Experta

Experta is a longtime servant in the household of Don Fermín and a resourceful, enduring presence in the lives of Guillermo García Medina and Amparo Priego Martínez. Her name becomes a fitting measure of her practical competence: she leads Guillermo through a hidden route in Don Fermín’s house, helps recover and bury his body, finds food for Amparo during wartime scarcity, and later entrusts Guillermo with parcels for her imprisoned sons. Her care is not abstract loyalty but work performed under pressure, shaped by her own losses and by the uneven terms of the relationships she serves.

Identity and early connection

Guillermo knows Experta from childhood, when he visited Don Fermín’s house with his grandfather. He remembers the house’s rooms and furnishings well enough to recognize that its library has been moved and a wall freshly painted. On the night of November 19, 1936, Experta brings him back into that altered house, where the familiar library conceals a passage to Don Fermín’s bedroom. She opens the lower central door, crawls through the hiding place Guillermo remembers from childhood, and calls at the bedroom door beyond it. The passage makes their shared past physically present, but the smell of a corpse overtakes his childhood memories before he enters the room.

Experta summons Guillermo in the middle of the night, distraught and unable at first to explain what has happened. He sits her down, holds her face, brings her water, and tries to calm her; she instead clutches his arms and urges him to come with her. Her urgency breaks through his exhaustion. That scene establishes the form her loyalty often takes: she does not offer a polished account or wait for permission, but reaches for the person she needs and gets him moving.

Don Fermín’s burial

After Don Fermín’s death, Experta helps make possible the removal of his body and its burial. Guillermo has gone ahead to settle paperwork, anticipating trouble over his grandfather’s grave. When he returns, Experta is waiting by a cemetery gate with her youngest son, a young friend of his, an older neighbor named Marcial, and a wheelbarrow. Marcial works at the cemetery and has helped open the grave; Experta explains that they will carry Don Fermín there in the wheelbarrow. Her practical arrangements give the burial a way forward even as the scene remains entangled in the family’s grief and in the political meaning of a civil burial.

There is no priest at the ceremony. Amparo, a Falangist who has refused to stay away, stands with Guillermo as her grandfather is buried beside his. The city’s civil graves have no flowers, but Experta has brought three fresh bunches of red geraniums, cut from the pots that had adorned her home’s balconies. She gives one bunch to Amparo, one to Guillermo, and keeps the third. The domestic flowers, inexpensive and ordinary before the siege, become the ceremony’s vivid offering. Experta’s small act does not erase the conflict around the burial; it makes space for a shared ritual amid it.

At the grave, Guillermo embraces Amparo as she weeps. Experta begins the Lord’s Prayer, and Amparo joins her near its end; the two women then say a Hail Mary together. The prayers do not require a priest, and Don Fermín is finally laid to rest. Experta supports Amparo in her arms as they leave the cemetery, helping her through a moment Guillermo cannot simply resolve with words. He gives Experta the keys to his home so she and Amparo can eat and rest there, telling her to have Amparo collect what she needs and return the keys later. He also makes the offer available to Amparo directly. The gesture extends Experta’s caregiving role into a practical refuge for both women.

Care under wartime scarcity

When Amparo becomes pregnant, Guillermo refuses her request to have Experta visit regularly to clean and shop. He insists that Amparo, living in his house, should manage the work herself rather than rest while Experta serves her. At the time, Guillermo recognizes that his words have the force of orders and that he takes pleasure in giving them, while Amparo takes pleasure in obeying. The arrangement changes Experta’s place in their household: she comes only occasionally, as a visitor, instead of becoming their servant again. Amparo, who had never faced a stove, learns to cook with necessity and Guillermo’s grandmother’s recipe books. Her new skills alter the couple’s private routines and the rules of their rewards and punishments, while Experta remains an important presence outside the daily household labor.

Experta’s absences have reasons of their own. The war has taken one of her four sons at the front; another has been captured after the northern front collapsed. She knows no more than that, and fears the captured son may have shared his elder brother’s fate. When Guillermo asks her to come, she arrives two days after receiving his message through a milkman who travels from Calle Ayala to Vallecas on Sundays to visit his parents. Guillermo notices how dulled and slow she seems beside the efficient woman he remembers, but learns that the change in her manner does not mean she has lost her capacity to act.

Guillermo explains why he needs her help. Amparo intends to have the child, and he cannot bring himself to anesthetize her with chloroform and perform an abortion without her consent, although he has considered it. Having accepted that the child will be born, he wants Amparo to eat well enough for the baby’s health. Their ordinary supplies of rice and lentils are inadequate; milk, eggs, and meat are needed. Selling one of Don Fermín’s gold bars through a bank would expose Guillermo to prison, so he asks Experta to find another way to obtain money and food.

Experta replies that the money can be managed: valuable objects remain in both households, and, although they will not fetch much, they can make do. She also treats the difficulty of acquiring food as a problem to investigate rather than a reason to give up. Guillermo warns her not to take risks over black-market purchases. She answers that such buying has become as common as drinking water. Her ease with practical improvisation contrasts with Guillermo’s anxious calculation of what the law might punish.

The first object sold is Amparo’s grandmother’s silver cutlery. Experta sells the pieces one at a time to obtain a better price and makes contact with women who cross the front each week to buy provisions in the other zone. A small ladle, a serving spoon, and a dessert spatula bring back six eggs, three oranges, a packet of flour, and slices of bacon. Experta complains that the suppliers have cheated them because they paid with solid silver; Guillermo sees the exchange as a miracle. The recovered food has a specific consequence: when Amparo enters the kitchen insisting she is not hungry, the sight of fried eggs and bacon dispels her reluctance.

Family bonds and the birth of Guillermo’s son

Experta continues to stand beside Amparo through her pregnancy. She is living with the couple by the time Amparo enters her eighth month. When Amparo’s waters break, Guillermo, startled awake, begins to go to the bathroom rather than immediately taking charge. Amparo grabs his wrist and demands to know where he thinks he is going. Experta steps in with the calm competence her name suggests, telling Guillermo to go where he needs to and that she will stay with Amparo. The contrast with his momentary disorientation is sharp: the doctor is also the expectant father, while Experta knows what the immediate situation requires.

On May 6, 1938, Guillermo and Amparo marry. Experta handles the paperwork and serves as one of the two required witnesses; Guillermo supplies the other, his chief, who drives them to the town hall. The marriage is a formality prompted by Amparo’s fears about what might happen if she died in childbirth, Guillermo were shot or imprisoned, and their child were left untraceable in an institution as the son of an unmarried mother. Experta’s work makes the legal bond possible. She also makes Amparo’s appearance for the occasion: still short of five months pregnant, Amparo wears a new dress Experta has fashioned from two black dresses, with a front fold that shapes the silhouette without hiding the pregnancy, and carries three mauve hydrangeas.

Experta’s knowledge of the child’s later circumstances is important as well. Amparo refuses to let Guillermo see their son, who has been given the name José Antonio Urbieta. The surname was chosen at random from a street directory, while the child’s first name recalls the absent Falangist leader. In Amparo’s home a framed photograph of a young Falangist in a blue shirt and belt is set above the piano, with a single flower in a small silver vase below it. Experta says that she has never seen the man and wagers that Amparo does not know who he was either. Nevertheless, the boy believes the man in the picture is his father, a hero who died in Russia; official papers support that account, arranged through Amparo’s influential connections.

The continuing bond with Guillermo

After Guillermo begins working at La Meridiana, he visits Vallecas less often. Experta is the one who establishes distance, because Sundays are needed for visiting her sons, who are serving their sentences in two separate penal detachments. Guillermo persuades her to let him send parcels to them without charge, repaying, as he sees it, only a tiny fraction of the lifelong debt he owes their mother. She does not entirely believe that he can arrange the deliveries for free, but eventually entrusts the packages to him.

Their arrangement is deliberately discreet. Experta comes to Guillermo’s office about once a month but never goes upstairs to see him. She asks what people would think if they saw him receiving someone as poor as she is. They settle on meeting at the entrance at eleven, any day she has something to send. Guillermo comes down to collect the parcel and invites her to breakfast. Their conversation often turns less to her sons than to his: the exchange of practical help opens a private space in which Experta can speak about the child she helped bring into the world and whom Guillermo is rarely allowed to see.

Experta tells Guillermo that his son resembles him unmistakably, just as Amparo says. Guillermo protests that he gave everything he had, not little; Experta agrees, then adds that Amparo is herself the reason he is kept from the boy. She insists Amparo would not show him the child for all the gold in the world. Her report gives Guillermo the likeness he cannot witness at close range, and makes their monthly breakfasts a substitute, however incomplete, for the father-son relationship denied to him.

The novel thus lets Experta’s care recur in objects and acts: the hidden doorway she opens, the geraniums she carries to the grave, silver converted into food, legal forms completed for a marriage, and parcels passed between a mother and her imprisoned sons. She moves between households and generations without becoming the center of their conflicts. Instead, her steady labor makes survival, mourning, and connection possible—and leaves her own losses visible in the pauses and distances the war imposes.