Día de San Nicolás

Día de San Nicolás, the annual celebration hosted by Clara Stauffer, becomes the setting for a private reckoning. On a year when Clara combines the customary adult gathering with a party for children, the narrator sees a boy who looks uncannily like him—and recognizes the resemblance as the one he once saw in the mirror as a child.

The Annual Gathering

Clara calls the narrator well in advance, as she habitually does for important occasions, and invites him to celebrate San Nicolás. She specifies eight o’clock and insists that he arrive punctually, without explaining the reason. When he reaches her home, she opens the door herself. Instead of the adult visitor he expected to find there, a small, fair-haired girl clings to her skirt, while a maid calls to the noisy children in the entrance hall to sit down if they want chocolate.

Clara welcomes him and lifts the little girl into her arms, eager to tell him something. As they walk on, she explains that the Spanish conversation classes are ending because all the pupils now speak Spanish well. She also says the gathering is a double celebration: because she will not be in Madrid for Reyes that year, she did not want to miss inviting the children. San Nicolás had usually been an adult party, and the combined occasion has left the household scrambling to manage everything.

A Change in the Narrator’s Life

The announcement about the classes lands amid the narrator’s growing estrangement from Amparo Priego. Since the previous October, his commitment to the lessons has fallen to one day a week at Ayala 45. Neither he nor Amparo has managed to preserve the earlier lightness of their relationship against the increasingly poisoned atmosphere around them. Their sexual relationship remains pleasurable, but pleasure no longer conceals the unresolved tensions between them. The end of the classes offers what seems to him a natural, painless, almost elegant way for the relationship to end.

The party’s arrangement also unsettles the narrator’s expectations about the people present. Geni greets him with a conventional, married woman’s cheek-kisses and remarks that she thought he had no children. He replies that he does not. The distinction becomes charged when a doorbell rings and Clara leaves to receive more guests: the narrator stays where he is, arms held straight at his sides, staring at a boy as his memory fixes on the child’s face.

The Recognition

The boy’s resemblance connects the present scene to the narrator’s own childhood. He recalls seeing the same face every morning in the bathroom mirror before going to school. Clara’s guest then remarks on how incredibly much Amparo Priego’s son resembles him. The gathering thus makes visible a connection that the narrator’s brief exchange with Geni had denied: although he says he has no children, the boy before him bears the face he recognizes as his own.

San Nicolás is more than the date of the party. Its familiar annual ritual supplies the ordinary frame for a sudden change in what the narrator understands about his life with Amparo. The gathering’s double character—adult celebration and children’s party—places his apparent separation from her alongside the child who makes that separation newly complicated, and ends the scene with resemblance as an unmistakable, unresolved fact.