Valentín Arregui and Marta’s relationship

Valentín Arregui’s relationship with Marta is defined by separation and belated admission: after nearly two years without seeing her, he recognizes that she—not the girlfriend whose safety also concerns him—is the woman he most wants to hear from, touch, and be close to. The distinction unsettles his political self-image, while his attempt to dictate Marta an unsent letter turns private longing into a fragile means of enduring prison.

Identity and the Other Relationship

Valentín first corrects the impression created by his earlier talk about a liberated woman from a bourgeois family. She is not his girlfriend and is not the woman who wrote to him. The woman he has been discussing is someone he entered the revolutionary movement with; later, he clarifies that this woman is Marta. The correction matters because it separates two attachments that he has allowed to blur: his concern for his girlfriend, who is in danger, and his deeper desire to see and be held by Marta.

The text offers no account from Marta herself and gives little concrete history of their life together. Their relationship reaches the reader through Valentín’s recollections and disclosures in conversation with Molina. What is clear is that Marta was close enough to him to share the movement’s beginning, to become attached to life with him, and to remain the person he thinks about after a prolonged separation. His account establishes the force of his feeling, but not Marta’s present circumstances or whether she would return it.

A Separation Shaped by Political Commitment

According to Valentín, Marta later decided to leave the movement and urged him to do the same. He explains the conflict as a consequence of her happiness with him: their relationship alone had become sufficient for her, while his commitment kept drawing him away. When he disappeared for several days, she became upset; each time he returned, he found her crying. These repeated departures and returns made the collision between revolutionary activity and shared life painfully concrete.

Valentín also describes a change in what Marta told him. She stopped passing on phone calls from his comrades and eventually intercepted letters. He calls the intercepted correspondence the last straw in the relationship’s conflict. His description presents her actions as an obstruction to his political ties, while his language about her attachment shows how intimately those ties were contested. Nearly two years after they last saw each other, he still thinks of her, but frames their separation as something they may have been destined for. The account does not resolve whether the break was unavoidable; it shows how political commitment and the desire for an exclusive life together became incompatible in his telling.

Desire, Guilt, and Class

The sharper recognition comes when Valentín admits that the woman he most wants to write to and be with is not his girlfriend but Marta. The admission forces him to distinguish loyalty, concern, and desire rather than treating them as one feeling. He judges himself harshly for wanting a woman he associates with class privilege, saying that his attraction to Marta may come from her class. He sees this preference as evidence that, inwardly, he resembles the reactionaries he condemns politically.

That self-accusation makes the relationship more than a private longing. Marta becomes entangled with Valentín’s effort to understand the gap between revolutionary conviction and personal desire. His feelings do not neatly confirm or cancel his politics: he remains committed to the movement, yet recognizes an attraction that he regards as politically compromising. When Molina’s bolero brings Marta to mind, Valentín explains his irritation by connecting the song to her. The romantic register catches him off guard because it gives audible form to an attachment he would rather keep under ideological control.

Longing in the Cell

As his physical weakness worsens, Valentín says that he is afraid for his girlfriend because she is in danger, but also acknowledges that she is not the person he longs to hear from or touch. His body, he says, aches for Marta and for her closeness. He imagines that she alone could save him, describing himself as dead and her presence as the one thing that might revive him. This is his expression of need, not evidence that Marta can reach him or that she has agreed to take on that role.

Unable to write comfortably because his vision swims and he becomes dizzy, Valentín asks Molina to light a candle and take down a letter to Marta. He is weak, sees everything as black, and says he needs to unburden himself. The dictated words ask for closeness and comfort, while dwelling on the distance between the prison cell and Marta’s unknown whereabouts and needs. He admits that he may never send the letter, but says he must speak to her in writing because he fears something inside him will break if he does not open himself to her.

The letter therefore functions as an address without any assurance of reply. Valentín asks Molina to read it back and again acknowledges that he will not send it. Marta remains absent, but the act of composing the message lets Valentín name the loneliness and desire that his earlier political self-judgment had made difficult to admit. Their relationship is present not as a reunion, but as an unresolved attachment that becomes most explicit when he is isolated, ill, and dependent on another prisoner to give his words form.