The parent-child relationship between Ricardo Aldaya and Penelope Aldaya

The father–daughter relationship between Don Ricardo Aldaya and Penelope Aldaya is marked not by intimacy but by paternal power exercised as coercion. When Ricardo learns of Penelope’s relationship with Julián Carax, he responds with physical violence, medical scrutiny, and confinement, making his authority the immediate instrument of her isolation. The episode belongs to the wider history of the Aldaya mansion, where a prophecy of women’s deaths and the family’s eventual flight deepen the sense that private life in the house is governed by fear and inherited wrongdoing.

Identity and Household Background

Penelope is Don Ricardo’s daughter and one of the women whose life is shaped by the rules of the Aldaya household. Ricardo’s standing as a wealthy industrialist does not translate into care within the family: the account of his conduct emphasizes his power over the home and his forceful response when that power is challenged. His daughter’s relationship with Julián becomes a matter he controls through punishment rather than a private choice he seeks to understand.

That authority sits within an already troubled family history. The mansion had been acquired through Ricardo’s hard dealings, and the family’s happiness gradually drained away there. Señora Aldaya repeatedly pleaded with her husband to sell the property and move into town, or return to the residence built for the family patriarch, Simón. Ricardo refused, in part because he spent much of his time travelling or at the family’s factories and saw no problem with the house. His indifference to his wife’s fear contrasts with the control he later exerts over Penelope.

The Mansion’s Prophecy

The family’s history gives the father–daughter conflict a foreboding setting. When Penelope’s brother Jorge was a child, he disappeared inside the mansion for eight hours. On returning, pale and dazed, he said he had been in the library with a mysterious black woman who showed him old photographs and foretold that all the women in the family would die in the house to atone for the men’s sins. The woman also named the date of his mother’s death: 12 April 1921.

The prophecy became inseparable from the house’s later history. At first light on the named date, Señora Aldaya was found dead in her bed. Her jewels had vanished; after the courtyard pond was drained, a servant boy found them in the mud beside a doll that had belonged to Penelope. The story does not establish that the prophecy caused the death, but the date, the recovered jewels, and the doll tie the family’s domestic losses to the mansion’s atmosphere of menace. Penelope’s later confinement unfolds against this history, in a home already associated with the vulnerability of its women.

Ricardo’s Response to Penelope’s Relationship

The account of the discovery comes through the longtime servant who had tried to protect Penelope. After Penelope’s mother caught the young couple in the servant’s bedroom, Penelope told the servant what had happened. The following day, Señora Aldaya summoned the servant and asked what she knew about Julián. She said she knew nothing beyond his being a nice boy and Jorge’s friend. Señora Aldaya ordered her to keep Penelope locked in her room until permission was given for her to come out.

When Don Ricardo returned from Madrid early on Friday, his wife told him what she had witnessed. He leapt from his armchair and slapped her so hard that she fell to the floor, then demanded that she repeat what she had said. The servant had never seen him behave that way before and described him as appearing possessed with anger. He went upstairs, pulled Penelope from bed by the hair, and kicked the servant aside when she tried to stop him. The sequence makes the reach of his authority explicit: he first strikes his wife for bringing him the news, then turns his violence on his daughter and anyone attempting to intervene.

Ricardo next called the family doctor and had him examine Penelope. When the examination was over, the doctor spoke to Don Ricardo; Penelope was locked in her room, and Señora Aldaya told the servant to collect her things. The account does not specify what the examination involved or what the doctor concluded. What it does show is that Ricardo brought medical authority into the crisis, while the resulting household response was continued confinement rather than any restoration of Penelope’s freedom.

Separation and Consequences

The servant was not permitted to say goodbye. After eighteen years of uninterrupted service, she was thrown out that night with nowhere to go, and Ricardo threatened to report her to the police if she told anyone what had happened. Two days later, at a boarding house on Calle Muntaner, Miquel Moliner visited her and said that Julián had gone to Paris. He wanted to know why Penelope had not appeared at the station as arranged. The servant could explain what had happened inside the house, but had no access to Penelope and could not reunite the separated pair.

For weeks, she returned to the mansion begging to see Penelope, but was barred at the gates. She waited on the opposite corner day after day, hoping to see the family leave; Penelope never came out. Ricardo later used his influential connections to have the servant committed to the asylum at Horta, claiming that nobody knew her and that she was a deranged woman harassing his family. She spent two years locked up and went back to the house as soon as she was released. The relationship’s consequences therefore extend beyond the father and daughter: Ricardo’s effort to contain the discovery also removes a witness and isolates the person who might have carried news between Penelope and Julián.

A week after Señora Aldaya’s death, Ricardo decided to dispose of the mansion. His financial empire was already failing; some blamed the house, while others attributed the collapse to his failure to understand changing markets and his destruction of the business built by the patriarch Simón. He announced that he would leave Barcelona with his family for Argentina, claiming that the textile industries there were prospering, though many believed he was fleeing failure and shame. The mansion went up for sale in 1922 at a very low price, closed in 1923, and remained unsold for years. That later abandonment does not undo what Ricardo did to Penelope: it leaves the house as the lasting setting of a family history in which paternal power, secrecy, and the threatened lives of women are bound together.