Taverna Riviera

Taverna Riviera is the gambling tavern where Ricardo Uribe’s weekly poker game with the Count of Torrelavid becomes the setting for the wager that changes Nina’s life. The place’s charged silence marks the moment when ordinary stakes—money and property—give way to a child’s future.

Setting and Routine

The Riviera is a tavern where people gamble. Uribe goes there every Friday, making the establishment part of his regular routine. On a winter evening, he stays late at a game that has narrowed to a contest between himself and the Count; the other players have put down some money and then withdrawn.

The Poker Game

Uribe holds four jacks and is facing a pot worth more money than he sees in a year. Confident in his hand, he keeps pace as the Count repeatedly raises. The contest reaches the point at which the players lose their sense of reality, and the Count puts his estate at Belsito into the pot. The tavern falls still: the other players and onlookers register that the game has moved beyond an ordinary wager.

Belsito is described as the finest estate in the area, with an avenue of orange trees climbing toward the hilltop and a house from which the ocean can be seen. That description gives the Count’s stake a particular grandeur. Uribe says he has nothing to wager that is worth Belsito and lays down his cards; the Count replies by suggesting the pharmacy, then laughs, with some of the people around them laughing too.

From Property to Nina

The laughter ends when the Count turns serious, leans across the table, looks Uribe in the eyes, and points to Uribe’s beautiful daughter. Uribe does not immediately understand what is being proposed. The narrator says the Count explained the situation to him, but does not disclose what he said privately; no one ever told the narrator the words.

Uribe then slides his cards across the table toward the Count. The account makes the tavern the place where a game over money and an estate becomes a transaction involving Nina, although the precise terms spoken between the men remain withheld. The Count takes Nina to his home that very night. He waits sixteen months, marries her when she turns fourteen, and she later bears him three children.

Narrative Significance

The tavern scene is remembered through Nina’s account of how she came to marry the Count. Its progression—from a crowded game, to a sudden silence, to private words the narrator cannot recover—makes the decisive exchange both public and obscured. Taverna Riviera is therefore more than the location of Uribe’s regular Friday gambling: it is where the novel connects the casual rhythm of wagering with the lasting consequences imposed on Nina.