La confitería de Madame Bombón

Synopsis

Leocadia left a whitewashed village in La Mancha as a young woman, on the arm of Felipe, with more fear than hope. Twenty years on, she is Madame Bombón: the formidable woman who runs a confectionery shop with a chequerboard floor, a mahogany counter and a wind chime Felipe carved with a penknife before leaving her for someone else. As far as her neighbours are concerned, Leocadia has always been a widow; in truth, she is a woman who was abandoned, and who learned to turn her grief into Swiss buns and chocolate bonbons. Her daughter, Lucita, is not her own by blood: she arrived one rainy night with a small red case and a wooden roly-poly toy, and has been all Leocadia needs to keep loneliness at bay. Or so she believed.

One evening, without warning, Felipe walks back into the shop. He has a limp, a finger missing and nowhere to go. Leocadia, who had sworn she would throw him out on sight, ends up giving him a bed in the storeroom, and then in her own home. The hands remember what the mind would rather forget, and Felipe's return stirs certainties Leocadia thought she had buried: her lifelong friendship with Pruden, the reason a photograph of a "dead" man hangs in her sitting room, an old wound that never quite healed.

A small community of solitary people has gathered around the mahogany counter over the years, holding one another up without quite knowing it. Don Marcial, secretly widowed from a love that was cut short, sleeps in a dental splint for fear of losing his words. La Francesita, the young woman in the attic, drinks a glass of cider every afternoon believing it to be champagne, and writes letters to a dead fiancé who never quite existed as she tells it. Pruden, Leocadia's closest friend, has kept a secret for twenty years — one that threatens to break two marriages and a friendship.

When La Francesita disappears without a word, leaving only an envelope of money and a note — "Just in case" — the calm of the shop is shattered. Her neighbours, clumsy but determined, improvise an investigation with more enthusiasm than method: they trace letters, question a mysterious man in a felt hat, uncover an abandoned wedding hall and a family photograph with an unnamed baby. Each lead opens a door onto a different secret, and none of them come through unscathed by what they find.

La confitería de Madame Bombón is a choral novel about chosen motherhood and rejected motherhood, about loves that return when we thought them long buried, about old age, fear and friendship between women — and about the small daily act of resistance that is, each morning, going back to the kneading.

Machine translation, pending review.