«De todas las historias de la Historia sin duda la más triste es la de España, porque termina mal»

Jaime Gil de Biedma’s line from «Apología y petición» gives the novel a bleak historical premise: among all histories, Spain’s is the saddest because it ends badly. As an epigraph, it turns national history into a story shaped by its ending, while the next page begins with a man going to meet a woman who knows his true identity. The juxtaposition links the tragedy of a country’s past to the precarious, concealed identities through which the novel’s characters live.

Source and wording

The expression appears as a line from «Apología y petición», published in Moralidades in 1966. Its repeated invocation of history—first as an encompassing category, then as the specific history of Spain—narrows a sweeping claim into a national judgment. The concluding phrase, that the story ends badly, makes the outcome feel less like an isolated misfortune than the measure by which the whole history is remembered.

Placement and narrative effect

The epigraph precedes the heading “MADRID, 30 DE MARZO DE 1947” and the narrator’s announcement that he went to meet a woman who knew his true identity. This move from a judgment on Spain’s history to a private encounter establishes a scale the novel can repeatedly traverse: public catastrophe and the intimate consequences of living under an assumed identity. The placement also makes the opening meeting carry an uneasy significance before its circumstances are given: the woman’s knowledge distinguishes her from a world in which identity is concealed.

Significance

The line offers no promise that suffering will be redeemed by a triumphant ending. Instead, it sets a tragic frame in which what happened to Spain cannot be separated from how its history concludes. Read beside the narrator’s guarded identity, the epigraph also prepares for a story attentive to losses that persist in private lives. Its force lies in the contrast between the broad certainty of the historical verdict and the immediate, still-unfolding encounter that begins the narrative.