Óscar

Óscar is Blanca’s ex-partner and the father of her child, a man whose physical presence offers immediate comfort but cannot settle the question of whether they can build a life together. His faith in sex as a cure for distress, his support through Blanca’s mother’s final illness, and their repeated returns to one another make him both a refuge and a source of renewed uncertainty.

Identity and First Impressions

Blanca remembers Óscar as physically striking: long and strong, with a slightly concave chest, narrow hips, cyclist’s legs, and large, emphatic features. His face has a bull-like quality, while his posture retains something of a shy adolescent’s forward hunch. The combination of forcefulness and awkwardness helps explain the pull he exerts on Blanca: he appears robust and instinctive, yet also vulnerable to laughter and intimacy.

Blanca’s mother recognizes him before he has properly been introduced. After encountering him in the elevator, she guesses that he is heading to Blanca’s apartment and tells him, flirtatiously, that the heat is so intense she sits down to write in wet clothes, which dry within half an hour. Óscar reaches the apartment laughing, and Blanca understands that he has just met her mother. This early meeting links him to the family life that will later become inseparable from their relationship, and gives their first intimacy a comic, domestic frame.

Intimacy and Shared Life

For a time, Óscar’s body is Blanca’s only home, her only place in the world. The metaphor presents their early closeness as a form of shelter grounded in physical contact. Their life then changes: they have a child, and, as Blanca puts it, they come to know one another. The sequence marks a shift from bodily certainty to the more difficult work of a shared relationship. Intimacy can make them feel perfectly matched; knowing each other exposes the differences that complicate that match.

Óscar believes in sex as a forceful remedy for nearly every misfortune. In Blanca’s account, his prescription applies to sadness, a headache, a broken computer, financial ruin, and even a mother’s death. She concedes that it sometimes works, but emphasizes how briefly. After sex, the grief and panic that seemed to vanish return to their exact places in the room, the mind, and the stomach. The temporary disappearance of pain is real, but it is not a resolution. Óscar’s confidence in bodily relief stands beside Blanca’s recognition that the relief has limits.

Support During Bereavement

After Blanca’s mother dies, Blanca wakes beside Óscar, her ex, and watches him sleep, careful not to move enough to wake him. The quiet domestic scene follows an encounter that has brought temporary respite from death. Outside, children splash in the pool, sunlight promises another hot day, and the plane trees move peacefully. Their calm contrasts with Blanca’s inner devastation, while Óscar’s sleeping body gives her a familiar presence in the aftermath.

Their history is complicated, but his presence during the illness is not merely sexual. Óscar has been beside Blanca through the last six months of hospitals, doctors, and battles that could not be won. His companionship during that period gives substance to the idea of him as a refuge, even though it does not make him her partner again. He has a girlfriend, yet still shares Blanca’s bed; care and desire coexist with the unresolved boundaries of their former relationship.

Repeated Attempts to Reconcile

Blanca says she has lost count of the times they have tried to resume their relationship. Each attempt founders on something, usually his character or hers. The pattern is not a simple return to an earlier happiness: their bodies repeatedly draw them close, but the practical and emotional question of how to stay together remains open.

When they meet, even for an ordinary errand such as lunch or a trip to the pharmacy, they become a couple almost automatically. Blanca experiences them as two parts that seem unable to add up to anything else, as though together they form a perfect formula whose meaning they have never managed to discover. The image conveys an intense sense of fit without promising that compatibility can be translated into a workable life. Their couplehood is immediate; its terms remain elusive.

Desire, Refusal, and Uncertainty

In one intimate reunion, Óscar playfully invites Blanca back into bed. She resists, saying she needs to touch land rather than return to the sea: a sharp contrast between his invitation into bodily pleasure and her need for steadier ground. She then insists that she wants to be his girlfriend. Óscar answers tenderly but doubts the request will last, believing she would send him away again after two days. Blanca denies it and argues from the force of their sexual connection, while recognizing that the certainty her body expresses is contradicted by what happens in their life together.

The dispute becomes more painful when Blanca says she wants everything or nothing. Óscar replies that they have discussed the matter many times: in his view, she does not want a relationship, or does not want one with him. He says he has to leave for work in Barcelona. Blanca believes that explanation is false, because it is Friday in summer and he has recently spent weekends with his girlfriend. Rather than accept the separation calmly, she turns toward anger to avoid sadness. The scene leaves their bond unresolved: Óscar can be a source of comfort, a familiar partner in bed, and a steadfast presence in grief, yet neither desire nor shared history has secured the commitment Blanca asks for.