Friendship between Guillermo Medina Acero and Fermín Martínez

The friendship between Guillermo Medina Acero and Fermín Martínez is rooted in the bond between their grandfathers, whose regular chess rivalry joined two households divided by politics, religion, and morality. As children, Guillermo and Fermín’s granddaughter Amparo found their own closeness in the spaces around those Sunday games; years later, Guillermo’s grief for Fermín and his tenderness toward Amparo reveal how much the older man had come to matter to him.

The Grandfathers’ Friendship

For decades, Guillermo’s grandfather and Don Fermín met every Sunday afternoon for chess, alternating between their homes as if taking turns on a football schedule. Their skill was closely matched, though Don Guillermo generally won six games out of ten. The rivalry was a recurring structure in family life: Don Guillermo later taught his grandson to move the pieces, but before that, Guillermo was already accompanying him to games at Don Fermín’s house.

Chess did not explain the older men’s attachment. They had little else in common, and their political, religious, and moral convictions placed them in opposing camps. Yet they maintained a profound friendship whose underlying affinity seemed almost secret, perhaps even unknown to themselves. Both were amiable, curious men who enjoyed conversation and argument. Their connection endured across difference without dissolving it.

Childhood Companionship

At Don Fermín’s house, Guillermo found Amparo, his granddaughter and the only child his age he could see on days without school. She lived with her grandparents, though she was not an orphan: her father, an engineer, worked for a German company exploiting mineral deposits in Huelva, and her mother lived with him in a house beside the mine, far from the nearest town. Amparo was the youngest of their children, and her parents left the children in Madrid as they reached school age.

Guillermo was used to playing alone, but he preferred Amparo’s company. They invented new games week by week, though their favorite was hiding together—in a wardrobe, a pantry, behind laundry baskets, or in the hollow lower section of Don Fermín’s enormous custom-built bookcase. There they would stay still, holding hands and whispering until the adults’ calls told them they had been missed. The bookcase’s empty lower compartment, beneath shelves rising in a stepped, pyramid-like shape, made their hiding place a private refuge inside the very house where their grandfathers met.

Bereavement and Its Aftermath

Nearly a year after an earlier parting, Guillermo and Amparo were together again as they faced the death of her grandfather. Guillermo opened his arms, and Amparo took refuge in them as though nothing had changed since their childhood hiding place. He told her he was deeply sorry; her tighter embrace confirmed that she knew he meant it.

His mourning was for more than Don Fermín’s death. Guillermo grieved the ugliness of the old man’s final illness, the anguish of being confined, and the loneliness and silent suffering he believed Don Fermín had shared with Amparo in a suffocating room. That grief was sincere but brief: distant sirens announcing another bombing forced him back to the immediate danger of the present. He gently drew Amparo away and insisted that the three of them leave the room, sit in the study, and explain what had happened. In that shift from embrace to urgent inquiry, affection persists, but wartime necessity sets the limits on mourning.