Semua Bab Second Bloom: Bab 81 - Bab 90

January in Barcelona is the city's honest month. The Christmas lights come down. The Fira de Santa Llúcia disappears overnight, leaving the cathedral square to its undecorated self, which turns out to be sufficient. The restaurants go back to their regular hours. The tourists who came for New Year's leave. The city, having performed the season, puts on its working clothes and goes back to what it actually is — a Mediterranean port city with opinions about everything, a permanent construction project, and an absolute refusal to be one kind of thing at the expense of any other kind. Valentina loves January for the same reason she loved September as a child: the city becomes itself again after the pressure of the audience. She is thirteen weeks. The first trimester ended with the specific relief of a threshold crossed — not the anxiety resolved, because she has not had much anxiety, but the particular sol

The Seville client arrives in June, as Cristina planned. They are a family-owned sherry producer (sherry — jerez in Spanish — is a fortified wine produced in the area around Jerez de la Frontera in Andalusia, southern Spain, using a unique aging system called the solera, in which barrels are stacked in rows and wine moves gradually downward through the system over years or decades, blending old vintages with new in a continuous process that means every bottle contains wine from every previous year back to the founding; the oldest sherries can contain traces of wine from a century ago) based in Jerez de la Frontera (the city in southern Andalusia that gives sherry its English name — jerez became 'sherry' through Arabic and then English phonetic shifts; the city has been making fortified wine for over three thousand years), the fourth generation of a family that has been running the same solera (the tiered barrel aging system — solera comes

He has always been good with his work. She has known this since the Madrid kitchen and the parador brief and the Eixample hotel, three sentences, and the Azores guest books. He asks the question that opens the next room. He receives the answer completely. He does not solve the problem she did not ask him to solve. With Clara he is, predictably, the same. He does not perform fatherhood. He does not announce what he is doing or require that it be noted. He is simply, consistently, present in the actual situation — which is, she knows, the rarest quality in any person at any stage of anything. On a Saturday in August she is at the Eixample office for two hours — the Seville brief needs a final read before she sends it to Álvaro, and she has learned that she reads differently in the office than at home, less context, more precision — and she comes back to the Gràcia apartment at noon to find E

At six months Clara has: opinions about the morning light, a preference for Ethan's shoulder over Valentina's when tired (which Valentina finds both predictable and slightly offensive and does not say so), a complete inability to be uninterested in anything that moves, and the specific quality of watchfulness that Rosa identified on the first day and that has only deepened as the weeks have accumulated. She watches people the way Valentina watches cities — not passively, but with the focused attention of someone who understands that the information is available if you are paying close enough attention. Valentina has seen this look before, in photographs and in the mirror and in the memory of a man she only partly remembers but whose hands she has always carried. Jordi Serra's look. The one that skips generations and arrives intact. She is, Pep says one Sunday, a natural ceramicist. "She is six months old," Valentin

The first word is Pep. Not mama or papa or ava (the Catalan word for grandmother — àvia — shortened to ava as infants tend to shorten everything to its most essential sound), which is what everyone expected. Pep. Clear and deliberate on a Sunday afternoon in Sant Andreu, directed at the man himself, who is sitting at the kitchen table with the seventh bowl in his hands, explaining something about glaze to Rosa, and who looks up when he hears his name in a voice that he has never heard before. His expression is the one Valentina has come to recognize as Pep at his most undone — the quality of a man who has spent a life paying attention to the way things are made and is encountering something he cannot account for. "She said my name," he says. "She did," Rosa says, with the satisfaction of someone who is not entirely surprised. "Why mine?"