“In the room they gave me was a grand piano, its keys uncovered. A number of gilt mirrors with candelabra attached—some of them very valuable—on the walls. A Chinese desk, paintings, ill-assorted furniture. It looked like the attic of an abandoned palace; it was, as I later found out, the living room.” 

When Andrea arrives at her family’s home in Calle de Aribau, she finds that they have slowly descended into poverty from their formerly upper middle class status. Though Andrea recalls the Calle de Aribau home as a grand and welcoming space from her childhood memories, the apartment has now been split in half, with her grandmother’s grand old furniture piled precariously. As both Andrea and her Uncle Román reflect throughout the novel, the state of the household’s things reflects the mental and emotional state of its inhabitants, who experience the apartment as more of a trauma-haunted “abandoned palace” than a realm of the “living” (9). Andrea thus confronts the stark difference between her hopeful expectations of Barcelona and the unfortunate reality of her family’s financial and psychological situation after the Spanish Civil War. She also hints at the grim destiny of these “very valuable” (9) objects, which will later be sold to buy food and other provisions for survival.

“There was the long, difficult history of their love—I couldn’t remember exactly what it was…perhaps something connected to the loss of a fortune. But in those days the world was optimistic and they loved each other very much. They were the first tenants in this apartment on Calle de Aribau, which was just beginning to take shape then […] I imagined her in the same blue dress, the same charming hat, walking for the first time into the empty apartment that still smelled of paint. I’d like to live here, she must have thought when she saw the empty spaces through the windows. It’s almost in the outskirts, and it’s so quiet! And the house is so clean, so new…” 

In the course of reconciling the differences between her own great expectations of Barcelona and the dilapidated, chaotic reality of her family’s household, Andrea empathizes with the changes her