Grandfather’s chess clock

Grandfather’s chess clock is the last valuable object Guillermo García Medina keeps from the possessions recovered after the fall of Madrid, and the gift through which he tries to leave something of himself with his hidden son, José Antonio Urbieta. Its movement from family heirloom to medical patient’s present, and its later place in José Antonio’s discovery of his birth, make the clock a material link between a father’s concealed past and a son’s belated recognition.

The clock among the recovered things

The clock belongs to a cache of possessions that Guillermo had not examined for years. After finding his name on a list on 20 January, he searched a leather folder he had hidden in a trunk. The folder held documents and keepsakes from his earlier life, among them his medical degree, a union card, a photograph of him with Norman Bethune, and papers connecting him to Amparo Priego Martínez and their son, Guillermo García Priego. The search makes the clock’s later appearance part of a broader return of the past through objects: the father’s forgotten records and the child’s concealed identity survive together, though not in the same form.

Experta had filled the trunk in April 1939 with what she judged to be the most valuable things in Commissioner Medina’s house. The chess clock was the final possession from that collection that Guillermo still considered truly valuable. It had become his own grandfather’s clock, kept above the fireplace, an heirloom whose significance was personal even before Guillermo gave it away. Its apparent domestic simplicity conceals a history of displacement: it has survived the hurried removal of possessions and years of ordinary use, while the family relationships surrounding it remain hidden or deliberately misrepresented.

A gift after recovery

On 22 January 1953, Guillermo visited Amparo’s home and played chess with José Antonio, who had recently recovered from rheumatic fever. Guillermo gave the boy the clock as a trophy for his recovery and as a reward for having been such a good patient. Made of cherry wood, it had two Roman-numeral dials and gilded-brass buttons; Guillermo explained that its paired clocks were used to play rapid chess. José Antonio understood the simple mechanism, but looked at the unusual, old-fashioned present with the grave expression of an adult wondering why a doctor would give it to him.

For an instant Guillermo felt that the boy recognized him and had intuited the depth of their relationship. The impression passed quickly. José Antonio was fourteen, and Guillermo barely knew him. The boy’s curiosity soon gave way to a childlike insistence that they play a rapid game. They played three; Guillermo won each one. He then left, falsely promising that he would come by from time to time, and embraced José Antonio at the door without kissing him. The clock was therefore not a straightforward declaration of fatherhood: it allowed Guillermo to give his son something intimate while the identity that might explain the gift remained unspoken.

Heirloom, secrecy, and family memory

The clock’s meaning depends on the identities its recipients and observers do not share. José Antonio knows it as a gift from the doctor who treated him and taught him chess. He does not know that Guillermo is his father, or that the clock is an heirloom Guillermo has preserved from the possessions Experta rescued. Guillermo, by contrast, knows both its family value and the impossibility of explaining that value openly. He later tells Rita that he gave it away because he probably will never see the boy again and wanted him to have something of his.

Rita recognizes what has disappeared from above the fireplace and identifies it as Guillermo’s grandfather’s clock. Her response is not simple disapproval. She admits that she is glad José Antonio has recovered, but also that she resented Guillermo’s daily visits to Amparo’s house and feels guilty about her jealousy. The object thus registers the strain that secrecy places on Guillermo’s new household as well as his connection to his first family. Rita’s pregnancy gives the exchange an additional familial setting: Guillermo leaves José Antonio with a keepsake, then returns home to hold Manuel, his infant son with Rita.

The clock in José Antonio’s discovery

Years later, José Antonio recounts how he uncovered his birth documents while searching his mother’s underwear drawer for money. His mother had cut off his allowance, and he needed forty duros to take a girl dancing. Instead of cash, he found an envelope containing documents, including his birth certificate and a Republican family record, along with a photograph of an apologetic note and a photograph of his pregnant mother beside the doctor who had visited him during his illness and taught him chess. He had already gathered fragments of information from Experta, who told him that Guillermo was his father and that Guillermo was a leftist; the documents and photographs made the concealed history harder to dismiss.

The chess clock is not itself among the items he says he found in the drawer, but his recollection of the doctor’s lessons gives it a place in the chain of recognition. In the earlier visit, the clock linked their shared chess game to Guillermo’s unspoken wish to leave a personal token. In the later conversation, José Antonio recalls learning chess from that same doctor as part of the evidence that made the truth of his parentage credible. The heirloom’s significance therefore extends beyond the moment it changes hands: it belongs to a relationship whose facts are kept from the child but whose gestures and objects remain available for him to interpret.

A material bond across the years

The clock compresses several histories into one portable object: inheritance from Guillermo’s grandfather, survival among possessions gathered in 1939, a gift to a son recovering from illness, and the son’s later effort to make sense of the doctor who visited him. It cannot repair the years of separation or substitute for an acknowledged father. Instead, it gives Guillermo a limited way to act on the relationship he cannot openly claim. The gesture is tender but compromised: he gives José Antonio something genuinely his, then leaves with a promise he already knows may not be kept.

When Guillermo and his old friend Manuel Arroyo Benítez embrace at Barajas on 30 December 1976, the novel again measures their hidden and damaged histories through what bodies and identities carry. The chess clock’s arc is quieter, but similarly material: like the traces of parentage preserved in papers and photographs, it outlasts the silence that surrounds its meaning. For José Antonio, the doctor who taught him chess becomes more than a remembered caregiver; the surviving objects help transform a family secret into a relationship he can finally recognize.