Relationship between Guillermo and Guillermo García Priego

The relationship between Guillermo García Medina and his first son, Guillermo García Priego, is shaped by a striking reversal: Guillermo initially says the child will have no father, yet at the birth recognizes an irrevocable bond. War then separates them and obscures the son’s identity, but family papers, a handmade wooden train, and Guillermo’s long memory carry that connection across decades. Their story makes fatherhood both an intimate attachment and a relationship repeatedly altered by political violence, concealment, and names imposed from outside.

Identity and origins

The child is conceived while Guillermo and Amparo Priego Martínez are living through the Spanish Civil War. Amparo speaks confidently of having considered the risks of pregnancy and believes money and the presence of a doctor will protect her. Guillermo, who sees the consequences of deprivation and illness daily, knows how frequently pregnancies and newborns are lost. Against her assurance, he says that the child will have no father. The remark is not a considered decision about the child so much as an outburst from a man suddenly confronted with a paternity he feels unable to accept. His anger also reflects his resentment of Amparo’s assumption that her conscience and plans can determine the lives of both of them.

His rejection does not last unchanged. After the baby is born, Guillermo examines him as a doctor, checking that he appears healthy and normal in size and vitality. When he wraps the newborn and holds him, the medical task gives way to recognition: Guillermo understands that he will always be the child’s father and the child will always be his son. The certainty is immediate, though the circumstances that surround it remain precarious. The boy is named Guillermo, after his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

Fatherhood in wartime and separation

The baby’s existence gives Guillermo a powerful attachment during a period in which he is otherwise isolated. His parents and grandfather are dead, and he has had no news of his grandmother for more than two years. He thinks of Amparo and the child as a single unit, even as his relationship with Amparo remains difficult and neither of them can escape the conditions of war. He does not feel guilt for having wished the child would not be born, but he begins to feel the weight of responsibility. The child, in his view, is both an innocent being and the only force capable of changing the couple’s stagnant, unsustainable situation.

That responsibility survives the separation. Guillermo lives with his son for only six and a half months before setting out toward Franco’s Spain under the identity of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez. He takes a doctor’s bag rather than a suitcase, concealing in it family photographs, money, and the silver cutlery that has not been sold. When he decides to take the family papers too, his concern is for the future of a child named Guillermo García Priego and for whatever part he might still play in that child’s life. He cannot know that his son will grow up without his name or surname, or that the documents will one day matter to more people than the two parents.

The papers include a family book issued in the names of Guillermo García Medina and Amparo Priego Martínez, the birth certificate of their legitimate son, and a photograph of their wedding. Amparo’s short, unfinished-looking apology, dated 28 March 1939, is kept with them. The wooden train Guillermo had sanded, painted, and repaired is not among the things he finds to take: it is the one object connected to him that Amparo has chosen to carry away. That choice comforts him because it means the child may receive and play with the train, a small material link preserved even as father and son are separated.

A son under another name

Years later, Guillermo learns that the child is being raised as José Antonio Urbieta. Experta tells him that the boy has been given the name of the “Great Absent One” and the Basque surname Urbieta, selected at random from a street directory. In Amparo’s home, a framed photograph of a young Falangist in a blue shirt and belt occupies a prominent place above a piano. The boy believes the man in the picture is his father, a hero who died in Russia; the papers support that account. Experta says she has never seen the man and suspects Amparo may not know who he is either.

The public fiction does not prevent Guillermo from watching his son from a distance. He sees him arrive several times, growing taller and more awkward, sometimes with scraped knees and his shirt outside his trousers. Guillermo does not stop to explain to himself why he keeps looking for these glimpses. When he learns that the boy’s classes have ended, he discovers that losing even this distant chance to see him grow is painful. He later enters the room where the child is among other children, his mouth stained with chocolate, and his son briefly looks up at him without recognizing him as his father.

Documents and delayed recognition

The papers Guillermo preserved remain hidden for nearly eight years in a leather folder inside a trunk. On 20 January, after finding a name on a list, he returns to the folder and searches through the trunk’s clutter. Beneath the lining he finds his medical degree and other old papers, then the envelope containing the family book, the birth certificate, the wedding photograph, and Amparo’s note. The records establish what the false public story has concealed: Guillermo García Priego is the legitimate son of Guillermo García Medina and Amparo Priego Martínez.

The son eventually encounters the same evidence by accident. In the winter of 1958, while repeating his first year of Economics and short of money after his mother has cut off his allowance, José Antonio searches his mother’s underwear drawer for cash. Instead he finds the papers in a carefully kept envelope: his birth certificate, the Republican family book, a photograph of his mother pregnant and standing with the doctor who had visited him during an illness, and a photograph of the note asking forgiveness. He had already heard from Experta that the doctor was his father and that his father was a leftist; the documents make the concealed identity tangible. He tells Guillermo that there were too many strange things for him not to be his father.

Reunion, memory, and inheritance

After their first son has been absent from his life for years, Guillermo has another son with Rita, named Manuel after the best friends of the parents. The new baby’s gestures and early milestones recall the first child: the way he feeds, grasps, looks at his hands, and tightens his lips as if beginning to smile. Guillermo fears a superstitious boundary at six months, the age his first son had been when he disappeared from his daily life. Manuel passes that age and continues to grow, gradually turning the older child’s memory into a gentler, more distant nostalgia. When Rita becomes pregnant again in spring 1952, Guillermo begins thinking of José Antonio as his eldest son, although he is not the oldest child in that household.

The older son’s identity is also carried through a detail that was never part of the official story. Guillermo asks whether Amparo told him that he had painted the wooden train for him, but José Antonio has never heard this. The object and its history belong to Guillermo’s memory of the child’s infancy, while the son’s knowledge comes through papers, photographs, and what Experta later tells him. Their family history is therefore transmitted unevenly: records disclose parentage, but intimate acts and memories must still be exchanged.

The relationship reaches a decisive recognition not through a single document alone but through the son’s gathering of evidence and Guillermo’s long-preserved account of their shared past. The name José Antonio Urbieta belongs to the life arranged for the boy; Guillermo García Priego belongs to the birth certificate and to the father who never stopped treating him as his son. Their bond demonstrates the difference between legal proof, public identity, and lived attachment: the first can be hidden, the second imposed, but the third persists in the father’s acts of preservation, remembrance, and care.