La Casa De Bernarda Alba

Act II opens with the sisters busily at work sewing and embroidering. Angustias, Magdalena, Martirio, and Amelia sit together and work while La Poncia entertains them with colorful stories. Adela is absent, offstage in her room. The others call repeatedly for her to join them until she relents, bemoaning how no one will let her be. The Servant enters to call everyone but Adela and La Poncia away, leaving the two alone. After some prying from La Poncia, Adela confesses that she’s attracted to Pepe el Romano; she has been staying awake each night to visit with him once he has finished talking with Angustias at her window. La Poncia does her best to talk Adela into seeing sense, even going so far as to assure her that the sickly Angustias will die in childbirth and leave Pepe free to marry again, but she will not listen, saying ominously, “No one can stop what has to happen” (183).

The others return with deliveries of more material, and “[t]iny bells are heard distantly as though through several thicknesses of wall” (184). La Poncia explains that the “reapers” have arrived; “forty or fifty handsome young men […] from far, far away” (184-85). La Poncia and the sisters listen as they pass outside, singing a beautiful song about reaping wheat along with “the hearts of any girls they meet” (185). The sisters meditate on the differences separating men and women, genteel and laboring class, each feeling the keen melancholy of a different loss.

Angustias disrupts the reverie caused by the reapers’ song by bursting into the room. Her portrait of Pepe, which she keeps hidden under her pillow as a keepsake, is missing. Accusations fly, drawing the attention of Bernarda. She directs La Poncia to search the bedrooms of all five daughters. La Poncia obviously suspects Adela after the conversation they had earlier, and no one is more surprised than she when Pepe’s portrait finally turns up between the sheets of Martirio’s bed. Bernarda, shocked at this development, flies into a rage and beats Martirio with her cane until the other sisters pull her away. 

After the shocking ordeal, La Poncia and Bernarda are alone together. La Poncia takes the opportunity to warn Bernarda about the growing threat of discord that she has witnessed. She wisely tells her, “You’ve always been smart, Bernarda; you’ve seen other people’s sins from a hundred miles away. […] But your children are your children and now you’re blind” (191). Without going so far as to reveal Adela and Pepe’s affair, she attempts to get Bernarda to see that, although Pepe and Angustias’s union might make the most sense where wealth is concerned, the obvious lack of romance or desire between the two makes Pepe’s presence among younger and more attractive women (e.g. Adela and Martirio) dangerous to the harmony of the house.

The act ends with the shock of an angry mob passing in the street outside the house. La Poncia goes to find out what is happening and returns to deliver the story to the story of a local man, Librada’s daughter. She’s had an illegitimate child and murdered it, hiding the body under some rocks. The villagers want to kill her. Bernarda and her daughters go out to their front door and heckle the crowd as it approaches, goading them to greater acts of violence against the girl. Adela is the only one of all the women who appears deeply disturbed by these events and refuses to join in. Only Martirio notices her hesitation, and as she yells “let her pay what she owes!” (195) in the direction of the mob, she directs a pointed look at her younger sister.