Junghans chess clock

The Junghans chess clock is a cherished family object that also serves as a private reckoning with Manuel Arroyo’s compromised success. Given to him at Christmas 1954 by a major client whose business depended on Nazi gold and later flourished under the Franco regime, the cherrywood clock stands in his Madrid living room as a reminder of the political defeat that made him wealthy. Its place in the home turns an ordinary present into a visible emblem of identities, loyalties, and hopes that cannot be reconciled.

Origin and Gift

In April, Manuel and his wife welcomed a daughter who nearly received the name Andrea but was ultimately called Rita Guillermina. Soon after the birth, the family left their two-bedroom flat at the Casa de las Flores, where their balconies faced those of Caridad’s house, for a larger home on Marqués de Urquijo Street. The new living room had a fireplace that the family would never light. Above it, from 1955, stood an old cherrywood chess clock made by Junghans, very like Manuel’s grandfather’s clock.

The clock came from Otto Skorzeny, a client whose dealings with Manuel had begun years earlier. Since the summer of 1951, Skorzeny had used La Meridiana to send and receive materials and documents. His commercial identity was itself a source of risk: he sometimes forgot to sign contracts as Rolf Steinbauer, the name under which he operated, and Manuel had to return them so that Skorzeny could send them back bearing his false signature. The clock was not simply a purchase or a casual token. Skorzeny went to considerable trouble to obtain it, drawing on contacts he still had in Germany, and gave it to Manuel for Christmas.

A Household Heirloom

The clock entered a family life already shaped by displacement and new beginnings. It was placed over the unused fireplace in a larger home after Rita’s birth, where its resemblance to Manuel’s grandfather’s clock linked the present household to an older family inheritance. Manuel’s wife said nothing when he set it in place, but the object soon acquired its own imagined future within the family.

From the time he was five or six, Manuel’s son told visitors that the clock would be his when he grew up. Manuel never succeeded in getting the boy interested in chess. Rita, by contrast, became a strong player, especially at speed chess, and Manuel promised that one day the clock would be hers. Yet he did not let her take it to her room. It remained above the fireplace, in the shared space of the living room, rather than passing into either child’s private possession. The clock thus became both an heirloom promised to the next generation and an object Manuel could not bring himself to relinquish.

The Client and the Unspoken Past

Skorzeny’s return to Manuel’s life did not restore their earlier intimacy. Although their relationship remained friendly, it never moved beyond the limited confidence Manuel extended to other clients. Skorzeny once asked whether the transport agency was now Manuel’s; he knew the answer already. The heirs of Don Gabino still owned 35 percent, while Manuel owned the rest. Skorzeny made a couple of early offers to visit Manuel’s home and meet his family. Manuel put him off, and Skorzeny did not press the matter.

Their contact settled into a carefully maintained business routine. They did not speak by telephone; their secretaries handled arrangements. They ate together about twice a year, partly because avoiding such meetings would have seemed suspicious given the scale of the German companies’ steel imports that Skorzeny represented in Spain. Manuel always paid for the meals. They discussed business, women, restaurants, and small everyday matters, but not what had happened between them.

The silences were deliberate and shared. Skorzeny mentioned Clara Stauffer in passing a couple of times, but never spoke of Hans Lazar or of how he had disposed of an unidentified corpse. Manuel never said Adrián Gallardo’s name or mentioned the street where the Sociedad Europea de Comercio Exterior had its offices. Each understood that they had been extraordinarily lucky and that neither wanted to revisit the past. Their knowledge was unequal—Manuel knew Skorzeny’s reasons, while Skorzeny did not know his—but the unspoken contest had ended in a draw that suited them so long as conversation stayed safely within ordinary subjects. The clock was one of those subjects, and its recovery through Skorzeny’s German contacts allowed the gift to carry the past into the room without either man naming it.

The Clock as a Measure of Reversal

Manuel saw Skorzeny only twice a year but thought of him often, because his return seemed to trap him in a paradoxical loop. Trading in Nazi gold had made Manuel rich; the favor Skorzeny received from the very regime Manuel had hoped to overthrow had helped turn La Meridiana into one of Spain’s most prosperous and important transport agencies. Political failure and commercial success were not separate outcomes: one had become the source of the other. Manuel knew he would have chosen the opposite if choice had been possible, and also believed that fate would never give him that choice.

That is why he placed the clock where he could never fail to see it—not to balance the inheritance between his son and daughter, but to keep the contradiction in view. It stood above a fireplace that remained unlit, a conspicuous object in a room devoted to family life but carrying the weight of a history the household could not simply leave behind. The chess clock evokes a game in which the apparent result is not the result Manuel wanted: his defeat had become his success, and the object supplied by a compromised client made that reversal tangible.

The clock also gathers the divided identities through which Manuel has lived. It recalls a man named Guillermo García Medina who lived as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez; a doctor only partly and secretly; a leftist who became rich working for the Nazis; and a successful businessman who would have exchanged his office without hesitation for a post in a simple Casa de Socorro. Manuel had stopped expecting political change, yet would have given anything to be able to keep hoping. The clock remains above the fireplace as a key to that life: not a solution to its contradictions, but an object that keeps them present in the family home.