Mrs. Daphne Fielding

In this episode, Marta and Fina get a breakfast of tense negotiations, even if they finish up with the Family Cadenza (00:09:52-00:10:03 in the Mafin Drive Cut) at Marta’s generous decision to donate Pelayo’s money to charity. Whereas Bianca and Fina get a jaunty art collab montage of Fotógrafa Fina where everything just flows with ease, and with some tango soundtrack to boot.

Fina has asked Marta over for breakfast, which mainly signifies that Marta has not spent the night (we don’t know for long Bianca painted the night before, after Marta fled the scene). Marta is in her full lumberjack small-check lesbian armor, high collar-fit, dense fabric. And Fina may have foregone the turtleneck armor, but she has just one button open on her shirt. With Bianca on her couch, it was two.

What Fina underlines in this scene – even as Marta fights to have an honest conversation – is how unwilling she is to put in the painful work an actual relationship takes, which in this case would be opening up about her own suffering and learning about Mart’s suffering in turn. Instead, Fina evades it like an irrationally defiant toddler avoids bath time.

Fina doesn’t want to talk about Pelayo, she doesn’t want to hear about Marta’s reasonings, the anger at “he wiped out our lives with a stroke of a feather” remains at that, as does Marta’s “We both suffered a lot”, but they both leave it at that abstract place, yet again without learning what the other one has gone through (this feels like an intentionally left-out-for-now puzzle piece. Hopefully with a resolution down the road. I don't care if it takes another 100 episodes!).

The scene revisits another Mafin core element, the double “Mírame” (00:08:00) that has always been, especially at moments when they were at odds, a touchstone to stop and listen to each other and communicate with honesty. Here, Fina openly says “no!” to it and refuses to look up, until Marta calls her out by her name, and even then, Fina avoids and evades as much as she can.

The peace at the end of this scene is brittle: the mention of the charity gets the Broody, Foreshadowing Clarinets of Doom – as of 626 we know why – at 00:08:32, the Bugging High Strings of Gaslight underlie Fina’s “it’s resolved, then” (00:09:34); while at least Marta’s good intentions, with mention of Isidro, get a gentle flute soundlayer, 00:09:04. Oh Marta. This just nailed the coffin shut and you don’t even know it, and it is evidenced by the Camera Work of how behind Marta, Bianca’s workspace, easel and brushes loom the entire time, like an abyss rising up behind Marta without Marta being able to see it.

Fina is not doing the work yet, and she even looks away when she kisses Marta’s hand (00:10:03) when she did the same thing to Bianca the day before and nearly kissed her lips, too. Seeing Marta’s struggle and Fina’s evasion makes the photography collage (and Bianca’s continued invasion) all the more of a betrayal in contrast.

This is the happiest with have seen Fina, with her camera, since she left. And photographing another woman in a playful setting, and with a tango soundtrack in a sexteto arrangement soundscape (as of 00:23:27), did belong to Mafin before: that’s the 363 darkroom love scene, with “la mujer de mi vida”. It’s also a reference to ep 370 and Fina taking semi-nude photos of Marta, one of which would then be her parting gift (“siempre te recordaré así mi amor”). And it is taken away here. This particular intimacy had been Mafin-coded, and Fina, with that smile, and sing-songing along, now has given the intimacy of her gaze in such a setting to Bianca, while still keeping Marta at arms’ length, and wow, that hurt.

And while Fina tells Bianca happily that she made up with Marta (she should tell Bianca a lot less in general!), and while Bianca continues to lay her traps, there’s Fina allowing the teasing (Bianca’s “usted-ing”) and the intimacy of the conversation while she sits on her bed, working while Marta is only allowed in across the distance of a breakfast table, after a night spent apart, like a formal guest.

And I kept thinking about why the intimacy of Fina’s gaze being given away here is such a cruel point, but the photography is not just a point about Mafin, it is an even deeper point about Fina.

Eze suggested that the photography career that is her is what Fina built from scratch in her situation of loss and exile in Argentina, and while that is a valid point, I got stuck on another because photography is also the only thing that Fina managed to hold onto in her situation of loss and exile.

Fina took along her camera(s) when she had to leave her life behind. Photography is what Fina could grow and use as a lifeline and it was one thing where she still was herself. It was something to remember herself by: Fina was a photographer before she left.

Granted, she was still working as a saleswoman, but she talked with Marta about job opportunities (Marta who said in ep 373 that she wouldn’t want Fina to miss a career chance just because of her and being tied to Toledo and the tienda). Fina got paid jobs and had growing recognition. She had a darkroom and a wife and friends who encouraged her, and who organized spaces and supplies and an exhibition for her.

Photography is a space where Fina had found herself, and it is a facet of Fina that Pelayo did not manage to take away even as he took everything else from her: her life, her love. And there is a poetic justice in that Fina managed to keep this one thing that revolves all around Fina's perspective of the world, through her lens. It is about her gaze, about Fina’s stance in the world and its traces that Pelayo tried to erase, but Fina still had a camera even if nothing else.

In that context, it is notable that Bianca met Fina while Fina was wearing her camera (Bianca has described that she saw Fina with her camera in a bar) because it shows Fina The Photographer as a constant. Fotógrafa Fina was still/already there, and is not a result of Bianca molding her into her little bob muse.

Rather, Fina the Photographer is a throughline. Even as Fina had to give up Marta she did not give up herself because she still had her newly discovered passion for photography. This is who she is and she found it, and she held onto it.

But what Fina needs to remember now is that she was a photographer before Bianca and that she is an artist also very much without Bianca. It was Isidro who left her a camera, it was Marta who gave her another and bought her books and encouraged her; it was Carmen and Claudia organizing that exhibition, even Gema offering that early job of photographing Teo that nurtured Fina’s talent. All that gave her equipment and jobs and recognition.

Fina. Honey. You don't need some Chacracore Barbie buying you with her contacts and her My Little Farm setup and her 'my artist’s gaze uncovered you as an artist' narrative. That is perhaps the most insidious of Bianca’s suggestions: that Fina has become an artist through Bianca and that Bianca has been the one discovering Fina's talent when really all that Bianca has done was offer amplification from a point of privilege.

Fina needs to rip off that mask – the one that incongruously appears in this photoshoot – both from her own sense of self, from her own face that she still does not show to Marta fully, and from Bianca, to uncover the selfish scheming and chained “freedom” (the one where she owes Bianca her life, her sense of self, her career, her recovery, her time, her attention, her apartment) for what it is.

And she needs to stop smiling at Bianca like this (yes, I know this is played up intentionally and that actually bodes well for longterm Mafin, but how will you ever come back from this, Fina?). Please.