Barcelona is the city in which the narrator’s life has unfolded, and in the novel it serves as a personal archive rather than a neutral backdrop. Hospitals, bars, streets, and domestic rooms hold separate moments of family history; after her mother’s death, their familiarity makes the city both intimate and newly painful.

The City as a Personal Map

Barcelona’s meaning comes from accumulated experience. The narrator likes the city because so much of her life has taken place there: Edgar was born in one of its hospitals, she secretly kissed his father in a bar, and she used to have a weekly afternoon snack with her grandfather. Her mother also died in Barcelona. These landmarks do not form a formal itinerary, but together they make the city readable through biography: a hospital, a bar, and a recurring family ritual each preserve a different version of the narrator’s past.

The city’s history also includes journeys between Barcelona and Cadaqués. In the narrator’s childhood recollections of the family house by the sea, her grandfather arrives from Barcelona with crates of fruit. The memory belongs to the rhythms of the Cadaqués household, but Barcelona is present as a point of connection: the place from which family and provisions travel toward the summer home. Later, the narrator returns to Cadaqués carrying the weight of experiences accumulated elsewhere, and recognizes that the same coastal landscape can seem to deny tragedy even as it recalls it.

Domestic Life and Family Networks

Barcelona is associated not only with the narrator’s past but with the practical arrangements of her life as a mother. After her mother’s death, the entrance to her home fills with boxes: her mother’s belongings are being sorted, while unopened boxes from an earlier move remain stacked nearby. The narrator moves repeatedly between wanting to give everything away and deciding to keep every last object. The indecision becomes a way of negotiating how close she wants to remain to her mother through the things she left behind.

One item is kept apart from the boxes: a blue-gray wool jacket with terracotta-colored stripes, bought with her mother at the older woman’s favorite shop. It is the only piece of clothing the narrator has kept. She has not yet taken it to the dry cleaner or tested whether it still smells of her mother; hanging by the entrance, it feels like a dusty, dog-haired apparition greeting her when she comes home. The later decision to take the jacket to the cleaners marks a small but concrete change in her relation to the loss. The object is not discarded, but its preservation no longer depends on leaving it untouched.

The family life around the narrator is not limited to a single household or to conventional couplehood. Guillem is the father of her eldest child, and despite their separation they retain a close, teasing, love-and-hate bond. At a meal, Guillem and Óscar treat each other with respect and affection, and each shows a form of near-paternal love toward the other man’s son. At the same table, Sofía flirts with Guillem, while Elisa and Damián share the private gestures of lovers. The scene presents family and intimacy as a network sustained by shared care and daily presence, rather than as a simple arrangement of one couple and their children.

Grief in Familiar Places

Barcelona’s familiarity intensifies the narrator’s sense of loss. She recalls the city through places that once supported ordinary life, but now also point to her mother’s absence. In the months before the death, illness and dementia altered their relationship: late-night calls summoned the narrator to her mother’s home, and the phone became associated with fear, distress, and demands for help. The narrator sometimes stopped answering or misplaced the phone, while also carrying guilt about what she could and could not do. The city’s domestic spaces therefore contain not only remembered affection but the strain of caregiving and the limits of what a daughter could manage.

The narrator’s reflections connect grief with bodily and erotic life. During her mother’s illness, she sought sex as an answer to death, describing her encounters as increasingly fierce as the disease became more relentless. After a period without seeing Santi, she meets him in Badalona, at a bar where they eat poor croquettes as if they were a delicacy. The outing is not a scene in Barcelona proper, but it belongs to the narrator’s discovery of urban life through a clandestine relationship and to her effort to feel alive amid bereavement. Santi’s familiar clothes and bicycle revive desire, while the narrator remembers her mother teasing her for being attracted to handsome men.

Memory, Return, and the City’s Limits

Barcelona offers the narrator a dense store of memories, but it cannot protect her from grief or contain it entirely. She recognizes that every place connected with her mother can become painful after death. The experience does not erase the city’s pleasures or its past; instead, it changes what familiar places can ask of her. Memories of her mother’s illness coexist with the bar where she kissed a former partner, the hospital where Edgar was born, and the afternoons once spent with her grandfather.

The city also remains part of the family’s present. When the narrator drives past the last apartment where her mother lived on Carrer de Muntaner, she watches her older son in the rear-view mirror as he silently looks up toward his grandmother’s balcony. That repeated gesture turns a street and an apartment into a shared memorial, even without conversation. The narrator considers telling her son that his grandmother is in a better place, but cannot honestly say that this would be true: for a long time, her mother’s greatest happiness was being with her grandchildren and with the narrator.

Near the end, the narrator reports that she is beginning to breathe more easily and almost no longer has nightmares. A new dog, Rey, has joined the household, and she is teaching the children to take him out each day. She has also taken her mother’s jacket to the cleaners. These are modest signs of life continuing in Barcelona, not a resolution that makes the loss disappear. The city’s decisive significance lies in holding both realities at once: it is where the narrator’s family life has been lived, and where that life must now be remembered without her mother.