Culpa y expiación

Culpa y expiación runs through the novel as a conflict between responsibility and the stories people tell themselves to survive it. Adrián Gallardo’s recurring question about what he has done leads from guilt over a manipulated boxing victory to the far graver choice to participate in the killing of prisoners; his eventual silence is not redemption but the result of a self-serving explanation. By contrast, Guillermo García Medina’s painful decision to keep living under a false name begins to change when he accepts medical work for the clandestine resistance. Across these personal arcs, the novel sets acts of conscience against obedience, self-justification, and the political protection of perpetrators.

Guilt as a recurring question

Adrián’s mother’s admonishments echo in the question his father used to begin childhood reprimands: “What have you done, Adrián?” As a boy, he knew the answer to small misdeeds, such as stealing sweets or fighting at school. As an adult, the question returns in circumstances he cannot so easily explain away. The repetition links the conscience of the child to the moral evasions of the soldier, while emphasizing how much is at stake in the difference between not knowing and refusing to know.

The Bilbao fight leaves Adrián with a particular burden: he has won through a bout arranged in his favor, and Alfonso Navarro’s imagined voice accuses him of dishonor. The memory pursues him into dreams and waking life. He trains against it by striking the punching bag, but the effort does not silence the accusation. Pirulo recognizes that the coming championship is threatened not by a physical opponent alone but by a shadow that has no body and yet weighs on Adrián as fear and guilt. His affection for Adrián, whom he regards as a good-hearted younger brother, cannot make that conflict disappear.

Obedience, responsibility, and self-exoneration

Before his rematch with Navarro in Pokrovskaya on Christmas Eve 1942, Adrián briefly sees his past differently. He tells himself that Antonio Ochoa’s orders left him no real choice: refusal could have brought ruin, imprisonment, or even death. This recognition restores his confidence and his ability to fight, but it does not settle the moral question. His reasoning distinguishes coercive circumstances from free choice while also admitting that he followed the orders without challenging them. The novel presents that distinction as emotionally powerful without treating it as a clean absolution.

A later episode makes the stakes far more severe. At Kolpino, Adrián has heard Jan Schmitt describe the devastation of his family, but had not allowed those accounts to register as a moral claim. When ordered to take part in the killing of prisoners, Adrián imagines refusing to fire, as Heinrich Beyer had done. The imagined refusal briefly offers him a way to recover his sense of dignity. In the event, he obeys and fires. Afterward, the voice that has asked what he has done fades and finally falls silent.

That silence marks a transformation, but not an expiation. Adrián constructs an explanation in which the victims themselves are made responsible for turning him into a killer. He decides that their apparent acceptance of suffering is an accusation directed at their executioners, and recasts that accusation as proof of their hostility. The logic allows him to stop hearing the question that had tormented him. Its moral consequence is not that the past has been repaired, but that he has found a way to live without acknowledging it.

Survival, shame, and restored purpose

Guillermo’s crisis takes a different form. After being saved and hidden under the identity of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, he spends his first night in a borrowed bed confronting what he has lost: his medical vocation, his work, his home, his lover, and the possibility that his son will know him as his father. He knows he wants to live, but experiences that desire as proof of weakness and as a betrayal of the integrity he associates with his grandfather. Survival under an assumed name feels to him less like a reprieve than a verdict against himself.

His daily routine gives that division a physical boundary. He hides the crucifix under his bed each night and replaces it in the morning, then walks across Madrid for hours without a destination. He never turns back before crossing the Castellana, which comes to mark the separation between Guillermo García Medina and the life he is living as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez. The repeated acts do not resolve his shame; they show how thoroughly the false identity has divided his ordinary existence from his former self.

A chance to work as a doctor for families of imprisoned members of the Communist Party changes the terms of his self-judgment. Pepe Moya tells him that his medical skill and experience make him valuable, although the work is unpaid and dangerous. Guillermo accepts the offer and weeps alone in a café bathroom. Returning to medicine matters, but the deeper change is his recovery of dignity: he can again be useful, take risks for others, and feel that his choices honor the person he wants to be. His incorporation into the clandestine organization does not erase the danger or his past; it gives him a way to act in keeping with his conscience.

Private remorse and public impunity

Manuel Arroyo’s experience broadens the theme beyond individual wrongdoing. Working among diplomats and political representatives, he has heard expressions of affection and solemn promises that repeatedly prove unreliable. Though he longs to be relieved, Pablo de Azcárate insists that his work is needed; Manuel continues it and swallows his anger. In 1945, the Francoist government is excluded from the new United Nations while Republican politicians attend as observers, a diplomatic outcome that might look like a great success from outside. Manuel, after witnessing the compromises behind it, distrusts the apparent victory. The episode shows how political theater can offer the form of accountability while leaving the underlying injustice intact.

The case of Jean-Jules Lecomte gives that injustice concrete form. Lecomte, a member of both the Rex Party and the SS, persecuted Jewish families in Chimay, attacked convents where nuns had hidden children under false names, and helped send the identified children toward deportation. He was condemned to death in absentia for crimes against humanity, but was never captured. Manuel learns that he is in Madrid, protected by the very failure of postwar pursuit that the novel repeatedly exposes: conviction without custody does not bring justice to those targeted.

The protection extends beyond the concealment of individual fugitives. In late 1947, the Allies submit a list of 104 people sought for their part in advancing Hitler’s cause. Spain’s foreign minister delays and then counters the claims with papers asserting Spanish nationality, royal favor, economic necessity, religious protection, or ignorance of a person’s whereabouts. Clarita Stauffer is the sole woman on the list. The Allied description identifies her as a leading organizer of a secret aid association that supplied false documents and jobs for Germans, and notes that she had received special embassy permission to obtain Spanish nationality after the war. In this system, identity papers and official discretion turn political complicity into shelter from prosecution.

Limits of expiation

The novel does not treat conscience as a single turning point after which wrongdoing is repaired. Adrián’s renewed resolve before the boxing match helps him regain strength, but his later participation in executions is followed by a theory that silences rather than answers his conscience. Guillermo’s decision to serve patients does not undo the losses that accompany his false identity, but it restores a capacity for action directed toward other people. Manuel’s persistence gives him no reason to trust international gestures that fail to bring fugitives to account.

These arcs distinguish personal change from public justice. A person may regain a sense of worth by accepting responsibility and serving others, yet remorse cannot by itself restore the dead or secure punishment for those who evade it. Where institutions protect perpetrators through nationality, diplomatic delay, and unfulfilled promises, guilt becomes more than an individual burden: the novel makes it a test of whether conscience is answered by action, or buried beneath an explanation that lets the guilty carry on.