A Makeshift Family in Wartime

A Makeshift Family in Wartime names the fragile households that arise where war has broken ordinary ties and made safety provisional. In the Madrid narrative, Guillermo García Medina, Amparo Priego Martínez, and Manuel Arroyo Benítez form a household whose shared meals, chess games, and intimacy give the narrator a newly domestic life. Pepe Moya gradually joins them, not as a formal relation but through nursing, company, and an easy humor that softens the home. Elsewhere, the novel sets that chosen kinship against households shaped by political duty, dependence, and abuse: the same language of care can shelter someone, bind someone to a cause, or become a means of control.

A household formed by wartime circumstances

The household takes shape after Manuel’s arrival changes the narrator’s life. The narrator says that, from the following day, life began to fit an old and new pattern at once: he suddenly had a family, a woman, and something like a brother. The change is marked less by a dramatic declaration than by routine. The three eat breakfast together; on some days they meet again at lunch or dinner. Even when work keeps the narrator away from home at midday or until after midnight, his day includes a couple of chess games with Manuel, and his nights include Amparo’s presence in his bed.

That daily rhythm matters because it reverses the narrator’s accustomed solitude. He has to learn not to do everything alone. The household does not erase the danger surrounding them, nor does it make their roles conventional. Rather, repeated meals, games, and shared space give a provisional shape to belonging while war and concealment continue to govern their lives. Amparo’s presence is at once domestic and intimate; Manuel’s companionship supplies the brother-like bond the narrator has not had. The family is real in its daily practice, even though it is described as makeshift.

Pepe Moya joins the family

Pepe’s place in the household grows out of care given during Manuel’s illness. The arrival of Manuel gives Pepe an opportunity to repay what the narrator calls a debt owed by the good savages. Instead of bringing oil or tobacco, which the narrator does not need, Pepe relieves him at Manuel’s bedside while Manuel remains at the Canadian Institute. Later, Pepe begins visiting the home in his free time to keep Manuel company. Before the others have fully noticed the change, he has become part of their makeshift family, like a distant cousin newly arrived from the country who knows no one else in the capital.

His contribution is emotional as well as practical. Pepe’s instinctive ability to please people has a soothing effect on the unusual atmosphere of the flat at Hermosilla 49, where he is always welcome. Manuel gives up trying to teach him chess after Pepe admits that he can manage the opening but never knows what to do with the pawns. The failure at chess does not keep them apart: Manuel enjoys talking politics with him instead. Pepe’s fine sense of humor colors his opinions, and he has a gift for inventing apt nicknames. He explains that in his village, if a person has no nickname, that person is nobody. His own nickname, the Portuguese, is familiar to many people in Torreperogil who do not know his actual name. That comic detail makes his easy social belonging part of the household’s everyday texture.

Separation tests the bond

The family’s improvised character becomes clearest when it must endure separation. A coded letter, built around an edition of the Fifth Regiment publication obtained by Pepe, reaches the government’s offices and sets in motion the effort to get Manuel out of Madrid. The narrator waits for someone to come to the hospital asking for him; Manuel has warned that the visitor will probably take him from the city that same day, though the process will take at least five days and perhaps a week. When a civilian arrives and gives the password by saying he has known Meg in Geneva, the narrator removes his medical coat and accompanies him home.

There, the departure becomes personal rather than procedural. Manuel goes briefly to his room, then embraces Amparo and says goodbye to the narrator. He reminds the narrator that he is owed a rematch: the score is two to one, and he still expects to come back because it is his turn to play Black. The chess debt carries the family’s ordinary life into the moment of parting; their shared game remains an unfinished promise. Manuel tells them to take care, singling out Amparo in particular. The narrator does not understand why he stresses her name, but sees a startling wet brightness in her eyes. Amparo, in turn, urges him to be careful and calls him Felipe, then qualifies it with the recognition that she does not know what his real name is. The exchange exposes how affection and false identity coexist: the family’s concern is genuine, while the names under which its members live remain uncertain.

Care, authority, and the meaning of family

The novel places this chosen household beside other relationships in which family and care are entangled with power. In the account of the Falange women’s organization, its founder Pilar Primo de Rivera maintains that women’s function is to serve. The organization begins with modest assistance to imprisoned party members and their families, but the war gives it greater political importance. Its structure places Pilar at the top, Marichu de la Mora as national secretary, and Clara Stauffer in charge of press and propaganda. Care is thus presented not only as an intimate act but also as an assigned social and political role.

Agneta Müller’s family life offers a sharper contrast. After a tram accident leaves Beate Müller with lasting mobility impairments, Agneta’s political ambitions are displaced by the demands of nursing and domestic service. She tries to combine care for her mother with her work in the German Girls’ League, but her absences coincide with sudden worsenings in Beate’s condition. Beate’s admiration among her comrades and the damage to Agneta’s political standing help persuade her to submit to her mother’s wishes. The household’s obligations are not negotiated as in the Madrid flat: they narrow Agneta’s choices and frustrate both mother’s and daughter’s hopes.

Later, when Agneta hides Jan Schmidt after the German capitulation, the roles of shelter and family shift again. Her father Rudi agrees to help after Agneta assures him that Jan is an ordinary soldier with no criminal responsibility; she is not lying, since she has never heard of Klooga. Beate supports her daughter from the outset, seeing aid to the fugitive as a last chance to serve the Reich she had loved before history swallowed it. Jan earns some domestic acceptance through work: he repairs wiring, lamps, and furniture, and paints the house, though his results are poor. His labor wins him a small neighborhood clientele, but he remains undocumented and conceals that he presents himself as a man without papers to prevent anyone recording the number of his Argentine passport. Here a family home provides hiding and practical support, yet its welcome is entangled with political loyalty and the family’s limited understanding of the man it shelters.

Intimacy and the violence of imposed roles

Manuel’s experience in Clara Stauffer’s household reveals another kind of unexpected kinship. After entering her escape organization, he recognizes that it was founded by a woman who chose other women as collaborators. That night, in a carefully prepared bed with clean sheets, he admits inwardly that in only a few hours he has learned more about the love affectionate, self-sacrificing mothers give their children than in all the years he lived with his own mother. The discovery unsettles him because the organization he has joined is also a network of political commitment and escape; maternal care appears within a world whose purpose is not innocent.

His relation to Clara further complicates the boundary between gratitude, power, and intimacy. As the false Adrián Gallardo, he sees her as a powerful benefactor: her inherited means, money, influence, and wholehearted devotion to her cause and comrades underpin a charisma that attracts people who owe her what they have. She has no known partner, and his hand beneath hers brings an unplanned possibility of desire into his thoughts. He does not want that distraction; he has decisions to make before taking a flight to Lisbon. The scene makes clear that dependence on a benefactor can produce emotional closeness without dissolving the obligations and purposes that brought the dependent person there.

Simona’s marriage to Renato supplies the darkest counterpoint to chosen care. For seven years, Renato controls her clothing, shoes, hair, meals, movements, and return time, rewarding and punishing her according to his whim. Before and after her annual April visit to her mother and sister in Buenos Aires, he beats her to stop her from speaking or considering staying away. Affection and sex alternate with violence; more tender declarations accompany darker bruises. Simona comes to mistake terror for guilt and blame herself for provoking him, even for failing to conceive a child with a husband who is sterile. The comparison clarifies what distinguishes the wartime makeshift family in Madrid: its bond is precarious and nontraditional, but its shared routines and acts of care are not presented as a license to command another person’s life.