The Time of the Doves follows the life of Natalia, an ordinary working-class woman in Barcelona whose personal story unfolds alongside the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. The novel traces her journey from a passive young girl at a festival to her journey through motherhood and marriage, and finally to a widow struggling to survive poverty and hunger amidst war. Through this novel, we see war through the lens of those most affected by it.
I think Quimet’s renaming of Natalia as ‘Colometa’ is one of the first moments where she loses control over her own identity. He laughs when she insists her name is Natalia. That moment stuck with me because it feels small, yet it sets the tone for everything that follows. From then on, her old life and identity begin to fade. Her life now revolves around Quimet and only his wants and needs. Following this, Quimet’s doves are an extension of his dominance over Natalia. They multiply uncontrollably, invade her apartment, and force her into endless cleaning. Just like Quimet’s authority, they take up space that was never freely given to them.
I also think the connection between the doves and motherhood is really complex. Natalia is constantly associated with reproduction—first through the doves breeding endlessly, then through her own pregnancies. Both feel less like choices and more like obligations forced upon her by Quimet. The apartment becomes overcrowded with children and birds, and she is the one left to manage all of it. In that sense, the doves reflect a distorted version of femininity: nurturing, cleaning, and enduring. But when she finally kills the pigeons, I saw it as her first real act of rebellion. She destroys what has been symbolically suffocating her.
“When they were sleeping I’d stick the funnel in their mouths, first one and then the other, and pour the acid into them and then pour it into myself and that way we’d put an end to it all and everyone would be happy since we wouldn’t have done anybody any harm and no one loved us.” (pg. 146)
I sympathize a lot with Natalia here. In fact, I don’t see her actions as cruelty; I think it symbolizes her absolute breaking point as a woman who has been stripped of agency for years. She ends up buying the acid, yet she can’t bring herself to go through with it. I think that this hesitation matters more than the act itself. It suggests that despite everything, there is still something within her that cannot be destroyed. Some instinct, some quiet resilience, remains intact. I like to think that inside her, beneath the exhaustion and trauma, there is still a trace of the young girl who once stood in the Placa del Diamant before her old life was stripped away from her. She is not entirely gone.
My discussion question for the week is: Do you think Natalia’s suffering was primarily caused by war, by the patriarchy, or by economic inequality? Or are these forces inseparable?