la familia elegida

La familia elegida describes a form of kinship made through affection, shared history, and acts of care rather than guaranteed by blood. In the novel, this family is neither an abstract ideal nor a substitute that simply erases biological ties: it is assembled from friends, former partners, children, and animals who continue to share responsibility and daily life. Its warmth is real, but so is its fragility. The narrator recognizes that chosen families can disappear more easily than families of blood, even as the bonds they leave behind continue to shape the living.

A family made through shared life

As a child, the narrator sees her mother’s friends laughing, playing cards until dawn, travelling, swimming naked in the sea, and going out to dinner. Their friendship has the texture of family because it has accumulated shared time and pleasure. Yet at the mother’s funeral, the narrator finds that many people are missing. Some of the friends who do attend, she thinks, knew her mother only slightly and remember the glorious person she had been years earlier. The gap between the remembered community and the people present makes the fragility of chosen kinship tangible: affection and a long past do not ensure that everyone will remain close, or even appear when loss gathers the survivors.

The funeral also shows how chosen relationships can cross generations. The narrator’s friends Carolina, Mercè, Elisa, and Sofía are there with her, while Patum, her mother’s large dog, is brought by Guillem. Patum wears a black ribbon on her collar and sits solemnly beside him. The narrator imagines her mother sitting with them, a hand on the dog’s head, at her own silent funeral. The scene gathers former partners, friends, a beloved animal, and the dead woman’s daughter into a family-like presence without pretending that grief has made the absences disappear.

Separation without severance

Guillem is the father of the narrator’s older son and her former partner. Their relationship is openly complicated: she loves him, while he usually pretends to hate her, and she regards even his performed hostility as more generous than many people’s love. Their separation does not end their practical connection. The children spend time at his home and return tanned, taller, and carrying vegetables from his garden. His teasing, his care for the children, and the familiar ease between the adults make their ongoing bond visible in ordinary exchanges rather than in declarations.

Patum’s history makes that continuity especially clear. The dog belonged to the narrator and Guillem for a time before she left Patum with him during a trip and he decided to keep her, saying she would be better with his mother and sister. Patum thus passed between households while remaining part of the same extended circle. Later, Guillem took her in when the narrator’s mother could no longer care for her. The mother’s acceptance of this arrangement struck the narrator as a sign that the end was near; relinquishing the dog seemed to mean relinquishing everything. At the funeral, Guillem brings Patum back into the family gathering, now as the dog who had outlived her mother and sister. The black ribbon and her unusually formal composure turn care for an animal into a quiet act of mourning shared by the living.

Parenthood by agreement and friendship

Sofía and Tom offer another, distinctly negotiated form of kinship. They had been partners when young and remained friends after their romantic relationship ended. When Sofía felt that the years in which having a child would be easier were passing, she approached Tom and asked him to father a child. By then he had married, had two daughters, and separated. He agreed, but set clear terms: the child could bear his surname and he would see him occasionally, while the boy would belong to Sofía alone in the sense that she would be the parent responsible for raising him. Sofía accepted with gratitude, conscious of what Tom was giving her, and he continued with his life.

That arrangement does not dissolve friendship into an assumed conventional household. Instead, it gives the relationship practical boundaries and a lasting consequence: Tom is Daniel’s father, but Sofía is solely responsible for his upbringing. The narrator and her children stop at Tom’s home on the drive to Cadaqués. His ramshackle house stands on a large plot devoted to rescuing dogs and breeding beagles; a dusty sign at the entrance reads Villa Beagle. The children call for him at the fence, and a pack of dogs runs toward them. The visit places a deliberately formed family connection within a wider scene of animal care and shared hospitality.

A household that keeps expanding

At the long wooden dining table in Cadaqués, the narrator sees several relationships inhabiting one room without becoming interchangeable. Óscar and Guillem treat one another with respect and warmth, and each treats the other’s son with an affection close to a father’s. Sofía flirts with Guillem, who answers by contradicting and teasing her; Elisa and Damián, lovers, exchange confidences. Children, former partners, friends, and lovers share a meal, with the narrator’s uncle’s old table at its center. The household’s closeness is not presented as a frictionless ideal: its members are passionate, and the narrator notes their dislike of casual promiscuity and easygoing tolerance. Still, the scene makes kinship visible as a daily practice of attention, teasing, feeding, and care across relationships that do not fit one simple category.

The mother’s influence remains part of this expanded household even after her death. The narrator remembers her as someone who made the lives of the people and animals she loved larger, airier, and more joyful, though her love also came with relentless scrutiny. The mother’s presence is therefore both a gift inherited by the family and a demanding standard against which its members may be measured. In the epilogue, the narrator notices her grandchildren receiving unusual, wounded, or eccentric visitors with courtesy, curiosity, respect, caution, and affection. Their welcome becomes one way the mother’s manner of relating to others persists through them.

Objects, memory, and continuing ties

Chosen kinship survives not only through visits but through the objects and places that hold shared experience. After her mother’s death, the narrator faces boxes filled with books, crockery, tea sets, and table linen. For hours she alternates between wanting to give everything away and wanting to keep every small thing. The indecision is also an attempt to decide how close she wants to remain to her mother. Among the belongings, she keeps one blue-gray wool jacket with terracotta-colored stripes, not because it is valuable but because she remembers choosing it with her mother and seeing her wear it many times.

The family home in Cadaqués gathers still more layers of common life: summer breakfasts, beach towels drying on the railing, afternoons, games of cards, early loves, children returning year after year, separations, and the mother’s gradual decline. The house changes from a place open to everyone into a more solitary space, and its later emptiness carries the mother’s absence. Yet the narrator’s early-morning attempt to visit the cemetery ends in an imagined sight of her mother walking toward her boat at Port Lligat with Patum and her other dogs. The mother turns back, smiles, and tells her that this too will pass. The vision does not restore the lost household; it gives the continuing bond a form the narrator can carry.

By the epilogue, the narrator is breathing more easily and has almost stopped having nightmares. A new dog, Rey, has joined the household, and she is trying to teach the children to walk him each day. She has also taken her mother’s jacket to the cleaners, where it is to be returned looking new. These small changes place grief within ongoing care: a new animal needs walking, the children learn responsibility, and an inherited garment can be handled again. La familia elegida is thus both vulnerable to absence and capable of renewal, sustained through specific acts of welcome, memory, and shared responsibility.