Marta

Marta is remembered as Valentin’s former lover and fellow member of the revolutionary movement, a woman whose desire for a shared private life came into conflict with his continued political activity. In the cell, her absence becomes more than a lost relationship: Valentin’s account reveals that the woman he most longs to see is not the woman he identifies as his actual girlfriend, but Marta, the woman he has been talking about. The distinction unsettles his account of himself and connects intimate longing to the political loyalties by which he judges his own character.

Identity and Background

Marta enters the narrative through Valentin’s recollection rather than through a scene of her own. He says that she joined the movement at the same time he did, establishing her as a political comrade as well as a former partner. The evidence gives no account of her appearance, family, or life outside this relationship and shared political beginning; what it does show is how Valentin interprets her choices and their consequences.

Valentin distinguishes Marta from another woman, whom he describes as liberated and from a bourgeois family, and from the woman who wrote to him. He insists that the woman he usually discusses is not the one who wrote. This distinction matters because his later confession identifies that discussed woman—Marta—as the person he most wants to see and hold. The scene thus separates the woman he longs for from the woman he calls his own, without making the two relationships interchangeable.

Relationship and Separation

According to Valentin, Marta eventually decided to leave the movement and pressed him to leave with her. He explains her decision as a consequence of becoming too attached to life and too content with their relationship alone. In his account, what sustained their intimacy also became a source of political conflict: Marta wanted a life that did not depend on his repeated absences and revolutionary obligations, while Valentin remained committed to the movement.

He describes those absences as lasting for several days at a time. When he returned, Marta was crying. The pattern gives the separation a concrete emotional history: it was not presented as a single sudden break, but as distress accumulating around Valentin’s departures and returns. Her unhappiness was accompanied, in his telling, by a change in what she communicated to him. She stopped telling him about calls from his comrades and, toward the end, intercepted letters. Valentin calls the intercepted correspondence the last straw, marking a point at which private attachment had, in his view, crossed into interference with his political connections.

The account is filtered through Valentin’s judgment. He likens Marta’s behavior to that of a castrating mother, casting her distress and intervention in a gendered, accusatory image. That characterization reveals his resentment, but it does not independently establish Marta’s motives or her full perspective. Her actions are known here through the person who left and who continues to measure their relationship against his political responsibilities.

Longing and Self-Conflict

When Molina asks whether it has been long since Valentin saw her, Valentin answers that it has been almost two years. The separation has not ended his attachment: he says that he still thinks about Marta and regrets that she began acting as she did. At the same time, he cannot settle on a clear explanation of their ending, saying that they seemed destined to be separated. His account moves between blame, regret, and fatalism rather than resolving the tension between them.

Later, while Molina urges him to talk through his pain, Valentin admits that the person he most wants to write to, be with, and hold is not his girlfriend or his “real woman.” It is the other woman, the one he has been discussing: Marta. The admission clarifies the emotional force of the earlier recollection. Although he has been apart from her for nearly two years, she remains the object of the closeness he most desires. His longing is not simply a nostalgic detail; it contradicts the neat division implied by his labels for the two women.

Narrative Role and Significance

Marta’s absence shapes a revealing conversation between Valentin and Molina. She does not speak in the supplied recollection, yet the details Valentin chooses—his disappearances, her tears, the calls and intercepted letters—make their former relationship a site where political commitment and private need press against each other. The conversation also changes what the reader can understand about Valentin: the woman he presents as his real partner is not the person he most wants, and his revolutionary self-image does not prevent him from feeling attachment, regret, or desire.

Valentin responds to this realization with shame. He judges himself as inwardly like the reactionary men who helped murder a poor man, because the woman he truly prefers is the other one. That comparison does not establish that his desire is politically equivalent to their violence; it shows the severity of the standard he applies to himself. Marta therefore matters both as a former lover whose relationship with Valentin broke under the strain of his absences and as the figure through whom his private longing unsettles his political and moral self-assessment.