Guillermo Marries Rita

Guillermo Marries Rita marks the passage from a love tested by political danger and personal history to a family life built in the aftermath of defeat. When Rita tells Guillermo she is pregnant, he offers both the medical option of an abortion and, more personally, his wish for the child to be born and for them to marry. Their wedding on 14 October 1950 is held in Madrid under Guillermo’s assumed identity, Rafael Cuesta Sánchez; its church formalities expose the humiliations imposed on Republicans under Francoist rule, while the appearance of Amparo Priego makes Guillermo’s buried past briefly present at the threshold of his new life. The marriage is followed by the birth of Manuel, whose first year helps Guillermo live beyond the loss of the son he had once been forced to leave behind.

Pregnancy and the Decision to Marry

Rita’s announcement comes after several days of unusual seriousness. Guillermo has noticed the change but misreads it: when she says they need to talk, he imagines she is about to leave him for a heroic clandestine communist, a man with a pistol and a legend that he could never rival. The imagined abandonment is so complete that he cannot see the trees, buildings, or table around him. Against that moment of panic, her disclosure that she is pregnant brings immediate relief, although he recognizes that his first response has failed to reckon with what the news means for them.

When Rita presses him for an answer, Guillermo distinguishes between his professional responsibility and his personal desire. Speaking as a doctor, he explains that he could attempt an abortion, as he has done for comrades before, and that Rita is twenty-six and healthy. But she is not his patient, and he tells her plainly that he wants the child to be born, wants to raise it with her, and would marry her if she could forgive him for not being a communist. His offer makes the pregnancy a decision they must share rather than a medical problem he can settle on her behalf.

Rita’s teasing remark about being able to vacation in hotels if they married tests what his proposal means to him. Guillermo answers that marriage would make him happy every night and every morning because he has never loved anyone as he loves her. Rita moves her chair closer, kisses him, and says that he has repaired what had not been a very romantic conversation. The exchange turns an awkward discussion of abortion and practical arrangements into a mutual declaration of attachment, without disguising the political and personal differences between them.

A Wedding under Francoist Rule

The arrangements make clear that the marriage takes place in hostile social territory. Rita’s brother Germán lives in Switzerland, where he works as a psychiatrist after his father secured him a place on one of the last ships to leave Spain. Though he has no blood crimes to answer for and served only briefly in a battalion recruited by the JSU near the end of the war, returning would expose him to three years of military service and prevent him from leaving again. His mother, Caridad, makes sure he will not have to return and quickly handles the wedding arrangements.

A priest recommended by Caridad’s brother Ramón offers to marry the couple at a church they would never have chosen for themselves. The process becomes a chain of small humiliations: required courses, confessions, and communions are crowded together to keep Rita’s pregnancy from attracting notice. The priest presents the church’s permission as a generous gift to people who do not deserve it. Guillermo and Rita endure the procedures partly because they have been recommended, and he reminds Rita that an ordinary couple known as Reds in a small town would face an even harsher ordeal. The wedding is therefore more than a private commitment: Guillermo describes it as taking place in enemy territory and as another manifestation of defeat.

The ceremony takes place at noon on Saturday, 14 October 1950, in the Basilica of the Concepción on Goya Street, near the house where Guillermo García Medina lived until the war’s end. He enters the church escorting his mother-in-law, but the silence when the priest asks whether anyone objects does not reassure him. He feels that his past is waiting inside the church, an unease that persists as he kisses Rita and continues toward the atrium. In this setting the wedding’s official, public form cannot wholly separate the couple’s new beginning from the danger and false identity that have shaped Guillermo’s life.

Amparo at the Threshold

Guillermo’s sense that the past is pursuing him takes concrete form just before the couple leave the church. Amparo Priego steps out from the last pew and congratulates him. He thanks her, kisses her quickly on the cheeks, and continues toward the door without looking back. The brief encounter is charged by what each knows: Amparo is his former lover, and her presence at the wedding threatens to connect his assumed identity with the history he has tried to leave behind.

Outside, María Luisa Velázquez brings Amparo over and introduces her to Rita. She then adopts the artificial, distant politeness that will characterize her treatment of Guillermo. He never learns how much Amparo may have confided to María Luisa. After the initial fright passes, however, he reasons that Amparo could not have told her anything about defending besieged Madrid without implicating herself as well; such knowledge would also reflect favorably on his own conduct in the eyes of a fascist. The encounter thus reveals both the vulnerability of Guillermo’s constructed life and the limits of what can safely be said about the past.

For the following months, Guillermo watches the marriage alter family relations: his entry into the Velázquez family has, as he sees it, distanced Caridad from her sister-in-law. Rita also proves able to quiet his old and new nightmares. Their recovery from the strain of the wedding is brief but sweet enough to compensate for the kneelers, confessionals, and false repentance demanded along the way. After the ceremony and its humiliations, the couple’s attention turns to the child they are expecting.

Manuel and the Memory of Guillermo

When Guillermo and Rita consider what to name their child, they choose Manuel, a name shared by their parents’ best friends. The birth brings Guillermo back to the memory of his earlier son, Guillermo, whom he had spent many years scarcely thinking about. Manuel’s crying, smell, gestures, and small daily advances recall the first baby’s learning to nurse, grasp, look at his hands, and shape his lips as if to smile. The recurrence makes fatherhood a scene of both present attachment and recovered loss.

Guillermo develops a superstitious fear of the six-month mark, as though his son might again disappear from his life. Manuel passes six months, then seven and eight, and reaches a year still present with his parents. As he grows, and especially when he begins to recognize Guillermo, he gradually displaces the earlier child’s memory without erasing it. What had been an absence becomes a milder, increasingly pale nostalgia. The marriage’s decisive consequence is therefore not simply that Guillermo gains a new family: Rita and Manuel give him a life in which love can persist without requiring him to forget what was taken from him.