies should be left to sleep alone or not be picked up and comforted too readily. Her own childhood experience of fear informs her determination to listen to her daughter and soothe her. Clarice is established as someone with her own views on how things should be done and a readiness to share them, but the text does not make her the source of every childrearing doctrine Amaia resists. The sharper conflict is that Clarice’s plans arrive as decisions already made, where Amaia wants closeness and parental choice.

Naming and Plans for Childcare

Clarice’s attention to the coming baby continues at a meal about a week before the birth. When James affectionately refers to the child as their little girl, Clarice responds sarcastically, questioning why the parents have not yet chosen a name. Amaia looks to James, then pretends to read a letter; James explains that they like several names and will decide after the baby is born, when they have seen her face. Their answer preserves the choice for themselves rather than satisfying Clarice’s demand for advance planning.

After coffee, Clarice asks whether they have looked into nursery schools. James, visibly tired, says they have not, because they will not send the baby to daycare. Clarice immediately proposes the next solution: they can find a nanny to care for her when Amaia returns to work. The exchange shows how quickly Clarice turns a parental answer into another logistical question to solve. Her attention is practical and future-oriented, but the parents’ decisions repeatedly set limits on that involvement.

Ibai and the Limits of Her Expectations

Clarice’s response changes when the child is Ibai rather than the granddaughter she had expected. On learning about the boy, she initially rails against the doctors and prenatal testing, insisting that such things do not happen in the United States. She accepts the baby, though Amaia perceives some disappointment, which she connects to Clarice’s evident enthusiasm for dressing a girl in bows and lace. The nursery is changed to white, and Clarice’s shopping spree gives way to vouchers for clothes. Amaia uses them as needed and has enough clothing to dress Ibai until he is four.

Thomas responds to his grandson with unreserved delight: he holds and kisses Ibai, takes photographs, and opens a university fund for him. Clarice, meanwhile, soon grows bored once shopping is no longer a source of activity. She talks of returning home because of her commitments, including presidencies of two high-society women’s clubs and her golf. Yet before leaving, she presses for Ibai’s baptism. James has long wanted the ceremony at the chapel of San Fermín, where the waiting list means no date is available for a year. Clarice goes to the chapel, meets with the chaplain, and secures a date for the following week after making a generous donation. The episode crystallizes her character: affection and initiative become tangible in gifts and arrangements, while her determination can carry her past the parents’ preferred pace and procedure.