2 The House

The House   The de Souto's house is like the others in the village.  It has two floors: the bottom one and the upper one.  In the bottom one, there is the kitchen;  in the upper one  are the other rooms, the bathroom and a hallway.  The rooms are the dining room, the living room and the bedrooms.

The parents, Antón and Rosario, sleep in the best room.  It has a door that leads to the porch, where in the summer, the sun shines the whole day.  Inside, there is a queen size bed with a big quilt that used to belong to the grandparents.  Rosario embroidered the sheets and the pillows before getting married.  At the headboard of the bed, on the wall, there is a little picture of the Virgen and a carpet at the foot of the bed.  A dresser with a mirror and a closet complete the furniture in the room.  The floor and the ceiling are made of wood.

Carme and Uncle Pepe each have their own room.  Henrique and Lelo sleep in the same room.  Lelo is always the first one to get up, because, as he says, if Carme goes in the bathroom before him, he would have to go to school without washing up; as she doesn't do anything besides stand in front of the sink looking at herself in the mirror!

The living room is where the family spends the evenings. Before, they used to spend them in the kitchen, around the   lareira,   but since they put in the television, they go upstairs to the upper floor after supper.  In this room there are, besides the arm chairs and chairs, a  round table, don Antón's library with some books (the rest of them are in his office), a  floor lamp and a clock on the wall.

The consulting  room and also his office are together.  They don't let Lelo pass through the door of these rooms, so that he won't break the syringes, thermometers and other instruments that his father has.  Once, when he was small, he enterred without them seeing him and he filled all the steps of the stairway  with the medicines he was taking out of the cupboards.  His mother punished him the whole afternoon to the darkness of the attic for what he had done.  He says that then he was small, but that now he can go in, because he is bigger.