Ur tags on the spadeliano cover thing I 🥺🥺🥺🥺 I broke down when I noticed it and again when I read ur words!! 🥺 do you think he sat there long on Aurelia' and Nadia's bed with his hand pressed to the sheets like a lover gathering memories that weren't there... Or was pudor stronger and drove him to just do his duty without lingering knowing that in this specific part of the place that was their home he was just a guest till the end
that’s literally my face when i saw your gifset, because i noticed it on the boat but didn’t in the hotel scene! and just...that little piece of home. also realizing now that he left the blanket on the boat, that spadino took the ring...
i don’t think he could’ve lingered in that hotel, in this place that echoed with its emptiness, without remembering how he & aureliano & nadia & angelica had filled it with noise, had made a home on this monument to a past full of loss that haunted aurelia. i don’t think he could’ve stayed in that haunted house in that moment, so i think he just grabbed it and left. i wonder if he meant to like...bring more. take more. maybe stuff his pockets with gold and jewels and baubles. to give aurelia a burial worthy of a king. but in the end, he knew aureliano well enough to understand: this was the most precious thing he had. this life, this family, this home. and he wrapped him up in that symbol of it with care, with respect.
but then. i think it’s only when he sets the boat to park, only when he’s figuring out how to move his body to the edge to release him into the sea that he finally realizes. in the end, he is the one who gets to hold aureliano like this, who gets to kiss his forehead and cradle his body and stroke his cold, lifeless hands. because spadino is the only one who got to say goodbye. and i think that’s why he takes aureliano’s ring to give to nadia, because aureliano loved her, because she didn’t get this moment of closure and she deserves something of that. because he imagines himself in that position and he would’ve wanted something of his to keep. even if it hurts. especially if it hurts, because the pain says it happened, it was real.
which is why he keeps the blanket. he folds it up neatly and hides it away in the back of a closet in his new apartment and he tries so hard not to need it but...at night when he’s pacing the floor of his empty apartment and it’s dark enough that no one would know, he buries his face in it, the lingering smell of aurelia’s skin, his tears darkening the fabric. sobbing until he’s breathless and part of him wishing that he could die like this, suffocated by this piece of memory: it would be right for him to end devoured by the memory of aureliano. but spadino’s world is not one of poetry so he stops crying eventually and folds the blanket away again and continues to live with his own grief.