Don Ricardo Aldaya

Don Ricardo Aldaya is a powerful industrialist and patriarch whose ambition to control his family’s future repeatedly becomes an instrument of violence. His relationships with Sophie Carax, Penelope, and Julian bind the Aldaya family’s fortunes to the secrets and losses at the heart of the story; his final demand that Jorge kill Julian carries that conflict beyond Don Ricardo’s own death.

Identity and Background

Don Ricardo is an heir to the Aldaya business empire and a rising figure in Catalan high society. He is described as a wealthy industrialist with a reputation for womanizing and a leonine temper. His status gives him the means to acquire property, influence officials, and expect obedience within his household. Yet his power is unstable: the business partners whose fortunes he helped build eventually maneuver to take control of the empire, while the family itself is undone by the consequences of his decisions.

His dealings with Salvador Jausa show how readily he treats property as an opportunity for profit. After Jausa’s household becomes notorious and he refuses to sell his mansion, Don Ricardo visits it at Jausa’s invitation, ostensibly to observe a scientific and spiritual experiment. He later buys most of Jausa’s properties. When he views a film reel made at the mansion, he chooses to destroy it and pays the cinematographer to say nothing about the incident. His response makes secrecy another resource to be managed, alongside land and money.

Sophie Carax and Julian’s Origins

Don Ricardo encounters Sophie Carax at the home of Señor Valls, one of his financial dependents. Although Ricardo has recently married a wealthy heiress, he pursues Sophie, who is already receiving the attentions of the hatter Antoni Fortuny. Their secret meetings last ninety-six days and take place in an empty apartment on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Sophie eventually suspects she is pregnant with Ricardo’s child, but he responds by giving her five hundred pesetas and an address, ordering her to end the pregnancy.

Sophie refuses. Ricardo threatens her into silence, and she tells Antoni that she had been assaulted by thugs. Antoni believes her and marries her without learning the truth. The child is Julian Carax. Years later, Ricardo encounters the son he had once tried to erase financially, when Julian has become part of the Aldaya household. The revelation makes Ricardo’s position toward Julian profoundly contradictory: Julian is his son, but also the young man who loves Penelope, Ricardo’s daughter.

Patriarch and the Aldaya Household

Don Ricardo’s treatment of his children reflects the future he has chosen for each of them. He expects Jorge to inherit his position, though he regards his son as mediocre and keeps him protected by class privilege. Penelope, by contrast, is treated as a prized possession rather than an independent person. Ricardo sees Julian as a possible successor, imagining that he can shape the poet into an image of himself. He does not realize that Julian’s apparent affection for him is a means of staying close to Penelope.

At Jorge’s eighteenth-birthday celebration in April 1918, Don Ricardo arranges a grand party at the family mansion on Avenida del Tibidabo, although the occasion is unwanted by Jorge and Ricardo intends to be away. Hundreds of lanterns, pennants, and stalls fill the gardens. Ricardo is instead meeting a woman newly arrived from St Petersburg in the blue suite of the Hotel Colon. The celebration’s display of family prestige contrasts with the private relationships and ambitions that the patriarch believes he can keep under control.

The household’s move into Jausa’s former mansion also brings the family into a place already associated with disturbing stories. Ricardo renames it Villa Penelope after his youngest child is born there, two weeks after the family’s arrival. The name does not take hold. The mansion’s unsettling rooms and disturbances persist, while Ricardo dismisses the household’s fears as nonsense. His confidence in commanding the house parallels his broader assumption that wealth and authority can master whatever threatens his plans.

Penelope, Julian, and the Rupture

When Ricardo’s wife tells him that she has found Julian and Penelope together, he experiences the discovery as a betrayal and humiliation. The doctor confirms that Penelope has been sexually active and may be pregnant. Ricardo orders her confined to a bedroom on the mansion’s third floor and forbids others from seeing her during the ensuing months. He also arranges for Julian to be removed from Barcelona and sent into the army, where he expects him to meet an ostensibly accidental death. Julian escapes.

Penelope gives birth to a stillborn boy on 26 September 1919 and dies from the resulting haemorrhage while locked away. No doctor is present. Her father is outside the room, and her mother is also there, unable to intervene. Penelope and the child are buried without ceremony in the mansion’s basement crypt; the bedding and afterbirth are burned in the boilers, and the crypt is sealed behind a brick wall. Ricardo’s attempt to suppress the relationship and its consequences thus becomes a concealed family catastrophe, not a solution to the threat he believed he faced.

Jorge later tells Miquel Moliner what happened. Miquel chooses to send Julian a false letter, signed in Penelope’s name, telling him that she does not love him and has married someone else. He believes the deception may let Julian rebuild his life, but it also keeps him from learning the truth of Penelope’s imprisonment and death. Ricardo’s secrecy therefore continues to shape events even after the immediate violence has ended.

Decline and Ending

The family’s authority and wealth unravel alongside its private tragedy. Ricardo’s business partners withdraw their support and maneuver to seize power; the Aldaya fortune begins to collapse. After his wife dies, the family makes plans to leave for Argentina under false names. They depart in 1926, with Ricardo gravely ill and Jorge accompanying him. During the crossing, Ricardo watches sharks following the ship and interprets them as a sign that death is pursuing him.

Near the end of the voyage, he makes Jorge swear to find Julian and kill him. The command converts Ricardo’s hostility into an inheritance: even as the patriarch loses control of his own life and the family empire, he tries to dictate what his son will do next. Two days before the ship reaches Buenos Aires, Jorge wakes to find his father’s berth empty. He discovers Ricardo’s dressing gown on the stern, but not Ricardo himself. Afterward, the sharks disappear from view. Jorge arrives in Buenos Aires alone, a final image that links the family’s departure with the isolation produced by Ricardo’s choices.

Narrative Role

Don Ricardo’s story joins the novel’s histories of forbidden love, family secrecy, and political and social power. His wealth enables him to move people, property, and evidence, but cannot secure the future he wants: Julian escapes, Penelope dies, his business collapses, and Jorge is left carrying an order born of revenge. The contrast between Ricardo’s public role as patriarch and the concealed consequences of his actions makes the Aldaya mansion more than a family home. It becomes the site where his attempt to control the past and future is preserved in locked rooms, an unmarked burial, and a secret that continues to determine the lives of others.