La casa de las amapolas / The House of Poppies
May 1994
A young woman is being buried in a garden, under a beautiful fig tree. Dressed in white, she has been laid under the ground forever.
Zaragoza 2019
Elisa has just lost her husband Dani in a traffic accident. The pain of the loss is added to the economic difficulties she has been suffering ever since. She works hard but she can barely make enough to pay the rent and support herself and her daughter, Maya.
She decides to leave the flat and move to the house of Flora, her mother-in-law. Their arrival at the House of Poppies is a terrible shock to Flora: Maya’s features are the very image of young Aurora, her daughter. A highly sensitive girl, blonde and very pale, always dressed in white, almost ghostly, lonely, whom no one understood and who only had one friend, Blanca.
Flora is a mature woman, who twenty years ago left behind all the wealthy and luxurious life to live in the House of Poppies. The disappearance of her daughter Aurora made her change life completely.
Elisa finds a job in a hotel in Albarracín and the two stay in the house. There Maya meets Yago, a big, well-built man in his fifties, who often comes to work in the garden and to help Flora. Yago produces a strange sensation and makes Maya fearful, but her grandmother always defends him.
Maya gradually adapts to life in the countryside and, above all, begins to understand her grandmother and the two women who live with her: Silvia, an older woman who works with dried flowers, and Olga, who has only been in the house for a year and a half after suffering miscarriage shortly before delivery.
Everything changes when, unexpectedly, Flora suffers a stroke and dies. Everyone is devastated, especially Maya, who had managed to get emotionally close to her grandmother. Maya finds an old mobile phone hidden in the attic that rings incessantly and has only one number in its phonebook. When Maya picks it up, a woman’s voice asks her why she hasn’t called before. Nobody knows who it is, but days later they are all surprised when Aurora enters the house. Twenty years have passed and her hair is white, although she retains her spectral whiteness. She has come with Yago and tells them that during these years she has lived with him in the Casa de las Sabinas, lost in the woodland. She confesses that it was her who unintentionally killed Blanca when she threw a stone at her in anger at a malicious comment made by her friend, and that her mother buried her under the fig tree to protect her. Since then, Aurora’s life has been filled with remorse and now she wants to turn herself in to the police and serve the sentence.
But nothing is as it seems. The lives of Elisa, Maya, Aurora, Olga and Silvia have only just become more complicated under the roof of the House of Poppies.
