Blanca decides to take her children to Cadaqués

Blanca decides to take her children to Cadaqués after her mother’s death, accepting the coastal town as a place where she might find shelter when love and ordinary adult competence both feel uncertain. What begins as a friend’s practical suggestion becomes a return to a landscape she has long imagined as protective; the journey then sets her present role as driver and organizer against her remembered place as a child in the back seat.

The Invitation and the House

In the days after the loss, Blanca is surrounded by people who love her and tell her so. Their affection does not reach the part of her that longs instead for her mother to sit beside her, hold her hand, and place a hand on her forehead. She acknowledges the care she receives, but privately doubts the reliability of love, wounded by the sense that even her mother had stopped loving her for a time. Against this emotional isolation, the suggestion to go north offers a concrete alternative to remaining where she is.

The person encouraging her reminds her that the house in Cadaqués is now hers and that the boat is already in the water. Blanca’s first inward response is resistance: the house remains, in her mind, her mother’s, and always will. The difference between legal or practical possession and emotional belonging gives the invitation its force. Going there would mean entering a place that has passed to her while refusing to imagine that her mother’s connection to it has ended.

Blanca does not accept immediately. She answers uncertainly, then allows herself to consider that the suggestion may be right. Her eventual decision is not presented as a cure for grief or as a declaration that she is ready to take her mother’s place. It is a provisional movement toward the home and its familiar surroundings, made possible by the fact that the house and boat are still there.

Cadaqués as Refuge

Blanca’s image of Cadaqués is both affectionate and fantastical. She imagines the town’s witches perched on the church tower, deciding whom to welcome and whom to drive away, stirring quarrels between couples, directing jellyfish toward unsuspecting bodies, and placing sea urchins beneath particular feet. The comic mischief belongs to the same imagined power as the town’s tenderness: the witches can also make astonishing dawns that ease hangovers, turn streets and corners into welcoming bedrooms, and wrap visitors in waves that erase the world’s troubles.

This fantasy makes the place more than a destination. Since childhood, Blanca has understood Cadaqués as a force that can reject or embrace people, and that can briefly soften the effects of pain. Now, she adds a new witch to the imagined company, implying a changed relationship to the town without explaining the figure further. The refuge she chooses is therefore not untouched by loss: it is a familiar setting whose capacity to shelter her must be encountered anew.

As she commits to going, Blanca invokes Tara and the red earth of Tara, then turns toward tomorrow. The allusion gives her decision a theatrical, borrowed cadence, a way of making resolve speak when certainty is unavailable. Her long drink of beer and question about the film that supplied the line bring the grand gesture back to the ordinary conversation in which it arose. The return begins not as solemn ceremony but as an improvised decision voiced among other people.

Setting Out with the Children

The journey to Cadaqués is described as an expedition. Edgar, Nicolás, and Daniel, Sofía’s son, ride in the back with Úrsula, the nanny; Blanca drives, and Sofía sits beside her as copilot. The arrangement makes Blanca responsible for the practical decisions that carry the group onward: when to leave, what instructions to give Úrsula, which clothes the boys will take, and how to get everyone there. The destination is familiar, but the work of reaching it belongs to her.

That role feels strangely unreal to Blanca. Watching the children laugh and quarrel in the rear-view mirror, she expects to be exposed as a fraud and sent back to the seat with them. She experiences herself as someone who has failed to graduate from the playground, despite wearing the uncertain crown of adulthood. The trip thus turns on a sharp contrast: in practical terms, she is in command; inwardly, she still feels like the child who ought to be carried along by someone else.

Sofía’s presence beside her and Úrsula’s care for the children make the departure a shared undertaking rather than a solitary escape. Yet Blanca is the one at the wheel. The decision to take the children north becomes tangible through these particular responsibilities, not through a claim that grief has been mastered. She drives while still doubting the adult identity that the act of driving appears to confirm.

The Road and the Remembered Back Seat

The road awakens Blanca’s memory of earlier journeys with her mother. She remembers being crowded into the back of the car with her brother Bruno, Marisa, Marisa’s daughter Elenita, and the family’s dogs, while Lali, Marisa’s large poodle, brought her own unruly presence to trips that she seemed to dislike. The remembered car is packed with people and animals; the present car also carries children, a nanny, and a companion. The resemblance binds the new expedition to family life as Blanca knew it, even as the family and the roles within it have changed.

From the driver’s seat, Blanca notices what appears along the way: a small dog bobbing at a ground-floor window, a grandfather holding his grandson’s hand, handsome men alert to those around them, the flash of sunlight on her bracelets, lonely old people, kissing couples, beggars, defiant elderly women crossing slowly, and trees. She reflects that different people see different things, and that what they notice reveals who they are. Her account makes seeing a form of recognition: people instinctively love those who notice the same things and recognize them in return.

That attention also explains why adulthood feels like a costume she wears badly. Blanca would gladly trade its cardboard crown for the remembered back seat, squeezed among the people and dogs of her childhood. Yet the present journey puts her at the front, responsible for the children and the route. The decision to return to Cadaqués therefore carries two movements at once: toward a place that once sheltered her, and away from the child’s position she longs to recover. The road joins these versions of Blanca without making them identical.