The narrator’s mourning for her mother

The narrator’s mourning for her mother is the emotional current running beneath the summer’s ordinary activities and sudden returns of grief. It moves between bodily attempts at relief, memories embedded in the family home, and a failed dawn visit to the grave; it ends not with release but with an imagined reunion and the recognition that the narrator will carry her mother’s absence for the rest of her life. The mother remains present through the narrator’s habits, her children, and the places and objects they shared, so mourning becomes a changed form of relationship rather than a clean break.

Grief in the Body and the Everyday

The narrator describes grief as something that briefly recedes and then returns with exactness. Sex can momentarily disperse both death and life, she reflects, as if everything in the room and mind had been swept away. But when the spell passes, the furniture, clothes, memories, panic, and sorrow settle back into their former places. The image makes relief real but temporary: the loss has not been resolved, only interrupted.

That interruption occurs beside Óscar, her ex-partner, with whom she has resumed sharing a bed. He has a girlfriend, yet has also stayed beside the narrator through the last six months of hospitals, doctors, and battles that could not be won. Their physical closeness follows repeated failed attempts to restart their relationship, which have foundered on his temperament or hers. The episode places sex and comfort alongside bereavement without turning either into a cure: the narrator wakes, leaves the bed quietly, and returns to the ordinary demands of a morning. Her mother’s illness had already made the body a site of loss; the narrator recalls that the disease took her mother’s mind before the rest of her, leaving only intermittent lucidity that brought further suffering.

Other people’s care also has limits. The narrator has repeatedly been told that many people love her, and she is grateful, but the reassurance arrives when she wants to withdraw into bed and have her mother sit beside her, hold her hand, and place a hand on her forehead. She does not tell those offering comfort that she no longer trusts anyone’s love, having felt that even her mother stopped loving her for a time. The gap between the support available and the particular comfort she longs for makes the loss irreducible to a general network of affection.

Cadaqués as a Vessel of Memory

At the family home in Cadaqués, the narrator’s memories collect around repeated routines and physical details. On the terrace, looking toward the sea, she recalls her grandfather arriving with crates of fruit from Barcelona, Remei taking laundry away, Marisa’s gazpacho, long breakfasts of toast and butter, beach towels drying on the railing, reluctant naps, ice creams, and card games. The home also holds first drunkenness, early loves, sleepless nights, laughter, drugs, the conception of her first child, and later summers spent bringing children there. Its history is not a single, untroubled past but a record of changing generations and lives.

The house’s atmosphere changed as the mother grew old. Doors once left open even at night began to close, and the familiar routine of breakfasts, the boat, lunches, naps, and cards persisted even as happiness altered. The narrator remembers old companions returning with children and tired faces, and the deaths of Marisa and Marisa’s daughter Elenita. Eventually, she felt obliged to visit her mother in Cadaqués even when she no longer wanted to; then came the mother’s death. The house seemed to age with her, grow empty, and finally become her. Yet the morning light, clear air, and tranquil sea still resemble the landscape of the narrator’s twenties, making the scenery appear to deny the tragedies held within it.

That memory is not merely consoling. Patum, the dog, understands that the mother is gone, avoids her room, and waits at the doorway, sniffing for her scent or a sign that she will return. The narrator recognizes the same search in herself and imagines repeating journeys they made together to Athens, Venice, or New York in the hope of finding her. She also fears Patum’s approaching death: Guillem has heard from the veterinarian that the dog may not live until winter. The possible loss sharpens the sense that the narrator’s world is being emptied of those connected to her mother, while the family home and its animals keep the absent woman’s presence tangible.

The Failed Dawn Visit

After a night at a party, the narrator walks through the village before dawn, tired and still carrying the sadness that has followed her since the death. She intends to go to the beach and see the sunrise alone, but instead climbs the mountain’s narrow lanes toward the cemetery. Earlier, she had imagined coming there by herself, calm and recovered, perhaps carrying a wildflower. The real visit is different: her heart pounds, her hands are cold, and she trembles before the cemetery’s dark wooden gate.

The gate is locked. She pushes against it, works the heavy handle, and tells herself there must be a solution. She considers calling the mayor, climbing the wall, writing to a newspaper, and asking Amnesty International to intervene; then she calls softly to her mother at the door and listens for a response. None comes. She pounds on the gate until her hands hurt, then sits exhausted on the bench by the hermitage. The scene turns the desire to reach the dead into a literal, futile encounter with a barrier. She cannot enter the cemetery, and the mother cannot answer.

As daylight spreads over the olive trees and the white walls, the narrator climbs onto the bench and looks over the wall toward Port Lligat, where the family kept its boat. She imagines her mother walking along the quay in a faded blue checked shirt over her bathing suit, with her familiar bruised legs, crooked glasses, disordered hair beneath a salt-worn cap, and three dogs just out of the water. The mother turns, smiles, and conveys the lesson that this too will pass. The apparition gives the narrator a moment of contact, but it does not erase the failure of the visit or make the loss reversible.

A Continuing Bond, Not a Cure

The epilogue returns to the circumstances the narrator cannot undo: she spent the final night at home after a doctor said her mother was better, though looking at her made clear that this was not so. Her mother died alone in the hospital. The narrator wishes she had died beside her, holding her hand at their shared ending, and says that although she walks among the living, more or less cheerfully and more or less alone, she always has one foot where her mother is. This regret gives the cemetery episode its deeper force: the locked gate is one more encounter with a separation she would have wished to prevent.

The mother had once told the narrator a story to comfort her after her father’s death. In it, an emperor asks learned people for a short phrase suitable for every circumstance, and they return with the thought that this too will pass. The mother added that pain and sorrow pass, just as euphoria and happiness do. Now the narrator cannot accept the promise as literally true: she will live without her mother until she dies. But the story remains one of the forms in which the mother persists, and its repeated phrase joins the remembered image at Port Lligat to a shared history of consolation.

The narrator also names what she received from her mother: love of art, books, museums, and ballet; generosity with money; bold gestures at the right moments; rigor in words and actions; freedom and responsibility; laughter, joy, and wholehearted commitment. She remembers the mother’s dislike of meanness, disloyalty, envy, fear, stupidity, and especially cruelty, as well as her sense of justice and her ability to recognize happiness while it was still present. These qualities are not presented as an inheritance the narrator possesses completely. She doubts her own capacity for her mother’s generosity and tolerance, but searches for them in the people around her and recognizes early signs in her children.

That inheritance appears in family life after the death. The children greet even unusual or wounded visitors with kindness, curiosity, respect, caution, and affection. When they drive past the last apartment where the mother lived on Carrer de Muntaner, the narrator discreetly watches her older child look up at the balcony in silence. She considers the comforting claim that the mother is in a better place, but rejects it because the mother had wanted most to be with her grandchildren and the narrator. Meanwhile, she is beginning to breathe more easily and has almost stopped having nightmares; on some days, she feels a little of the happiness she associates with her mother returning.

Small acts of care close the distance between memory and daily life without pretending to restore what has been lost. A new dog named Rey lives in the narrator’s home, and she is trying to teach the children to walk him each day. She has also taken her mother’s jacket to the dry cleaner, which promises to return it as good as new. The cleaned garment can be restored in appearance; the mother cannot. The narrator’s mourning holds both facts together: the life left behind can be tended and carried forward, but the bond persists precisely because its loss cannot be reversed.