Haxinta Coronado and Penelope Aldaya's mother-daughter bond

Jacinta Coronado and Penelope Aldaya share a mother-daughter relationship formed through years of daily care and confidences, despite Jacinta not being Penelope’s biological mother. Jacinta raises her from infancy, becomes her closest companion, and remains devoted to her after the Aldaya household forcibly separates them. Her lifelong inability to see Penelope again gives the relationship its defining shape: intimate, sustaining, and ultimately marked by loss.

A mother through care

Penelope was born in the spring of 1902. Jacinta watched her grow from a pale, delicate child, tending to her illnesses and personally preparing her meals, sewing her clothes, and attending to her at night. She was there for Penelope’s first words and remained beside her as she grew up. By contrast, Señora Aldaya appears in Jacinta’s recollection as a distant presence, coming and going according to the requirements of propriety. Though Penelope’s mother regularly told the girl that she loved her, Jacinta understood her own love as something enacted rather than declared.

Her care extended across the ordinary routines that made up Penelope’s life: reading to her, walking with her, bathing and dressing her, combing her hair, putting her to bed, and waking her. Jacinta also spoke with Penelope constantly. Once the girl could express her thoughts, the two began to share secrets and their lives. Their bond was not simply that of a servant and the child entrusted to her; the story presents Jacinta as Penelope’s mother in the emotional and practical sense, and as her best friend.

An inseparable bond

As time passed, their closeness deepened. By Penelope’s adolescence, Jacinta considered them inseparable, and she watched with pride as Penelope grew into a woman whose beauty others could also see. When Julián Carax came to the house, Jacinta quickly recognized the powerful connection between him and Penelope. She sensed that it was dangerous, but she could not bring herself to hate Julián. As Penelope fell in love with him, Jacinta’s own wishes became bound up with Penelope’s; she came to desire what the girl desired.

This response reveals the intensity of Jacinta’s attachment, but also its cost. Her devotion does not give her power over the household or over Penelope’s future. She can observe the danger and share Penelope’s emotional world, yet the decisions that will separate them are made by the Aldayas. The relationship is thus built through persistent acts of closeness and exposed to forces Jacinta cannot control.

Separation by the Aldayas

After Penelope’s mother discovered her with Julián, Señora Aldaya questioned Jacinta about him. Jacinta denied knowing anything beyond that he was a friend of Jorge’s. Señora Aldaya then ordered her to keep Penelope confined to her room. When Don Ricardo returned, he reacted violently to the news, went to Penelope’s bedroom, and had the family doctor examine her. Jacinta tried to intervene, but Don Ricardo pushed her aside. Señora Aldaya then told Jacinta to collect her belongings.

Jacinta was not allowed to say goodbye to Penelope. Don Ricardo threatened to report her to the police if she disclosed what had happened, and that night the family expelled her after eighteen years of service. She later returned repeatedly, pleading to see Penelope, but was not allowed through the gates. For days she waited across from the house in the hope of seeing Penelope leave; she never did. The separation was not a gradual drifting apart but a deliberate removal of the person who had raised Penelope, followed by the household’s refusal to let them meet.

Don Ricardo subsequently used his influence to have Jacinta committed to the Horta lunatic asylum, claiming that she was a stranger harassing his family. She spent two years there. Upon her release, she returned to the house on Avenida del Tibidabo, only to find it locked and for sale. The Aldayas had gone to Argentina, and letters Jacinta sent to the address she was given came back unopened. Her repeated attempts to recover contact ended without an answer or a final meeting.

Memory and the last news

Years later, when asked about Penelope, the elderly Jacinta immediately recognized her name and called her “My girl.” In telling her story, she remembered not only the separation but the years of intimate care that preceded it. Asked what happened to Penelope, she could only say that she had never seen her again. The confession overwhelmed her, and Fermín Romero de Torres comforted her as she wept.

A later visit from Julián brought a limited form of consolation. He spent time with Jacinta talking about the old days and gave her news of Penelope. Jacinta told the hospice staff that she was going home with her daughter, and she died in her sleep the following dawn. The account does not describe a literal reunion with Penelope; rather, it shows how the news allowed Jacinta, in her final hours, to imagine the daughter she had spent her life longing to see.

Significance of the relationship

Jacinta and Penelope’s bond is defined by a contrast between care and authority. Jacinta performs the everyday work of motherhood and becomes Penelope’s confidante, but she has neither the legal standing nor the social power to protect her when the Aldayas intervene. The same closeness that makes Jacinta Penelope’s truest maternal presence cannot shield either woman from the family’s control.

The relationship also gives lasting force to Jacinta’s testimony. Her account restores the years of affection that Penelope’s disappearance and the Aldaya family’s silence might otherwise obscure. Even when Jacinta cannot say what became of Penelope, the details of their shared life remain: meals prepared, clothes sewn, stories read aloud, and confidences exchanged. Their connection survives in her memory, and the late news from Julián offers a final, fragile comfort without undoing the separation.