Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas

Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas is identified in the novel as the organization that recruited two battalions near the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the Republican cause was already losing. Its brief appearance anchors an individual exile’s service in a specific act of attempted resistance and helps explain why returning to Spain after the war remained dangerous even for someone with no record of bloodshed.

Wartime Recruitment

The novel describes the organization’s recruitment of two battalions as a gesture of support for Juan Negrín’s policy of resistance. The narrator characterizes that gesture as less romantic than posthumous: the men enlisted when the war was already lost, and the force they joined could not reverse the defeat. The episode presents recruitment not as evidence of a likely military recovery but as a commitment made in the shadow of an impending end.

Germán Velázquez Martín’s Service

Germán Velázquez Martín, the eldest son of Andrés and Caridad, had served in one of those battalions for barely two months. He had enlisted in desperation, too late in the war for his service to become a sustained military career. Although the novel specifies that he had committed no blood crimes, even this short association with the Republican side had consequences after the Nationalist victory.

Germán later lived in Switzerland, where he worked as a psychiatrist. His father had secured him a place on one of the last ships able to leave Spain, turning departure into both an escape from the postwar danger and the beginning of a life abroad. When his sister’s wedding raised the question of whether he could return, his mother feared the risks of travel despite the theoretical absence of a blood-crime charge against him.

Return, Exile, and the Cost of Defeat

The danger was not simply an anticipated war-council proceeding. If Germán returned, he would have to perform three years of military service and would not be allowed to leave Spain again. His mother therefore made arrangements to ensure that he would stay away, and quickly resolved the practical question of the wedding ceremony. The episode shows how defeat continued to govern family choices after combat ended: even a brief enlistment could constrain movement and make a return home a potential trap.

The novel’s later historical account broadens this individual case into a pattern of repeated exile. After the 1976 Argentine coup, thousands sought to leave Argentina; Spain became a destination for refugees, including Spanish Republicans who had built new lives across the Atlantic after their own exile in 1939. For those returning nearly four decades later, Spain could be home and foreign country at once. Against that history, the battalions recruited by Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas belong to a larger chain of resistance, defeat, displacement, and return under altered political conditions.