Beatriz Aguilar

Beatriz Aguilar, known as Bea, moves from the figure Daniel Sempere thinks he cannot stand to the partner with whom he builds a family and runs a bookshop. Her story links a youthful reversal of hostility to the larger history Daniel is uncovering, and finally to an adult life in which love and domestic continuity coexist with memories that neither she nor the people around her can simply erase.

Identity and Background

Bea is Tomás’s sister and the daughter of Señor Aguilar, a prosperous property manager whose office is on Calle Pelayo. Daniel remembers first noticing her as a child waiting with her father while lessons ended. That encounter led to a joke at her expense and a fight in which Tomás rained blows on Daniel; the beating, in turn, gave Daniel the courage to speak to the boy. Bea is thus present at the beginning of Daniel and Tomás’s friendship, though she initially enters his life as its provocation rather than its companion.

Daniel’s early description of Bea is deliberately filtered through dislike. She resembles her mother and is her father’s favorite: red-haired, very pale, dressed in expensive silk or wool, and conspicuously upright in her bearing. She calls her greenish-blue eyes “emerald and sapphire,” a phrase that Daniel remembers as evidence of her vanity. Despite her strict Catholic schooling, she drinks anise liqueur when her father is not looking, wears silk stockings from La Perla Gris, and imitates film goddesses. Daniel cannot stand her; she answers his open hostility with languid looks of disdain and indifference. The polished image is not simply her nature but the role he sees her performing, a princess in her own fairy tale.

When Daniel encounters Bea again at the university, his certainty about her has already begun to falter. He is explaining away the presence of Fermín Romero de Torres when a student turns around and smiles at him. Daniel recognizes her, becomes tongue-tied, and realizes that he has been looking at his best friend’s sister with a sudden, frightening attraction. The reversal is bodily before it is orderly: the person he had treated as an enemy now makes him lose his composure.

From Antagonism to Intimacy

Their renewed acquaintance begins with Bea offering a truce rather than pretending that the old hostility never existed. She admits that she can be stuck-up and vain and asks Daniel directly whether he dislikes her. Her candor disarms him. He recognizes how quickly animosity can dissolve when the other person stops behaving like an enemy, and tries to deny that he dislikes her. The exchange changes the terms between them: Bea is no longer merely the object of his childhood resentment, and Daniel is forced to see how much of that resentment depended on his own picture of her.

The new closeness is shadowed from the outset by Bea’s engagement. She confirms that she is to marry Pablo Cascos Buendía and move to El Ferrol when he finishes military service. Daniel responds with a spiteful note, betraying how much the news unsettles him. Bea’s existing commitment makes their attraction more than a simple reunion, while the family ties around it raise the cost of Daniel’s feelings: Tomás is not only his closest friend but the brother whose warning about Bea he cannot ignore.

In the years when Daniel and Fermín investigate the history of Julián Carax, Bea becomes inseparable from the danger surrounding that past. Fermín recounts Carax’s friendship with Jorge Aldaya, the rupture caused by Penélope, and Carax’s departure for Paris in 1919. He explains that a letter signed by Penélope was never received by Carax because she had been imprisoned in her own house, and that Jorge had threatened to kill his former friend. As Daniel hears the account, he remembers Tomás’s earlier plea not to hurt his sister and feels sick. Bea’s importance to Daniel therefore sits beside a parallel, much older story of a love concealed by family power and silence. The comparison does not make the two relationships identical; it gives Daniel’s private attachment an ominous historical echo.

Danger, Separation, and Return

By the time Daniel and Bea leave the Aldaya mansion, the violence they have encountered has left its mark. Daniel’s hand is stained with ashes, and the night conceals the tears running down his face. In the taxi, Bea holds his hand, but she looks at him with glassy, unreadable eyes and does not open her lips when he leans in to kiss her. Their physical closeness is real, yet it does not undo the terror of what has happened or guarantee that they can return immediately to ordinary life.

Daniel asks when he will see her again. Bea promises to call the next day or the one after and confirms that she has the number for both his home and the bookshop. At the corner of Muntaner and Diputación, she refuses his offer to walk her to her door and leaves without another kiss or even a touch of his hand. Daniel watches from the taxi as she begins to run. In the lit Aguilar apartment, Tomás stands at his bedroom window, watching coldly; Daniel waves, but Tomás does not answer, and the window goes dark. Bea’s departure thus leaves Daniel facing not only a private uncertainty but the visible disapproval of the friend whose sister she is.

After Daniel learns that Nuria Monfort has been murdered, grief and shock drive him through the freezing rain to the Aguilar apartment. He knocks in the knowledge that Señor Aguilar may attack him, and finds that Bea is away with her parents visiting a doctor. The absence intensifies the uncertainty: Daniel has come seeking the person who represents what remains good in his life, only to be told that she is not there and that the household itself is caught up in a new crisis.

Daniel eventually finds Bea at the Aldaya mansion, following a trail of candles that she has set along the entrance, staircase, and corridor outside Penélope’s former room. Bea is huddled in a corner, wrapped in a blanket. He rushes to her and holds her as she dissolves into tears. She explains that she did not know where to go, had called his home several times without an answer, and was frightened. In this return, the mansion that has held so much of the past’s violence becomes the place where Daniel finds and shelters Bea. Her fear is not resolved by a speech; the embrace answers it, and Daniel understands that no verbal reply is needed.

Marriage and Family

Bea and Daniel marry at the Church of Santa Ana three months later. Señor Aguilar gives his daughter’s hand to Daniel after her disappearance has softened his anger. He remains so shocked and so attached to his remembered image of Bea as a child in her first-communion dress that he struggles to accept the approaching reality of a grandson who will call Daniel Dad. His consent is not an easy transformation into warmth, but it marks a change in the family’s position toward the couple.

A week before the wedding, Señor Aguilar visits the bookshop with a gold tiepin that belonged to his own father and shakes Daniel’s hand. He calls Bea the only good thing he has ever done in his life and asks Daniel to take care of her. The inherited pin makes the gesture tangible: a father who once treated Daniel as an enemy entrusts him with his daughter and with an object from his own family. Daniel’s father sees Señor Aguilar walk down Calle Santa Ana afterward with the sadness of men growing old together, and remarks that people love in their own way. The reconciliation remains imperfect, but the exchange allows affection to appear through awkwardness, inheritance, and a request rather than through easy intimacy.

By 1956, Bea and Daniel have made the bookshop their shared work. She handles buying and serves customers, who prefer her to Daniel; he does the accounts. Their roles are practical and complementary, a settled partnership formed not by escaping the past but by continuing to live after it. The business provides enough for them to live modestly, even as sales diminish year by year and offers arrive to turn the shop into a store selling televisions, girdles, or rope-soled shoes. Their refusal to leave preserves both a livelihood and a place organized around books.

Later Life and Narrative Significance

In 1966, Bea and Daniel’s son, Julián, is nearly ten. Daniel observes that the boy has his mother’s eyes and intelligence, and hopes he has inherited his own sense of wonder. The name Julián carries the past into the next generation, while the child’s everyday presence makes that inheritance more than a symbolic resemblance: Bea and Daniel have made a family in the aftermath of the danger that once brought them to the abandoned mansion.

Time has made Bea strong and wise, but it has not made her talk freely about what came before. She hardly ever speaks of the past, and Daniel sometimes finds her stranded in silence, alone with herself. The contrast matters: she participates actively in the present, buying stock, serving customers, and raising their son, yet some part of her remains inaccessible even to the person closest to her. Their marriage offers companionship, not a claim that trauma has vanished.

Bea also voices a view of reading that gives the family’s life at the bookshop a larger meaning. She calls reading an intimate ritual and describes a book as a mirror that offers readers only what they already carry inside. As the store’s sales decline, her defense of reading sets the couple’s work against commercial replacement and cultural disappearance. The shop survives on modest means, held together by Daniel’s optimism and Bea’s conviction that reading requires the whole heart and mind. Her role in the ending is therefore both intimate and public: she is Daniel’s wife and Julián’s mother, but also a working partner who helps preserve a world of books even as that world contracts.