Zacarías González Peña

Zacarías González Peña is an Aravaca shepherd whose encounter with a murdered man in the Casa de Campo joins the novel’s hidden violence to the material life of an ordinary family. He finds the body while tending sheep, takes the dead man’s watch and carpet, and eventually sells them to buy small gifts for his children. The episode is neither a simple act of criminality nor a clean moral parable: it shows how poverty, routine, and a landscape accustomed to corpses shape what survival can look like.

Identity and Background

War has forced Zacarías away from a ravine he once knew so intimately that he could cross it blindfolded without losing a sheep. He enlisted as a private in the Republican army, and afterward paid for that service with two years in prison and three more in compulsory military service. When he was finally allowed home, he returned to shepherding, the only trade he had ever known.

His wife, Mari, had been left alone only six months after their wedding. The couple had started their marriage with a shared flock, but by the time Zacarías returned she had only four animals left. He did not give up. A serious, dependable man, he gradually earned the trust of neighbors in Aravaca, who entrusted him with their sheep. His life is measured in practical obligations: keeping the animals safe, rebuilding a livelihood, and supporting a household that includes five children.

The Body in the Casa de Campo

On New Year’s Day, Zacarías entered the Casa de Campo at six in the morning, as he did every day, with sixty-eight sheep following him. In a hollow he found another dead man. The place was familiar in its grim way: Zacarías had discovered bodies there repeatedly over the preceding five years. But this one had been treated differently. Rather than being dumped like an unusable object, the corpse was wrapped several times in a carpet that seemed new and improbably clean. Blood from the open wound in the man’s neck was barely distinguishable among the carpet’s colorful arabesques.

Before touching anything, Zacarías stood and looked around. Seeing no one, he pulled the carpet until the body rolled onto its back, in a position like that of the other dead men produced by the same patch of ground. The movement exposed the corpse’s left wrist. The watch around it brought back a lesson from the village schoolmaster: the idea that private property was theft. Zacarías uses that remembered principle to make sense of what he is about to do, but his justification is also intensely material. The dead man no longer needs the watch; Zacarías has five children to provide for.

He addressed the corpse as a companion, apologized, and carefully took the watch. Then he rolled up the carpet, put it over his shoulder, and drove his sheep home. The family was still asleep when he hid the watch beneath a loose floor tile and the carpet in the stable behind a pile of firewood. He returned to the pasture with the animals, which had been unsettled by the disruption to their usual schedule, and left them grazing before going to fetch the forest guards. He had reported similar discoveries before; as on those occasions, the guards called the Civil Guard.

Evidence, Routine, and Concealment

The authorities arrived almost an hour later. Because the local corporal was unavailable, two Civil Guards had come from Pozuelo de Alarcón. After questioning Zacarías, they asked him to guide them to the body. He begged not to be made to ride their motorcycle: he could not leave the sheep alone. Only thirteen of the flock were his; the rest belonged to other people, and losing one could ruin him. He pointed out that the forest guards saw him every day and knew he had always told the truth. His concern was not merely an excuse for avoiding the scene. The dead man and the investigation had appeared inside a working day whose other responsibilities had not disappeared.

The carpet and watch leave the hollow with Zacarías, while the body remains for the authorities to find. At home, the objects occupy different kinds of concealment: the watch goes beneath a loose tile, the carpet behind firewood. The sequence places an extraordinary act inside familiar domestic spaces, where the shepherd’s family can continue to sleep while he hides what he has taken. Later, he and Mari turn the proceeds into goods for the children rather than into a transformed life or a lasting fortune.

Epiphany and the Family’s Share

On January 6, Zacarías brought the flock home earlier than usual. His children were awake by nine, though Mari had told them to stay in bed until their father returned. The previous night, the couple had laid the gifts on the kitchen table. They had obtained less than they expected for the watch and considerably more than they had anticipated for the carpet, which had been left to them, in effect, by the last dead man of the Casa de Campo.

The money bought two packets of sweets, a flower-decorated fabric hairpin for their eldest daughter, a rag doll for the youngest, and two tin cars that looked almost new for the boys. The baby, still nursing, already had enough simply in being happy and unaware. When Zacarías entered the room where all the children slept together, he felt for a moment as happy as the baby and told them to get up: the Three Kings had come.

Narrative Significance

Zacarías’s episode turns the repeated discoveries of corpses into more than background evidence of postwar violence. His daily route, his flock, and the five years of bodies found in the same hollow establish a grim normality; the unusually clean carpet makes this latest death distinct without making it less disturbing. The body’s wound, the unclaimed watch, and the shepherd’s careful handling of both carpet and sheep place violence alongside the demands of work and family care.

The remembered schoolroom maxim does not erase the moral unease of taking from a dead man. Instead, it shows how Zacarías frames the choice through a lesson about property and the urgent fact of his children’s needs. The objects then pass from a murder scene into the household: concealed first, sold later, and finally converted into small toys and treats. The scene’s force lies in that modest exchange. A corpse yields a carpet and a watch; their value reaches the children as a brief celebration, while the routine of shepherding and the unexplained dead continue around them.