De los buenos, pero sobre todo de los pardillos

“En aquella guerra fui de los buenos, pero sobre todo de los pardillos” is Manuel Arroyo’s rueful description of himself in the Spanish Civil War: he belonged to the good side, he tells his young son, but was above all a fool. The expression makes moral allegiance and painful self-judgment coexist, and its casual humor becomes the threshold to a much darker confession to Guillermo García Medina.

The phrase in its family setting

While the family is packing to leave, Manuel takes a folder from the safe and asks Simona to put it in the suitcase. She refuses: everyone is giving up essentials, clothes, memories, and valuables, she protests, so why should half a suitcase be filled with papers? Manuel answers that she can take out his clothes; he has already lost a war, and the only thing he wants to take from there is the folder. The disagreement reflects both the family’s anxious departure and the exceptional importance he assigns to those documents.

Their younger son Juanito overhears the argument and later asks whether his father had been one of the good people in the war in Spain. Manuel answers with the expression, then has to explain what the word pardillo means. The phrasing makes a child’s request for a simple moral category harder to answer: Manuel accepts that he was among the good, yet refuses to let that judgment stand without acknowledging his own folly.

A joke that changes register

The expression is not presented as a triumphant claim of virtue. Manuel extends it into a broader self-indictment, calling himself a fool in every war. Guillermo replies that the word is out of date and that young people now call people like them pringados. Manuel laughs at the unfamiliar slang. Their exchange briefly turns the weight of defeat into a joke shared between two men who recognize themselves in it.

That humor does not erase the cost beneath the phrase. Its movement—from Juanito’s earnest question, to Manuel’s explanation, to Guillermo’s teasing update—lets the language of self-reproach pass between generations and friends. The expression names a compromised, defeated kind of goodness: not innocence or victory, but a conviction that being on the right side did not prevent them from being duped or losing.

From self-description to confession

Immediately afterward, Manuel tells Guillermo that Adrián Gallardo Ortega returned from Germany in late 1949 and came to his office to ask questions. Manuel says he had no choice but to kill him, and reveals when, where, and how he did it. The conversation thus shifts abruptly from a joking label for wartime foolishness to the concealed violence that has shaped Manuel’s life.

The placement makes the expression more than a retrospective quip. Manuel has just described himself to his son through the language of being good yet foolish; with Guillermo, he discloses an act that cannot be contained by that simple self-portrait. The words leave the moral tension unresolved: they affirm Manuel’s allegiance while exposing the gap between that allegiance and what he has done.