The decline of the Aldaya family

The Aldaya family's decline is the collapse of a powerful Barcelona dynasty under the weight of its own secrets, greed, and revenge. Its flight from the mansion does not restore the family: wealth and status disappear in Argentina, and Jorge returns to Barcelona with little more than bitterness, blaming Julián Carax for his ruin. The family's fall also shows how thoroughly its former position can vanish: within fifteen years, the name Aldaya has become a faint recollection for most people who once knew it.

From family secret to flight

When Jorge Aldaya told Miquel Moliner what had happened to Penelope, Miquel chose to send Julián a letter signed in her name. The letter falsely claimed that Penelope did not love him, urged him to forget her, and announced a fictitious wedding. Miquel preferred that Julián believe himself betrayed and try to rebuild his life rather than learn the truth. The deception was meant to spare him the truth, but it also left him with a false account of Penelope's disappearance.

Two years later, Señora Aldaya died. Some blamed the mansion's supposed curse, but Jorge understood her death through the family's own history: the memory of Penelope's distress and her repeated attempts to get out remained with him. By then, the Aldaya family had already fallen from grace, and its fortune was rapidly collapsing amid greed and revenge. Secretaries and accountants arranged a move to Argentina and the start of a more modest business. Leaving Barcelona was presented as the essential step: the family sought distance from the apparitions associated with the mansion and from the past they could not escape.

The failed promise of a new beginning

The move did not arrest the decline. Ten years after arriving in Buenos Aires, Jorge returned to Barcelona, diminished by the family's worsening fortunes in Argentina and left to face the world alone. He lacked the strength and composure he associated with his father, and arrived already burdened by remorse. His later description of the New World as an illusion and a place of predators served as an apology or epitaph, but it also expressed the failure of the family's attempt to begin again elsewhere.

Jorge's losses accumulated over only a few years. He lost his reputation and, eventually, his father's gold watch, given to him for his first communion. The watch became the means of buying his return ticket: an inheritance that had once marked family continuity was reduced to the price of passage back to Spain. He returned almost a beggar, carrying bitterness over what he believed had been taken from him and directing his hatred toward Julián Carax.

A dynasty erased from the city

The disappearance of the Aldayas from Barcelona made the family's decline visible beyond its own members. A hatter who had once trusted the endurance of money and social position discovered that there was no trace of Penelope or her family anywhere in the city. Fifteen years of ruin and destitution had erased not only the mansion and the family's industries but even the dynasty's footprints. Many people recognized the name Aldaya, yet few could remember what it had signified.

That fading reputation completes the contrast between the family's former standing and its later obscurity. The move to Argentina was meant to put distance between the Aldayas and the spectres of their past; instead, the family's wealth and status dwindled there, while the Barcelona they had left gradually forgot their importance. Jorge's return did not restore what had been lost. The family survives in the account chiefly through the damage its secrets caused and through the diminishing memory of its name.