Blanca’s orphanhood

Blanca’s orphanhood is the loss of the person whose gaze had made her feel at home in the world. Her father died of cancer when she was seventeen; after her mother’s death, Blanca is forty, with two children and a history of marriages and relationships, yet still feels unprepared to become an adult without her mother. The novel follows that contradiction through bodily grief, inherited memories, and the ordinary objects and places that keep the relationship present.

Loss and the Feeling of Being Unmoored

Blanca remembers the death of her father as the moment when death ceased to be an abstract, sad, or even romantic idea. Before then, she had seen a schoolmate wearing her dead father’s yellow socks and thought of death from a distance. By the time Blanca turned seventeen, her own father had died of cancer. She imagines the dead accumulating like links in a macabre necklace, with herself as its eventual last link. Her mother’s death completes a change that had begun years before: loss is no longer an episode outside her life but a condition through which she understands it.

At forty, Blanca describes herself as having remained a child through two children, two marriages, several relationships, homes, and jobs. She dislikes being an orphan and doubts that she is made for sadness, then wonders whether sorrow has become the only garment that fits her. The image makes grief feel both imposed and intimate: she does not claim to have chosen it, but cannot yet imagine herself outside it.

The people around Blanca repeatedly remind her that many people love her. She knows this and expresses gratitude, but does not tell them that she no longer trusts anyone’s love in the same way. In the days after her mother’s death, the comfort offered by this silent, talkative crowd conflicts with her wish to retreat to bed and have her mother sit beside her, hold her hand, and touch her forehead. Other affection cannot simply replace that specific care.

The Mother as Home and Witness

Blanca’s sense of belonging had rested in her mother’s look. She recognizes that she never asked where her place in the world was because it seemed so unquestionable and permanent there. Now she cannot open a book without thinking of her mother, and the loss is reciprocal in her imagination: her mother will no longer see her. As the people who love her die, Blanca feels that the living gradually become strangers, deprived of the relationships through which they had known themselves.

Their closeness was not built on telling each other everything. They were not confidantes or friends, and Blanca remembers presenting a composed version of herself to her mother. As a teenager, she had already had her period for two years when her mother suggested they might consult a doctor; Blanca told her, calmly, that it was not her mother’s business. Her mother stopped the car in astonishment, then drove on without reopening the subject. The distance did not cancel the bond. Blanca believes her mother watched her fall in and out of love from a respectful remove, allowing her happiness and suffering without too many instructions.

Blanca’s memories also make her mother the beginning of her later capacity to love. She sees her own love for her children as connected to the love she received in childhood, and understands her mother as the great love against which other, more turbulent attachments could not compete. Orphanhood therefore changes not only who is physically present but also how Blanca understands the source of her attachments and the place from which she learned to love.

Cadaqués, the House, and the Work of Memory

The family home in Cadaqués gathers Blanca’s life into one place. On an early morning after her mother’s death, memories arrive as a dense covering that, for once, does not suffocate her. She recalls her grandfather bringing fruit from Barcelona, laundry being taken away, cakes and gazpacho arriving from family helpers, long breakfasts, beach towels drying on the railing, reluctant naps, evenings in town, and ice cream. The house holds not one period but the overlapping routines of a family across generations.

Those domestic recollections sit beside the more unruly summers of first loves, drunkenness, drugs, nights awake, friends, and the certainty of youth. Blanca remembers conceiving her first child there, later bringing the children to the house, and watching them repeat childhood mishaps that had happened to her brother decades earlier. She also remembers separations, her mother’s aging, the deaths of Marisa and Marisa’s daughter Elenita, and the house gradually growing old and becoming, in her perception, almost identical with her mother. The unchanged routines of breakfast, boating, lunch, naps, and card games could not keep happiness unchanged; the familiar landscape can seem to promise that life is beginning again only when Blanca stops looking back.

A single garment condenses this struggle to keep and release. Her mother’s jacket is the only item of her clothing Blanca has kept. At first she does not know what to do with it, and Elisa advises her to have it cleaned and store it high in a cupboard until she is ready to decide. In the epilogue, Blanca has taken it to the cleaner’s and is told it will come back as good as new. The practical act does not restore her mother; it marks a point at which the garment can be cared for without requiring an immediate decision about what it means.

Absence in the Animals and at the Cemetery

After an argument leaves Blanca alone at home with a migraine, she passes the morning with crushed ice against her forehead. Patum does not enter her mother’s room. The dog waits at the doorway and searches the house for her scent or some sign that she will return; Blanca recognizes the same search in herself and imagines repeating journeys they took together to Athens, Venice, and New York in the hope of finding her mother there. The dog’s behavior makes absence visible as a repeated, physical waiting.

Patum is also old and may not live through the winter. Blanca recalls the dog’s birth in a litter her mother cared for in a large wooden box beside her bed. Her mother had Nana’s nine puppies watched and fed, making sure the stronger ones left food for the weaker ones and that Nana could rest. Blanca remembers both her own distress at the birth and her mother’s enthusiasm, and says she loved the girl her mother had once been. The prospect of losing Patum compounds the bereavement: the remaining animals connect Blanca to her mother’s household and to a time that is also disappearing. She fears that this side of the world is becoming empty, though at other moments the dead seem to push her forward like a quiet force.

Near dawn, after spending several hours at a party, Blanca sets out intending to see the sea alone but climbs instead toward the cemetery. She reaches the entrance exhausted and afraid, remembers having imagined an earlier visit in which she would come alone, serene and recovered, and finds the wooden gate locked. She pushes, calls softly for her mother, then pounds the door until her hands hurt. When morning arrives, she climbs onto a bench and looks over the olive fields toward Port Lligat. There she sees her mother walking along the quay with Patum, Nana, and Luna, heading happily toward her boat. The vision gives Blanca a final exchange with her mother, who offers the assurance that this too will pass. The scene does not make the cemetery accessible or undo the death; it gives the failed visit an imagined encounter shaped by the remembered mother and the familiar dogs.

A Continuing Bond and a Gradual Return

Blanca’s grief moves between immersion in loss and the demands of continuing life. After sex with Óscar, she wakes beside her former partner and reflects that sex can briefly disperse death—and life—only for the room, its objects, memories, panic, and sorrow to return to their exact places. The passage makes relief real but temporary: even a powerful bodily interruption cannot remove bereavement. Elsewhere, the wish to lie in bed and be comforted by her mother coexists with the presence of people who care for Blanca and with the daily lives of her children.

In the epilogue, the bond persists through memory, gestures, and family habits rather than through any claim that the loss has been repaired. Blanca’s children welcome the unusual and wounded people who enter their home with kindness, curiosity, respect, caution, and affection; she recognizes in them qualities she associates with her mother. When the family drives past her mother’s last apartment on Carrer de Muntaner, the older grandson silently looks up toward the balcony. Blanca does not tell him that his grandmother is in a better place, because she does not believe that account: her mother had loved being with her grandchildren and with Blanca.

There are nevertheless small changes. Blanca says she is beginning to breathe more easily and has almost stopped having nightmares; on some days she feels a little of the happiness she calls fairy dust. Rey, a new dog, is living in the house, and Blanca is trying to teach the children to walk him each day. The jacket’s trip to the cleaner’s belongs to the same modest movement. Orphanhood remains a fact, and her mother remains irreplaceable, but memory and inherited care become ways of carrying the relationship into a life that continues.