Menina a mi pesar

Synopsis

Menina was born to attract attention, though never in the way she would have chosen. The daughter of don Pelayo Cervina, a marquis fallen on hard times, and of Amalia, a Venezuelan heiress with literary pretensions, Menina has grown up with Blount's disease, a lazy eye and a diastema that made her, from childhood, the ugly spare in a family consumed by appearances. Her resemblance to Mari Bárbola, the dwarf in Velázquez's painting, has earned her the nickname everyone uses. She has learned to turn that marginalisation into a weapon: she listens, she keeps records and she does not forgive. The family mansion — a neo-Gothic building in the heart of Habsburg Madrid — is falling apart, and only the equestrian portrait of the great-grandfather, attributed to the painter Zuloaga, can pull the Cervinas back from ruin, provided the Museo del Prado authenticates it before the Law of Democratic Memory strips them of their noble title. To stay afloat, the family begins letting rooms on the quiet. The new lodgers include Ramona Rebollo, a convicted former mayor who turns out to be the illegitimate daughter of the first marquis; a Jesuit friar turned food influencer who is running a clandestine soup kitchen on the side; a seamstress who survived a trafficking ring and dreams of making it on the catwalk; and a young hacker fixated on cryptocurrency. While Marquis Pelayo launches a far-right party, Imperial Hixpania, and his wife Amalia causes scandal after scandal with her protégé artist, Menina pursues her own schemes: hidden microphones, blackmail, investigations into each lodger's secrets, and an unrequited infatuation with the seamstress Cósima. When Ramona brings a legal claim for recognition as a legitimate Cervina — and with it, the marquessate, the mansion and the painting — the family is dragged into an inheritance war fought across courtrooms, television studios and social media. The plot thickens further: Ramona's daughter falls for the regional councillor threatening to expropriate the family's land; an unsolved murder takes place inside the mansion itself; a pharmaceutical company runs experiments on gifted elderly patients; a domestic abuser reinvents himself as a cult infiltrator; and populism continues its unstoppable rise across contemporary Spain. 'Menina a mi pesar' is a dark, choral comedy that dissects, with corrosive humour and prose overflowing with cultural references, the decline of the Spanish aristocracy, the rise of populism, the hypocrisy of public life and the endless performance of social media. Through the vengeful, clear-eyed gaze of its protagonist, the novel turns every character into a suspect and every secret into ammunition, sparing no one — not the left, not the right, not faith, not money. Only Menina, the least favoured member of the family, knows how to play her hand to the very end.

Machine translation, pending review.