Tang Feiying

Don Fermín’s presence in the novel is carried forward by what he leaves behind: Sunday chess games, a friendship that crossed political divisions, and valuables that become food during wartime scarcity. His memory links an intimate family history to the narrator’s present, where inherited objects are not merely keepsakes but resources with consequences.

Identity and Background

The narrator recalls Don Fermín through his friendship with Don Guillermo, a Republican policeman, despite Don Fermín’s own position as a right-wing notary. Their Sunday chess games form the central image of that unexpected bond. The narrator recounts this history to a patient who has become interested in the narrator’s inherited chess clock, explaining not only the two men’s friendship but also his own connection with Amparito. Don Fermín’s life is thus presented in fragments passed between generations: a friendship, a ritual, and the stories attached to them.

The recollection also introduces another side of his biography. The patient learns that the commissioner had distinguished himself as a playwright and, more unusually, as a clandestine author of revues and cuplés. The patient had seen Orgía en Constantinopla from the upper gallery of the Eslava as a law student, and his laughter at the thought of watching it from the stage gives the buried theatrical history a vivid, personal afterlife. Don Fermín is remembered not simply as a notary or as the grandfather whose possessions remain in the house, but as someone whose hidden creative work reached an audience beyond his immediate circle.

The Inherited Chess Clock and a Living Memory

The clock inherited from Don Fermín is a handsome wooden case made of cherry wood, with two Roman-numeral dials and brass buttons. When the narrator brings it to play chess, the patient protests that he is a poor convalescent and cannot be expected to play with such equipment. Yet the clock catches his attention: he has never seen one like it. The object becomes the occasion for the narrator to tell the story of Don Fermín and Don Guillermo, turning a chess accessory into a prompt for recovering a past.

The clock also carries the trace of the grandfather’s care. The patient plays better with black than with white, a circumstance the narrator connects to the way he learned: unlike the narrator, who had been taught with method and dedication by his grandfather, the patient had learned on other people’s boards, whose owners tended to keep the advantage of playing white. Don Fermín’s influence is therefore measured not only by the stories told about him but by the care invested in teaching the narrator. The contrast makes the inherited clock more than a beautiful possession: it recalls a particular intimacy and a sustained education.

Family Possessions in Wartime

Don Fermín’s legacy later becomes materially important when Amparo is pregnant and poorly nourished. The narrator considers the gold left by Don Fermín, still kept in a safe, but rejects selling a bullion bar through a bank because doing so would expose him to arrest. Instead, Experta proposes looking through the household goods for items that can be exchanged for food. The dilemma gives the inheritance a double character: the gold represents substantial value, but its possession cannot safely be converted into the necessities Amparo needs.

The family’s other belongings prove more useful. Perfumes, hats, feathers, brooches, necklaces, costume jewelry, Manila shawls, porcelain figurines, music boxes, lace, evening dresses, fur coats, paintings, and rugs are traded for food on advantageous terms. A mother-of-pearl powder compact feeds the household for a week; a torn silver-mesh bag brings two or three days’ food; and Don Fermín’s frock coats purchase three liters of milk. The coat’s transformation from an item of dress into nourishment gives the inheritance a direct, practical consequence: possessions gathered in one life help sustain another.

These exchanges also connect Don Fermín’s house to Amparo’s. The goods come from both homes, and the narrator’s concern shifts from preserving family property to securing better food for Amparo and the child. As her diet improves, she sleeps better; together, the improvement in sleep and the end of her crying ease the narrator’s fear for the pregnancy. The objects are not treated as abstract symbols of wealth. Their worth is tested by what they can obtain, and their use changes the household’s immediate prospects.

Memory, Marriage, and Continuity

The patient recognizes Amparo as Don Fermín’s granddaughter and assumes she has become the narrator’s wife. The narrator denies that they are married, explaining that she lives with him because the war left her alone, but concedes that the relationship is complicated. The assumption exposes how Don Fermín’s family history remains active in the household: Amparo is not only a person sharing the narrator’s present but the granddaughter through whom the inherited past is still present.

That provisional arrangement changes when Amparo, still not yet five months pregnant, appears in a new black dress made by Experta from the fabric of two older dresses. Its front pleat makes her look more slender without concealing the pregnancy, and three mauve hydrangeas distinguish her from the other brides waiting in the registry office. She tells the narrator that they are going to marry. The civil ceremony takes only as long as an official needs to read three articles of the Civil Code and four people need to sign a paper. Before the narrator has time to lift his pen, Amparo asks him to look at the photographer. The granddaughter whom the patient had mistaken for a wife becomes one in fact, completing a change that Don Fermín’s remembered family ties had already foreshadowed.

Narrative Significance

Don Fermín’s characterization is deliberately retrospective: his story reaches the reader through objects, remembered anecdotes, and other people’s recognition of his family. The chess clock opens a conversation; the recollection of theatrical work lends the former notary an unexpected artistic dimension; and the household goods reveal how inheritance is altered by scarcity. Each fragment adds a different measure of his continuing presence without making him an active participant in the later scenes.

The contrast between the chess clock and the goods sold for food marks two forms of inheritance. The clock preserves a particular history of teaching and shared attention, while the clothes and ornaments lose their former use in order to provide milk and other necessities. Don Fermín’s legacy is therefore neither untouched remembrance nor simple wealth. It survives as a story the narrator can tell, a skill he received, and material objects whose value changes with circumstance.