Señora Aldaya

Señora Aldaya is Penelope’s mother and Don Ricardo Aldaya’s wife, a woman whose place in the family is defined by wealth, domestic decorum, and limited agency. Her discovery of Penelope with Julián becomes the hinge of the lovers’ separation: she tells her husband, whose response turns a private encounter into confinement, violence, and the expulsion of Jacinta, Penelope’s closest caregiver.

Identity and Place in the Household

Señora Aldaya inhabits a mansion acquired and controlled by her husband, who is often away travelling or occupied with the family’s factories. She repeatedly pleads with him to sell the house and move the family into town, or to return to the residence built for the family patriarch, but he refuses. The contrast between her unease and his indifference marks the unequal power within the marriage: she lives with the consequences of the household’s atmosphere, while he can dismiss its troubles as pranks and nonsense.

The mansion’s reputation is shaped by a succession of unsettling incidents: food disappears, milk turns red at the new moon, animals are found dead, and jewels go missing. Don Ricardo treats the family’s fears as foolishness, yet the losses of his wife’s jewelry provoke him to dismiss more than five maids, all of whom protest their innocence. The servants’ explanation points away from the supernatural and toward Don Ricardo’s midnight visits to the younger maids, while the missing jewels themselves recur in a more ominous pattern. These stories surround Señora Aldaya with an atmosphere of fear and suspicion, without giving her control over the place she wants to leave.

Family, Prophecy, and Loss

Jacinta, Penelope’s nurse, remembers Señora Aldaya as a ceremonial presence in the girl’s childhood: she would come to say goodnight and tell Penelope that she loved her more than anything and was the most important person in the universe to her. The contrast is sharp. Jacinta, who personally prepared Penelope’s meals, watched over her illnesses, dressed and bathed her, read and spoke with her, never voiced her love; she expressed it through years of daily care. She regarded herself as Penelope’s true mother, while seeing Señora Aldaya as the woman who had given birth to the girl.

The mansion’s uncanny reputation becomes inseparable from Señora Aldaya’s fate. When young Jorge disappears inside the house for eight hours, he returns pale and dazed, saying he had been in the library with a mysterious black woman who showed him old photographs and prophesied that the women of the family would die there for the men’s sins. She also names a date for his mother’s death: 12 April 1921. On that morning, Señora Aldaya is found lifeless in her bed. Her jewelry has vanished, then turns up in the mud at the bottom of the courtyard pond beside a doll that belonged to Penelope. The prophecy, the recovered jewels, and the child’s doll bring the house’s family history together in a disturbing tableau, though they do not establish what caused her death or who took the jewels.

A week later, Don Ricardo decides to abandon the mansion. His financial empire is already failing, and people disagree over whether the house brought misfortune or whether he simply failed to understand the changing market and ruined the business built by the patriarch Simon. He announces that he will leave Barcelona for Argentina, claiming the family’s textile industries there are flourishing; many believe instead that he is fleeing failure and shame. Señora Aldaya’s death thus precedes both the family’s departure and the decline of the household she had wanted to escape.

Discovery and Consequences

Before the lovers’ planned elopement, Julián and Penelope meet secretly in Jacinta’s bedroom on the servants’ floor. Señora Aldaya opens the door and finds them together. She watches, spellbound, with fascination and disgust, manages only to ask where Jacinta is, and then turns and walks away without a word. Her silence does not avert the crisis: Penelope is left in mute agony, while Julián feels that his world is collapsing. Penelope urges him to leave before her father returns.

Julián fears that Don Ricardo will send hired assassins, but the next day he sees no change in Jorge’s manner at school. He tells Miquel what happened, and Miquel argues that Señora Aldaya may not yet know what to do. His assessment is that her self-absorption makes it difficult for her to see or understand anything she does not wish to believe, especially when the matter concerns herself. He reasons that she may be weighing the consequences for her own position—the potential scandal and her husband’s fury—rather than considering the lovers’ predicament. This is Miquel’s interpretation, not an account of Señora Aldaya’s private thoughts, but it frames her initial silence as hesitation rather than intervention.

The account of what follows comes from Jacinta. The day after the discovery, Señora Aldaya summons her and asks what she knows about Julián. Jacinta says only that he is a nice boy and Jorge’s friend. Señora Aldaya then orders her to keep Penelope locked in her room until permission is given for her to leave. When Don Ricardo returns from Madrid early on Friday, she tells him what she witnessed. The disclosure sets off his violence: he slaps her so hard that she falls, then demands that she repeat what she said. Jacinta has never seen him behave this way and describes him as seeming possessed by devils.

Penelope’s Confinement and Jacinta’s Expulsion

After hearing his wife, Don Ricardo goes upstairs and drags Penelope from her bed by the hair. Jacinta tries to stop him, but he kicks her aside. That evening he calls the family doctor to examine Penelope. After the examination, Don Ricardo and his wife lock Penelope in her room, while Señora Aldaya tells Jacinta to collect her belongings. The evidence records Señora Aldaya’s participation in keeping Penelope confined and in dismissing Jacinta, but does not explain what the doctor found or specify the terms of the confinement.

Jacinta is not allowed to say goodbye to Penelope. Don Ricardo threatens to report her to the police if she tells anyone what has happened, and that night the household throws her out after eighteen years of uninterrupted service, leaving her with nowhere to go. Two days later, in a pension on Calle Muntaner, Miquel tells Jacinta that Julián has gone to Paris and asks why Penelope did not meet him at the station as arranged. Jacinta returns repeatedly to the mansion, begs to see Penelope, and waits across the street, but Penelope never appears. Don Ricardo later has Jacinta committed to the Horta lunatic asylum, claiming that she is unknown to him and is a demented woman harassing his family. Jacinta spends two years there; on her release, the first thing she does is return to the mansion to look for Penelope.

Señora Aldaya’s decisive role is therefore less a matter of open confrontation than of what she sees, reports, and permits within the household. Her discovery gives Don Ricardo the occasion to act; her order begins Penelope’s isolation, and her dismissal ends Jacinta’s access to the girl. Yet Jacinta’s account also shows the limits of Señora Aldaya’s authority: Don Ricardo strikes her, controls the response, and uses his influence to remove the witness who might challenge the family’s account. The tragedy of the separation unfolds inside that imbalance, leaving the mother both a participant in Penelope’s confinement and a subordinate in the violent system that enforces it.