Margarita’s Toast

Margarita, a successful writer, returns to her hometown to live in the house of her parents, a 1960s apartment in a working-class neighborhood. In the meantime, the media relayed the exhumation of Franco’s body, which marked the lives of so many generations of the Spanish people.

Of the four people who lived in that house, only Margarita remains. Her grandmother, her mother and her father have died in this order. She is an only child and has is left to do all the tasks on her own. Neither her husband nor her son accompanies her on this extreme journey, which is one of personal gain.

The smells that come from the clothes, the taste of the Santa Catalina’s quina, the old passports, the books…  will transport her to different moments of her past life in the flat. The blame to herself and the ghosts of the dead that live in her memory are mixed with the history that marks and her family’s life: a grandmother that lived all the wars of the century, a mother and a father that grew up in a postwar that castrated their dreams; and she, the protagonist and narrator in the first person, who was thirteen when the dictator died. Her memories fill the empty house, and through them, we can understand in a better way the attitudes of her family and herself with all that was happening in those years of the Transition.