Robles de Laciana is a small village in León whose beauty frames Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s childhood but cannot soften its poverty or family divisions. It is both his place of origin and the confined world he must leave: a landscape of high meadows and mountains, a house where affection is unevenly distributed, and a life from which schooling offers an escape.

Setting and Household

The Arroyo home stands on the outskirts of the village, before a horizon of majestic mountains, gentle hills, and high meadows in innumerable shades of green. That expansive landscape surrounds a household of eight children, yet Manuel’s early life is marked by isolation. He is the sixth child, curious and alert, but there are no boys his age in the village; the younger children are girls, while the older ones accept him only now and then.

The family’s circumstances are defined by work and scarcity. Manuel’s mother tends the house and vegetable garden and is perpetually tired; his father spends so much time with the cows that the animals see him more often than his children do. The narrator’s contrast between the village’s natural abundance and its constrained household life makes beauty a feature of the setting, not a remedy for the hardship within it.

Manuel’s Childhood and the Village’s Limited Future

Manuel grows up feeling less loved than the children his mother favors. She feeds, clothes, and cares for him when he is ill, but gives him little physical affection. He finds closeness instead with Hermene, María, and Leocadia, siblings who care for, protect, and help one another. In the family’s division between favored children and the less cherished, Manuel’s place among the latter is partly eased by being the youngest of that group.

The village’s prospects are sharply illustrated when Manuel’s mother takes him to the priest shortly after his First Communion. She proposes that he remain with Don Marcos, explaining that the son of a neighbor and her own son Hermenegildo are both turning fourteen and will go to work in the mine. Manuel is only seven, but understands the consequences: Hermene, his beloved support and protector, is to leave for the mines of Villablino. He also recognizes that his mother would not risk sending her favored son Toribio in Hermene’s place. The sacristy offers Manuel a possible alternative to the mine, but the decision is made by adults without asking what he wants.

Education and Departure

At ten, Manuel enrolls in Sierra Pambley College. His mother does not object when she learns that men from Villablino will educate him free and provide meals; his father does not even realize that Manuel has returned to sleep at home until he has been commuting for nearly two months. Manuel rises before dawn to walk with Hermene to the crossroads where the mine truck stops, then returns in the evening on the vehicle carrying the afternoon shift. After doing his homework in the college library, he eats alone in the kitchen whatever María has saved for him. In his own home he lives almost like an unwelcome guest, trying not to be noticed, while continuing to serve at Mass for Don Marcos on Sundays for as long as he chooses.

Study becomes his route beyond Robles. Manuel excels at Sierra Pambley because education offers a way out of the village, his house, and the life he sees as a trap. When three scholarships become available for secondary school in León, he studies intensely and earns the highest examination mark. His mother warns that the family cannot afford new clothes for him, especially after two cows die that winter; his teachers, proud of his achievement, bring him to the attention of the college’s visiting trustees. The contrast is telling: the village and its household offer few resources, while education opens a path Manuel can win through his own effort.

Leaving and the Village as a Continuing Origin

Years later, after returning from his mother’s funeral, Manuel decides to leave Robles that very afternoon and sleep at an inn in Villablino. He tells her he will return with Leo and arrange for Tula to take a vacant place, then answers her appeal by acknowledging that everything he has and is comes from her—because she did not love him. He does not kiss her when she leans toward him. It is the last time he sees her. The next day he returns to Madrid; forty-eight hours later he travels to Geneva. He lives in Switzerland for nearly six years, continues sending money to his siblings, and does not return to Spain until December 1936, from London.

Robles remains the measure of an origin that Manuel cannot simply discard. His later movements take him far beyond the village, but the narrative repeatedly connects displacement to the family and home he left behind. In Geneva in 1939, amid a very different life from the one that had once made him popular there, he misses Meg Williams and feels the defining solitude of his new period. When he re-enters Spain through Gibraltar in 1946, more than seven years after leaving, the sight of laundry on the rooftops of La Línea gives him a sense of homecoming. Robles is not the place he returns to in that moment, but the memory of home helps explain the force of that response—and the long distance, geographical and emotional, separating his later life from his childhood village.