Guillermo Discovers His True Parentage and Joins the Communist Party

José Antonio Urbieta’s discovery of his true parentage overturns the story he has been raised to believe and draws him into clandestine Communist politics. In 1958, a search through his mother’s private papers reveals that his father is not the Falangist Juan Urbieta, supposedly killed in Russia, but Guillermo García Medina: the doctor who once cared for him, taught him chess, and had lived with his mother during the war. José Antonio joins the Communist Party partly as a way to find Guillermo, but also because it offers a way to remain his mother’s son while becoming his father’s son in truth.

The papers that undo a family history

By the winter of 1958, José Antonio is repeating his first year of economics. He has struggled academically for years, and his mother has stopped giving him money after he spends what he received at Christmas. Needing cash for a date, he searches the drawer where he imagines she might keep it. There is no money, but an envelope holds papers whose meaning will unsettle the identity he has taken for granted.

Among them are his birth certificate and a Republican family book. The documents point toward a different past from the one his mother had described. A photograph shows her pregnant, holding flowers beside the doctor who visited José Antonio each day when he was seriously ill and taught him to play chess. Another image records what can only be a wedding: Guillermo and José Antonio’s mother together in Madrid during the war, with two soldiers in the background. The date and setting contradict the account of a Falangist father and a wedding at Burgos Cathedral.

The papers make the question more than a dispute about a name. José Antonio reasons that if the carefully preserved documents are authentic, the name and first surname on his identity card and in the forms he has filled out all his life must be false. His crisis is immediate and physical: he puts the papers back, goes to bed fully dressed, pulls the sheet over his head, and lies awake before sleeping into the following afternoon. Even after learning what the envelope contains, he returns to his mother’s drawer to check that it was not a dream. The documents are still there.

A father hidden by the war

José Antonio had already begun to investigate. When Experta visited, he cornered her in the pantry with questions. She had been reluctant to speak, but he told her that he could show her the wedding photograph, in which she appeared beside the groom. After he promised never to expose her, she disclosed what she knew: José Antonio’s great-grandfather had died during the war; Guillermo had buried him and hidden José Antonio’s mother; the couple had lived together until 1939; and Guillermo was José Antonio’s father. He was also a Republican, a fact that placed the family’s concealed history on the losing side of the war.

The confession explains both the relationship and its disappearance. Experta tells José Antonio that his mother left Guillermo because she believed he would be shot and feared that anyone discovering their life together in Republican Madrid would put her in danger. After the war, she claimed to have hidden in a mountain village with a friend, although no one had seen her there and no one knew the supposed friend. She feared questions that might connect her to Guillermo and his associates, particularly the foreign doctor who performed blood transfusions. José Antonio confirms the story by asking Guillermo about it; Guillermo’s nod verifies the hidden past, even as José Antonio’s own disbelief shows how thoroughly the official family account had taken hold.

The false history was not the whole of José Antonio’s childhood. His mother had kept the wooden toy train Guillermo made for him and had given it to him; they had played with it together in the corridor. She had preserved the object while withholding the identity of the father who made it. José Antonio had also repeatedly asked about his first father. At twenty, he told his mother he was old enough to hear the truth and tried to make it easy for her to speak, but she became angry and said nothing. The train and the papers thus hold contrasting forms of memory: one tangible remnant of affection, the other a record of the identity and marriage that had to be hidden.

From discovery to political commitment

Learning the truth changes José Antonio’s relation to politics. Before the revelation, he has no particular interest in political life. The distant figure of a Falangist father does not draw him toward Falangist comrades, while the students of the Spanish University Students’ Union repel him as pious, chaste, and studious—qualities he considers himself equally far from. Communists, meanwhile, have been too cautious in their clandestine work for him to have paid them much attention.

Once he knows that Guillermo is alive and cannot be approached under his true name, José Antonio decides that joining the Communist Party is the best route to finding him. The clandestine organization initially distrusts him, suspecting either a student-union infiltrator or a police informant. A female student in his year, with whom he has a good relationship, listens when he explains that he has discovered his father’s identity and wants to enter the Party to find him. She agrees to help and asks for what he knows: Guillermo’s real name, that he is a doctor who no longer practices, that he is called Rafa, and that he works for a trucking company.

A week later, she reports that older comrades who fought in the war know Guillermo and speak highly of him, describing him as a kind of hero in the 1940s. José Antonio responds with irony that all his fathers are heroes. Guillermo complicates that image rather than simply accepting it: he says that he has worked as a doctor for the Party since 1941 and saved the lives of many Communists, but insists that this was no more heroic than what another surgeon in his position might have done. He also helped move people out of the country through his work for a transport agency, though he stayed in an office and did not cross the border or face searches by police. In his account, the truck drivers were the real heroes, often without knowing what their vehicles carried. José Antonio points out the uneven risk: if a driver had been arrested, Guillermo would have gone to prison, while the drivers would not. Guillermo acknowledges the danger but says that it never happened.

A chosen way of belonging

José Antonio’s account of joining the Party is affectionate and self-mocking: in his telling, after hearing that Guillermo was a hero, he had little choice but to become a Communist. He knows this makes the decision sound frivolous, but explains that the news of his living father and the reason he had lost him made political neutrality impossible. He had never missed having a father until he learned that he had one, that Guillermo was alive, and why they had been separated.

His choice does not require him to reject his mother. José Antonio continues to love her and understands her, like himself, as a victim of Franco’s rule. Becoming a Communist seems to him the best way to preserve that love while acting as Guillermo’s son. He does not consider hating or being ashamed of Guillermo; indeed, he already likes the man he remembers from the days of Trafalgar. The revelation therefore produces not a clean break with one parent in favor of another, but an attempt to bring the two sides of a hidden family history into one life.

The commitment also involves sustained work, not merely an emotional declaration. José Antonio says that he had to read Marx’s Capital, take a course in Marxism, and study intensely. In his account, Communists were expected to be the best and first in their class. The party becomes both a political organization he must learn and a path toward a father whose clandestine existence has kept them apart.

Identity, inheritance, and the cost of concealment

The event joins the novel’s themes of false identity and political survival at the level of a family. José Antonio discovers that the name recorded on his identity papers may be false, while the father who could explain his origins has survived by living under another name. A birth certificate, a Republican family book, and a wedding photograph challenge the authorized version of the past; a wooden toy train preserves a relationship that the official story denies. The evidence is domestic and concrete, but it leads directly to the dangers of Republican memory under Francoist rule.

The revelation also recasts José Antonio’s mother’s silence. Her concealment has cost her son a truthful account of his parentage, yet Experta’s testimony presents it as a response to the threat of execution and the danger of being linked to Guillermo’s Republican life. José Antonio does not resolve that history by condemning her. Instead, his political commitment gives him a way to acknowledge both her vulnerability and his father’s cause. His entrance into the Party is thus at once a means of reaching Guillermo and an answer to the fractured inheritance that the documents expose.