The relationship between Amparo Priego Martinez and Guillermo Garcia Priego

The relationship between Amparo Priego Martínez and Guillermo García Priego begins as an intimate entanglement between former political enemies and becomes a hidden family bond whose truth is withheld from their son for years. Their son’s birth makes Guillermo a father in a sense he had not chosen, while the collapse of their shared life in Madrid separates him from the child. The papers Amparo leaves behind, and the wooden train she takes with her, preserve different pieces of a connection that is eventually recovered by the next generation.

From political enemies to expectant parents

Amparo and Guillermo’s affair does not erase the political and social identities that preceded it. Guillermo recalls her as the young Falangist who directed the servants’ rosary and collected money to buy votes with mattresses in Madrid’s poor neighborhoods. She had once seemed to embody the enemy; in their intimacy, he had also treated her as a compliant lover. When he learns she is pregnant, that picture breaks apart. He urges her to go to hospital with him, but she recognizes what he has in mind and refuses to have an abortion, calling it a terrible sin and rejecting the idea that he should be allowed to settle his conscience at her expense.

Her refusal is an assertion of choice in circumstances made dangerous by war. Guillermo is unsettled by the steadiness with which she makes the decision, and by the return of the self-assured woman he had thought intimacy had displaced. He proposes that the child will be fatherless. Amparo answers his fears with a confidence grounded in her family history and her resources: her mother and grandmother had carried children successfully, she could afford a doctor, and she believes the child will be fortunate. Guillermo counters with what he sees in his work as a doctor: poverty and inadequate nutrition make pregnancy and childbirth perilous. Their disagreement is not simply over whether the child should be born. It exposes two incompatible appeals to conscience, and Guillermo’s anger at Amparo’s certainty carries the weight of their political antagonism as well as his fear of unexpected fatherhood.

Making a family under siege

Although Guillermo considers an abortion in secret, he tells Experta that he cannot drug Amparo with chloroform and perform one without her knowledge. He accepts that the child will be born and turns instead to the practical problem of keeping Amparo nourished. The gold belonging to Don Fermín remains in a safe, but selling a bar at a bank could lead to prison. At Guillermo’s request, Experta finds a less direct way to provide food: she sells Amparo’s grandmother’s silver cutlery piece by piece and contacts women who cross the front each week to buy provisions in the other zone. A saucepan, ladle, and dessert server bring back six eggs, three oranges, a small packet of flour, and some slices of bacon. What Guillermo experiences as a small miracle helps make the pregnancy materially possible.

Amparo’s fear also changes the terms of their relationship. She imagines the child becoming lost in an orphanage if she dies in childbirth and Guillermo is shot or imprisoned; without a family record, her sisters might never find him. The concern moves beyond her initial confidence that money and medical attention will protect the baby. On 6 May 1938, Guillermo and Amparo marry. Experta completes the paperwork and serves as one of the two necessary witnesses; Guillermo’s chief supplies the other and drives him to the town hall. The marriage is arranged as a practical safeguard for the child, but its official form cannot be separated from the tenderness and strain of the circumstances. Still under five months pregnant, Amparo wears a new black dress pieced together by Experta from two garments, its front pleat shaping the silhouette without concealing the pregnancy. She carries three mauve hydrangeas, a conspicuous contrast with the other brides waiting at the office.

When labor begins, Experta stays with Amparo and allows Guillermo to attend to what he must. He describes the birth as both ordinary and extraordinary: the delivery is long but easy, while the moment he holds the newborn changes his understanding of his place in the family. After examining the baby and finding him normal in weight, size, and vitality, Guillermo wraps him and takes him into his arms. The child’s closed eyes and clenched fists turn the doctor’s professional attention into a recognition that he will always be the boy’s father. This certainty arrives after the pregnancy has exposed how unwilling and afraid he was to assume that role; fatherhood becomes real to him through care and physical presence, not through the marriage certificate alone.

Separation and the traces left behind

The family’s brief life together ends amid the collapse of Madrid. As Francoist supporters celebrate in the streets and refugee families leave with what they can carry, Guillermo recognizes his travel bag in a car and then recognizes the man loading it. He cannot see who is in the front seat before the car disappears. Before the victors have formally declared their triumph, the sight makes him feel that he has lost the war. At home he finds the rooms ransacked: the safe has been removed after the wall of his grandfather’s study was smashed, and the family documents lie trampled on the floor. Amparo has taken the gold, but not the papers that establish her marriage to Guillermo and the child’s birth.

The contrast between what she takes and what she leaves becomes central to their son’s later history. Guillermo gathers the family book, the birth certificate, and the wedding photograph, thinking of the future of a child named Guillermo García Priego and of what role he might be able to play in it. He does not yet know that the boy will grow up without his name and surname, or that these papers will one day matter to more than the family’s private past. The one object connected to Guillermo that Amparo has taken is the wooden train he had sanded, painted, and repaired. That choice comforts him because it means their son will receive the toy and play with it, even as it confirms that the child himself has gone with his mother.

Beneath the bed Guillermo finds Amparo’s unfinished note, dated 28 March 1939. It says that she is sorry and did not want to; the final writing trails into a blot, as though she was interrupted before she could finish. The note does not explain why she left or resolve what she felt, but Guillermo keeps it with the documents establishing their relationship. The surviving record is therefore fragmentary: a marriage, a legitimate son, a photograph, and an apology whose unfinished sentence cannot restore the household. For Guillermo, the wooden train offers one kind of comfort, while the papers preserve a claim that the separation cannot erase.

A father at a distance

After leaving Madrid, Amparo gives the boy a new public identity: José Antonio Urbieta, named after the Falangist leader and assigned a Basque surname chosen at random from the street directory. A photograph of a young Falangist in a blue shirt and military belt stands on a piano in her home; the boy believes the man in the photograph is his father, a hero who died in Russia. Guillermo learns these details from Experta. He does not stop caring about his son, but his access to him is reduced to glimpses. When Amparo is not in a hurry, he watches José Antonio arrive or leave, sometimes seeing him with scraped knees and his shirt outside his trousers, growing taller and more awkward. Even after Guillermo discovers that he is relieved to be breaking with Amparo, he is dismayed to lose the chance to watch the boy grow, however distantly.

The childhood bond takes another form years later, when the fourteen-year-old José Antonio falls seriously ill. Guillermo treats him, and the boy remembers the doctor who visited him every afternoon and taught him chess. In Guillermo’s later family life, his son with Rita is named Manuel, after the best friends of the parents. The baby’s gestures and early development recall Guillermo’s first child: feeding, grasping, studying his own hands, and making the beginnings of a smile. Guillermo fears the barrier of six months, the point beyond which his first son had disappeared from his life. As Manuel grows past six months, then seven and eight, and reaches his first birthday, the new child’s place in his life gradually changes the earlier loss into a gentler, paler nostalgia. The first relationship is never simply forgotten; it is carried forward through repeated acts of fatherhood and through the comparison between two sons.

Recognition and reunion

At university, José Antonio discovers that his mother has cut off his money and searches her underwear drawer for cash. Instead, he finds the family papers hidden in an envelope: his birth certificate, the Republican family book, a photograph of his pregnant mother with the doctor, and a photograph of a note whose apology is difficult to understand. The documents contradict the identity he has been given. He later tells Guillermo that he had already questioned Experta and learned that Guillermo was his father, that he had lived in the apartment across the street, that he had buried his great-grandfather and hidden his mother, and that he was a Republican. He had also been promised that he would never expose Amparo.

The train provides a second, more intimate recognition. Guillermo asks whether Experta told him that his father painted the wooden toy train in his bedroom, beside the photograph of the supposed Urbieta father. José Antonio has not known this. The distinction matters: the papers establish parentage, but the train connects that history to a particular act of care, one carried out before the child could remember it. The physical record and the remembered doctor thus work together, allowing the son to reinterpret both the illness and the stranger who taught him chess.

On 30 December 1976, at the arrivals entrance of Barajas International Terminal, Guillermo and his old friend embrace for the first time. By then Guillermo’s hair is gray and the other man’s is white; both are old enough to be grandfathers, both have children whose surnames do not come from their fathers, and neither uses his true name. The narrator’s account of the embrace emphasizes the bodily cost of the years behind them: the other man is covered in scars, and Guillermo’s hands had stitched him. Their reunion does not undo the long separation between Guillermo and his first son, nor does the recovered truth restore the family life Amparo’s departure ended. It does, however, place the hidden father-son history within a larger story of false names, damaged bodies, and survival, in which the relationship remains legible through the documents, the train, and the care that outlasted concealment.