Andrea, a young orphan who grew up in a Spanish provincial convent, has earned a full scholarship to study at a Barcelona university. She leaves the small town where she has lived to move in with her grandmother’s family at an apartment on Calle de Aribau: a once well-off street on the outskirts of Barcelona. She departs with excitement and high expectations for her new life, having pleasant memories of the city from visits during her childhood.

After arriving in Barcelona on a late night train, Andrea heads to her family’s Calle de Aribau apartment by way of “one of those old horse-drawn carriages that have reappeared since the war” (4). A dirty, chaotic “nightmare” (5) of worn surfaces, dim lighting, and piled furniture, greets Andrea. The atmosphere is nothing at all like her romantic expectations or memories. Her family feels equally strange. There is her grandmother, who is kind, but disturbingly thin; her Uncle Juan, an aspiring but untalented painter; a ghoulish maid named Antonia; Juan’s pretty wife, Gloria, a young woman with “disheveled red hair” (6); and Aunt Angustias, a towering and foreboding Catholic woman.