At end of Carmen Laforet's first novel, Nada, Andrea reflects on year she spent in Barcelona: Baje la escalera despacio. Sentia una viva emocion. Recordaba la terrible esperanza, el anhelo de vida con que las habia subido por primera vez. marchaba ahora sin haber conocido nada de lo que confusamente esperaba: la vida en su plenitud, la alegria, el interes profundo, el amor. De la casa de la calle de Aribau no me llevaba nada. Al menos, creia yo entonces. (298) Why does she say asi creia yo entonces? Does this mean, as Alison Tatum-Davis argued, that, as Andrea is telling story a few years after it occurred, she now realizes that she did indeed take something with her from her year in Barcelona, something such as identity clearer sense of she had sought? Or, as Ruth El Saffar and Barry Jordan maintain, was younger Andrea right in thinking that she wasn't taking away anything from that year, that she had not progressed, had not changed, and had not found self she was looking for? When Andrea arrives at train station in Barcelona, at beginning of her year there, she is looking forward to because of fond memories she of visiting her grandparents in this city when she was a child. She remembers house as beautiful and cheerful, and she imagines that city will be enchanting; however, her optimistic vision of begins to become blurry as soon as she enters house. Instead of beautiful and cheerful, it is now ugly and gloomy. Why? What brought about this drastic change? A hint, to begin to answer this question, can be found near end of first part of novel, when Angustias, Andrea's spinster aunt, prepares to leave house to become a nun. Her rebelious brother Roman says: Me alegro de que se vaya Angustias porque es un trozo viviente del pasado que estorba la marcha de las cosas (107). Herein lies problem, reason house and its inhabitants had fallen into decay: they are virtually living in past, ignoring present and forever-forward movement of time. This approach to reality--privileging past over present--can be addressed, in part, Elizabeth Grosz's recent studies of time. Grosz been developing a philosophy of becoming critiquing theories of temporality that privilege over past and present. One such theory is that of Henri Bergson, an early twentieth-century French philosopher for whom the essence of time is that it goes by; time already gone is past, and we call present instant in which it goes by (137), so my present has one foot in my past and another in my future (138). Bergson uses visual image of an inverted cone to express his concept of time (see Fig. 1). The base of cone, AB, is past or totality of recollections accumulated in my memory (152); summit, S, is present; and plane, P, through which cone passes, is one's actual representation of universe. The body is always in present, interacting with matter--moving, acting. So present is action, and past is that which no longer acts. In other words, present is actual and past is virtual. The actual is thus realm of perception, of matter, of action, whereas virtual is realm of memory, of thought, of imagination. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] As we attempt to access past, we figuratively step out of present, realm of actual, into past, realm of virtual. Bergson states that, whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we detach ourselves from present in order to replace ourselves ... (133). To call up past in form of an image, we must be able to withdraw ourselves from action of moment, we must have power to value useless, we must have will to dream (82-83). …