Gilberto Medina

Guillermo Medina is a physician whose determination to treat the wounded without first judging their politics becomes a practical form of resistance—and a liability when the Republic is defeated. His work in wartime Madrid moves between organized blood transfusion, improvised treatment under severe shortages, and clandestine care for people endangered by political violence. To survive Francoist rule, he must abandon the profession that defines him and take up a false identity, while trying to preserve his relationship with the son he leaves behind.

Identity and Medical Ethic

As a doctor, Guillermo approaches the patient first as a vulnerable human body, not as a representative of a faction. In a hospital, he has not made a practice of investigating the affiliations or personal merits of the wounded he treats. That principle becomes more demanding when he helps a man who may himself be involved in political violence: Guillermo does not know the patient’s work, loyalties, or reasons for using an assumed name, but judges that the man’s wounds are not consistent with an uncomplicated attempt to kill him. He continues caring for him despite uncertainty about whom he is helping.

The episode distinguishes ordinary clinical work from the risks of intervening outside the hospital. Guillermo arranges for the wounded man to be taken to a former residence at Príncipe de Vergara 36, where surgical facilities and sterilizing equipment remain available, rather than risk a transfer to a hospital where the patient cannot safely be admitted. He asks that Amparo be contacted and that the household’s trusted caretaker help receive the patient. These arrangements are practical, but they also make the doctor personally responsible for sheltering someone caught in a political crime.

Guillermo understands this decision through his professional obligation: he is a doctor, and his first duty is to save lives. He has never been a party militant, and he has regarded his medical service to the Republic as the essential work before him. Yet he recognizes that neutrality in treatment does not make every act politically neutral. By rescuing a stranger whom he knows may be a political operative, he has taken a side in practice, even without knowing the patient’s cause. The contrast exposes the limits of the hospital as a refuge: its routines can protect doctors from wider moral conflicts, but clandestine treatment makes those conflicts impossible to avoid.

Survival, False Identity, and the Loss of a Profession

As defeat approaches, Guillermo’s medical work becomes both harder and more morally costly. In February 1939, when a badly wounded young volunteer asks to be allowed to die, Guillermo continues treating him despite his own uncertainty about whether the work can still change the outcome of the war. Months of shortages have reduced treatment to painful improvisation: with no anesthetic available, he uses a cauterizer to render a patient unconscious before sewing a stump, then gives the nurse the only pain relief he can spare—two aspirin. The episode shows not a retreat from medicine but the persistence of care under conditions that strip it of its ordinary tools.

Manuel Arroyo, whose life Guillermo saved, warns him that his public record makes him vulnerable to the incoming Francoist authorities. His service as a transfusion doctor, the publicity surrounding his work, and his clandestine rescue of a Republican agent could provide enough grounds for a death sentence. Manuel gives him a forged identity document and money, instructing him to stop practicing medicine and live as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, a fictional man with a carefully constructed past. The papers specify a different birthplace and family history, erase political affiliations, and present Guillermo as a twenty-five-year-old Madrid resident whose most recent address was Salamanca. Manuel has also destroyed Guillermo’s old union record and explains that the identity card was made to resemble Francoist documentation closely enough to pass inspection.

The transformation is a forced rupture with the vocation that has shaped Guillermo’s life. He had believed that being a doctor and serving patients could protect him from political judgment; Manuel makes clear that, under the new regime, his work for the Republic can instead be treated as evidence against him. Guillermo is told not to return to his hospital or claim his medical credentials, and to find work unrelated to medicine. The warning turns survival into an act of self-erasure: to remain alive, he must conceal not only his name but the professional identity through which he has understood his obligations.

When Guillermo finally leaves Madrid, the false papers are only one part of what he carries. He packs a medical case his grandmother had given him, but uses it for the silver cutlery, foreign currency, family photographs, and documents rather than for medical work. He takes the family book, his son’s birth certificate, and the photograph from his wedding to Amparo, though she has left those proofs of their relationship behind. The wooden toy train he had made for the child is missing; Amparo has taken it with her. A short note from her, dated 28 March 1939, accompanies the family papers. The objects divide the life he is leaving from the identity he must adopt: documents meant to prove who he is, an identity card meant to deny it, and a handmade toy linking him to the son he cannot take with him.

Fatherhood, Separation, and What He Carries

Before Guillermo’s departure from Madrid, Amparo gives birth to a boy. In the moment of delivery he is still thinking as a physician, assessing the newborn and applying the judgment his work has trained into him. Once he has checked that the child is healthy and taken him into his arms, that clinical perspective gives way to a lasting recognition: he understands himself as the boy’s father, and the boy as his son. Fatherhood is not an abstract claim for him; it begins in the physical act of receiving and holding the child, even as the dangers of the war will soon separate them.

Guillermo has lived with his son for only six and a half months when he prepares to flee, but that brief period has made the bond irreversible. Amparo has gone to the Nationalist side, leaving the family book, the birth certificate, and the photograph of their wedding in a drawer. Guillermo gathers those documents because they preserve the child’s identity and his own connection to him, and because he is still thinking about what place he might have in the boy’s future. He cannot yet know that his son will grow up without his name and surname, or that these apparently ordinary papers will later matter to other people’s destinies as well.

The wooden train Guillermo had sanded, painted, and repaired sharpens the separation into a small, personal loss. It is the one object connected to him that Amparo has taken, and the knowledge that their child will receive and play with it comforts him. Beneath his bed he also finds her unfinished note, dated 28 March 1939: it begins with an apology, then breaks off in a blot. He puts it in the medical case with the documents proving their relationship. The case, no longer packed for medical service, becomes a container for the identities and attachments he must preserve while living under another name.

Later Encounters and the Persistence of Care

Years into hiding, Guillermo’s medical skill remains both a private capacity and a possible resource for the anti-Franco underground. Pepe Moya finds him because the resistance needs a doctor for guerrillas who cannot safely enter hospitals, for wounded or sick comrades in the mountains and city, and for prisoners’ families with no money or support. Pepe admits that the work is dangerous and unpaid; a raid on a safe house could expose Guillermo. His appeal rests on the fact that Guillermo saved his life and, because he no longer exists under his own identity, may be uniquely useful. The invitation brings back the wartime friendship and the loss that followed it, while making clear that even a profession he has been forced to relinquish can draw him back into danger.

Guillermo’s clinical judgment also persists in situations where his feelings pull against it. When he recognizes that Marcos is gravely ill, he asks that the man be advised to go to hospital, identifying the illness as liver cancer despite his own hostility toward him and the likelihood that the diagnosis will not save him. The moment recalls the ethic that shaped his wartime practice: medical responsibility does not depend on whether the patient deserves sympathy. Later, when his fourteen-year-old son becomes ill, Guillermo examines him and tells Amparo he believes the illness is rheumatic fever. He proposes calling Dr. Quintanilla, who may know a specialist, and explains the condition carefully, distinguishing it from ordinary rheumatism and reassuring Amparo that she is not to blame. The scenes show his medical identity surviving the loss of his title and public practice, carried forward in diagnosis, explanation, and the effort to care for those close to him.

Narrative Significance

Guillermo’s character is organized around a tension between professional duty and political consequence. Treating patients without first sorting them into innocent and guilty, Republican and enemy, gives his work its ethical force; in a collapsing republic, however, the same service can become incriminating evidence. His survival depends on denying the public identity through which he acted, while the medical case, family papers, and toy train preserve fragments of the life that denial cannot erase. The later requests for his help and his continued attention to illness make the point without restoring the life he lost: the name may be false and the profession forbidden, but the habits of responsibility endure.