Tang Giacomo Medina

Don Guillermo Medina is the narrator’s grandfather, a Republican police officer remembered for his intelligence, kindness, and progressivism. Though he appears through recollection rather than as an active participant in the later scenes, his presence endures in an inherited chess clock, in family features passed down through generations, and in the documents that eventually expose a concealed parentage. His legacy gives private family memory a connection to the political history that the victors would prefer to erase.

Identity and remembrance

The narrator recounts how his friend Manolo admired a beautiful clock inherited from his grandfather: a cherrywood case, two Roman-numeral dials, and brass plungers. Its appearance led the narrator to tell the story of Don Guillermo and Don Fermín, who played chess on Sundays, and of the unlikely friendship between a Republican policeman and a right-wing notary. The chess clock thus introduces Don Guillermo not through a formal biography but through an object still in use, which opens onto a remembered world of friendship, family, and political difference.

When the narrator visits Commissioner Basilio Rodríguez to arrange help for Manolo, Rodríguez recognizes the narrator’s family resemblance and asks whether he is related to Don Guillermo Medina. The narrator confirms that he is the policeman’s grandson. Rodríguez calls Don Guillermo an excellent officer—intelligent, kind, and progressive—and argues that men like him deserve a tribute, since younger people seem to imagine that Spain had no Republicans, socialists, or revolutionaries until recently. The encounter makes Don Guillermo’s memory a rebuke to historical amnesia: his character is recalled not only as a private inheritance but as evidence of a political tradition.

Family traces and concealed history

The narrator describes his face as a mixture of inherited features. His long face, dark hair, and sad eyes came from his father, while his nearsightedness, nose, mouth, and smile came from his mother, who resembled Don Guillermo exactly. At the police station, his name and maternal family resemblance help him win Rodríguez’s trust. Don Guillermo’s legacy therefore works practically as well as symbolically: the likeness helps open a path to aid for a man in danger.

Nearly eight years after placing memories of his life with Amparo in a leather folder, the narrator finds the folder hidden inside the satin lining of an old trunk. Among its contents are his medical degree, union card, a photograph of himself with Norman Bethune, and Don Guillermo’s Republican card. A white envelope holds the family record issued in the names of Guillermo García Medina and Amparo Priego Martínez, their son’s birth certificate, a wedding photograph, and Amparo’s brief note of apology dated 28 March 1939. The papers turn family history into tangible evidence: an official record of marriage and a child, set beside a few words whose unexplained remorse cannot undo the years of separation.

The grandson’s imposed identity

The child, Guillermo García Priego, has been given another name and an invented paternal story. He is now called José Antonio Urbieta, after the Falangist leader, with a Basque surname chosen at random from a street directory. In Amparo’s sitting room, a framed photograph of a young Falangist stands alone above a piano; a small vase holds a single flower beside it. The boy believes the man in the portrait is his father, a hero who died in Russia, because that is what the papers say. The carefully staged portrait supplies a public identity in place of the father and family history kept out of sight.

The narrator watches his son grow from a distance, sometimes seeing him arrive with scraped knees and his shirt untucked. The discovery that he dislikes losing even this remote chance to see José Antonio makes the cost of separation newly legible. Later, when the boy is ill with rheumatic fever, the narrator’s visits and chess lessons become part of the evidence from which the son will reconstruct his origins.

Delayed discovery and reunion

As a young man, José Antonio searches his mother’s belongings after she cuts off his money. Hoping to find cash in a drawer, he instead discovers an envelope containing his birth certificate, a Republican family record, a photograph of a note asking forgiveness, and a photograph of his pregnant mother with the doctor who visited him during his illness and taught him chess. The documents overturn the story he had been given. He learns from Experta that the doctor is his father, that the narrator had buried his great-grandfather and sheltered Amparo, and that the two had lived together until 1939. He also learns that his father was a Republican—described in the family’s political shorthand as a “red.”

The revelation is not produced by a single document alone. José Antonio has already made inquiries, questioned Experta, and recognized that the clues do not fit the official family account. His discovery changes the meaning of the chess lessons and the photograph: the doctor who seemed an occasional visitor was his father, and the family’s suppressed Republican history was part of his own. The narrator’s old toy train, which he had painted for the child, remains an intimate detail the son does not know; even after the truth emerges, their shared past is incomplete.

On 30 December 1976, at the arrivals entrance of Barajas Airport, the narrator and Manuel embrace for the first time. Both are in their sixties, both have families, and neither uses his true name, though each addresses the other by his authentic one. Manuel’s body is covered in scars, and the narrator’s hands are the ones that stitched him. Their reunion recalls their reciprocal debt—each owes the other his life—and the defeat they had endured together. Don Guillermo’s memory belongs to this wider pattern: identity and kinship can be obscured by political violence, but the inherited object, the family record, and the act of recognizing one another keep the past from disappearing altogether.

Narrative significance

Don Guillermo’s limited but decisive appearances bind the novel’s private clues to its political history. The chess clock carries his memory into a later friendship; his Republican card resurfaces among documents hidden for years; his features persist in the narrator’s mother and, through her, in the narrator himself. These traces make inheritance something both material and bodily.

His remembered reputation also counters the imposed narratives surrounding the family. Rodríguez’s tribute recalls a Republican past that younger generations risk forgetting, while José Antonio’s fabricated Falangist father and concealed birth records show how political identities can be manufactured inside a household. Don Guillermo’s legacy is therefore less a completed biography than a set of surviving proofs—an object, a face, a card, and the testimony of people who remember what the official story leaves out.