Blanca and Elisa argue over Damián

Blanca and Elisa argue over Damián in a confrontation that turns an ambiguous, intoxicated farewell into a rupture over friendship, grief, and personal freedom. What begins as Elisa’s account of seeing Blanca and Damián touch lips becomes an explicit dispute about whether intimacy can be detached from obligation—and whether Blanca’s ideals of openness take other people’s feelings seriously.

Background and the Morning After

The conflict follows a hazy evening among friends. Blanca, increasingly intoxicated, feels a thread drawing together those who are becoming more impaired and excluding the lucid. Elisa, who drinks little, watches her with a questioning, severe gaze. Through the blur, Blanca signals to Damián, afraid he might dissolve from view; he sits beside her and talks with Pedro. For a moment, music, friends’ voices, and the sound of the sea make everything seem intact. Blanca rests her head on Damián’s shoulder and closes her eyes. The scene leaves the farewell open to competing interpretations: to Blanca it belongs to a blurred, affectionate night, while Elisa remembers a troubling gesture.

Blanca wakes with a monumental hangover, the children already at the beach and harsh daylight pressing against her closed eyes. Wearing her robe, she climbs the stairs carefully, makes an infusion, and turns through an old newspaper. When Elisa appears, Blanca greets her warmly, recalls the previous night as a success, praises the friends and their guitar, and proposes doing it again. Elisa’s exhausted face and sleepless, worried eyes contradict that cheerful account. The women have barely spoken since Elisa began seeing Damián, and the morning’s apparent friendliness quickly gives way to what Elisa has been holding back.

The Disputed Farewell

Elisa says she saw something that troubled and saddened her: Blanca saying goodnight to Damián. Blanca initially laughs, assuming Elisa means Pedro, who kisses her on the mouth as he often does. Elisa clarifies that she is not talking about Pedro and knows that many people kiss Blanca. The correction makes the accusation specific: Elisa believes Blanca’s farewell crossed a boundary with her boyfriend.

Blanca rejects the idea that she is trying to seduce Damián and asks whether Elisa has gone mad. She then concedes that they were very intoxicated and says their lips only brushed; they are friends, she insists, and she promises not to kiss him again. Elisa’s reply is not that the contact was necessarily deliberate, but that Blanca pressed close to him and said goodbye with a kiss on the lips. She names the pattern as flirtation rather than friendship. Blanca answers that friendship is always flirtation, a formulation that treats flirtation as ordinary and expansive, while Elisa hears it as a refusal to recognize what this particular intimacy means to her.

Grief, Freedom, and Accusation

The quarrel broadens from Damián to Blanca’s way of understanding relationships. Elisa attacks Blanca’s imagined new society, where people understand one another, kiss when they wish, move in and out of relationships freely, and have children across those shifting connections. In Elisa’s view, that arrangement works only when other people do not matter. Blanca denies that indifference, but Elisa insists that Blanca cares about almost nobody beyond her children and perhaps her mother.

Elisa brings Blanca’s bereavement directly into the argument. She recalls that Blanca’s mother was old and very ill, suffered greatly during her last six months, and also caused Blanca pain; she emphasizes that her mother had a full life, with love, friends, children, success, and the freedom to do as she pleased. Blanca is sad and somewhat lost, Elisa acknowledges, but grief does not give her the right to overturn everyone else’s life. The appeal is both an attempt to put Blanca’s loss in perspective and a charge that she is using it to excuse the consequences of her behavior.

Blanca turns the accusation back on Elisa, calling her a coward. She points to Elisa’s refusal to try drugs, her unwillingness to have children, and her need always to have a boyfriend, interpreting each as evidence of fear and a confined life. Elisa counters with a different account of who is sheltered: she calls Blanca privileged, says she lives on income, has never set foot in a public hospital, and objects to meeting in the poorer neighborhoods where Elisa lives. Blanca denies living on income, but the exchange has moved far beyond the disputed kiss. Each woman now presents the other’s way of life as a fantasy that conceals its own dependence and fear.

Departure and Aftermath

Elisa ends the discussion because, as she sees it, Blanca is continually trying to say something funny instead of arguing seriously. Damián is waiting for her in the parking lot. As Elisa crosses the garden, Blanca shouts that her kisses belong to her: she owes nobody an explanation, can share them as she chooses, and sees them as more democratic—and more dangerous—than money because everyone has them. A world in which everyone acted that way, Blanca argues, might be more chaotic but also more fun. Her declaration turns the kiss into a principle of personal autonomy, but its force also exposes the point Elisa has made: a defense of freedom does not answer the hurt or uncertainty experienced by the person on the other side.

Elisa leaves with a goodbye. Guillem, watching from a window, whistles, stares open-mouthed, and makes a gesture at his temple to indicate that the women are crazy. Blanca slams the door and bursts into tears. The scene ends not with agreement or reconciliation but with a public exit and a private collapse. She spends the rest of the morning alone in the house with Patum, pressing crushed ice to her forehead to ease her migraine. The physical aftermath echoes the argument’s emotional one: after insisting that her choices need no explanation, Blanca is left alone with the pain and with the consequences of a friendship now openly strained.