Rafael Impersonates a Lawyer to Visit His Son in Carabanchel Prison

Rafael Impersonates a Lawyer to Visit His Son in Carabanchel Prison is the clandestine visit in which Rafael, newly aware that the imprisoned José Antonio Urbieta Priego is his son Guillermo, enters Carabanchel under a borrowed lawyer’s identity. The meeting makes their concealed relationship explicit: after decades shaped by false identities and political danger, Guillermo greets him through a barred window as his father. The visit is both a personal reunion and an act of resistance carried out through the very paperwork that the dictatorship uses to control access and identity.

The obstacle of kinship

When Rafael learns that J.A.U.P. is Guillermo, his first impulse is to go to Carabanchel on an ordinary visiting day. Rita quickly explains why that cannot work: Guillermo is a Communist prisoner held on remand while awaiting trial before the Public Order Court, and Rafael has no legally established relationship to him. Even if Guillermo requested the visit, the authorities would not authorize it. Federico confirms that a letter is the only lawful possibility, but warns that prison officials will read it and learn its contents before Guillermo does.

The obstacle is not simply the prison wall. Rafael’s undisclosed fatherhood has no standing in the official record, and the state’s categories—prisoner, lawyer, proven relative—determine who may approach whom. A letter would preserve the distinction between them rather than overcome it. The visit therefore depends on making Rafael legible to the institution as someone else.

A lawyer’s borrowed identity

The opening appears through Ricardo Ruiz Aguilar, the nephew of Inés Ruiz Maldonado. He warns Rafael that the proposed visit is not merely irregular but a criminal offense. Then he lays out the plan: Rafael will enter as a lawyer, joining Guillermo’s defense as a supposed colleague of Ricardo. A photograph is needed for the colleague’s bar-association card. Ricardo has already notified the court that another lawyer will join the defense, a move likely to seem ordinary because he handles many similar political cases.

The arrangement rests on a chain of people and documents. The assisting lawyer, Ángel Valverde Roldán, lends his Madrid bar-association card to Rafael despite not knowing him. Rafael keeps an excellent forgery in his wallet, and Ricardo supplies a court document identifying its bearer as the defense lawyer for the prisoner José Antonio Urbieta Priego. On 26 October 1968, those papers get Rafael into Carabanchel without difficulty. The legal disguise does not erase his relationship to Guillermo; it gives him access to the room in which that relationship can finally be spoken.

The controlled interview

On the way to the prison, Ricardo explains the interview procedure. Lawyer and prisoner meet in a small room divided by a partition with a little window. A prison official will initially remain in the prisoner’s half, then normally step into the corridor while leaving the door open. Rafael must speak quietly. Ricardo gives him a folder of papers to present aloud as documents Guillermo needs to review; the pretense of reading them will provide cover for their conversation. They have twenty-five minutes.

At the entrance, an official checks Rafael’s documents, looks at the clock, records the time on a form, and directs him to room three. The encounter is regulated down to its allotted duration. Inside, the room is small, with bare, peeling walls and a dirty floor; the smell of boiled vegetables recalls Rafael’s memories of the Hospital de San Carlos during the lost war. The setting joins the present prison visit to an earlier period of defeat without turning the meeting into an escape from its immediate constraints.

Recognition across the partition

Rafael first sees Guillermo through a square, barred opening. His son’s longer hair makes the resemblance to Rafael less exact than it had seemed in other imagined or remembered versions of their likeness, but the image is still a version of himself. Rafael cannot speak. He lowers his eyes, pulls the chair away from the wall, and sits. When he looks up again, Guillermo has stretched out his right arm and placed an open hand against the bars, a gesture Rafael takes for a greeting.

Before Rafael can answer the gesture, Guillermo speaks: “Hola, papá.” Rafael finds his son calmer than he is, and Guillermo is smiling. When Rafael begins to cry, Guillermo tells him, “No llores, papá,” then adds, “Los abogados no lloran.” His words acknowledge both truths at once: Rafael is his father, and the man before him has entered under the identity of a lawyer. The borrowed role that makes the meeting possible becomes part of the son’s gentle effort to steady his father.

What the visit changes

The scene converts a fact concealed by the plot and absent from the prison’s official relationship categories into a direct exchange between father and son. It does not remove the legal and political barriers around them: their conversation remains confined to a monitored room, dependent on a falsified credential, a court paper, and a twenty-five-minute allowance. Yet the greeting is unmistakable. Guillermo calls Rafael “papá” before Rafael can find words, taking the initiative in naming their relationship.

The visit also brings together two recurring pressures in the story: identity as something that can be forged for survival, and kinship as something the state’s files cannot fully define. Rafael’s false professional identity opens the door; the emotional recognition inside it exceeds that identity. The episode ends not with a legal resolution or freedom for Guillermo, but with the guarded, intimate fact of recognition: across the bars, father and son know who they are to each other.