Guillermo García Medina and Rita Guillermina’s father-daughter relationship

Guillermo García Medina and Rita Guillermina’s father-daughter relationship grows within the family he builds with Rita Velázquez Martín, but it is shadowed by the son Guillermo lost to separation and secrecy. Their domestic life gives him a lasting experience of being present as a father, while the chess clock in their home preserves the unresolved history of the child he can only see from a distance.

A Family Built After Loss

After marrying Rita Velázquez Martín, Guillermo names their son Manuel, honoring the name shared by the parents’ best friends. The baby’s cries, smell, and small new gestures recall Guillermo’s first son, Guillermo García Priego, whose early development he had missed. At first, that resemblance revives his fear of losing another child: he watches Manuel pass six months, then seven and eight, and finally his first birthday. As Manuel grows and recognizes him, the old memory recedes into a gentler, increasingly faint nostalgia.

When Rita becomes pregnant again in the spring of 1952, Guillermo begins to think of Manuel as his eldest son, although he is not. The arrival of his first son’s mother at his office, pleading for help when the boy is fourteen and seriously ill, abruptly restores the distinction. Guillermo’s second family has not erased his first fatherhood; it has given him a daily life that the earlier one never had.

In April, Guillermo and Rita’s daughter is born. They name her Rita Guillermina, after briefly considering Andrea. Soon after the birth, they move from the Casa de las Flores, where their two-bedroom flat faced Caridad’s home, to a larger apartment on Calle Marqués de Urquijo. The new household has room for a family future, but its objects also carry the marks of Guillermo’s past.

Fatherhood Through Objects and Repeated Gestures

The grandfather’s chess clock is among the few valuable possessions left from the trunk Experta had filled in April 1939 with items salvaged from Commissioner Medina’s house. Guillermo gives it to José Antonio Urbieta, his first son, during a visit. They play three quick games, all of which Guillermo wins. He leaves with an embrace but no kiss, and falsely promises to visit again. At home, he picks up Manuel as he does each evening after returning from Calle Ayala, while Rita watches him closely. The contrast between the child he can hold every day and the son he has just left behind gives the gift its emotional weight.

In the new apartment, a second chess clock eventually takes the first one’s place. From 1955, an old cherrywood Junghans clock, resembling Guillermo’s grandfather’s, stands above the unused fireplace. It is a Christmas 1954 gift from the best client of La Meridiana; Guillermo never pays for it. Manuel tells visitors that the clock will be his when he grows up, but Guillermo does not let him take it to his room. The object remains in the shared living space, where the promise of inheritance meets the history it cannot explain.

Manuel never takes to chess. His sister, by contrast, becomes a very good player, especially at fast games. Guillermo promises that the clock will one day be hers too, yet keeps it on the mantel. That small decision makes the clock more than a family possession: it stands where Guillermo will keep encountering the story of the father he has been, and the father he has failed to be openly.

The Hidden First Family

For years, José Antonio grows up under an invented account of his parentage. His mother’s home displays a framed photograph of a young Falangist in a blue shirt and military belt, presented as the boy’s father, a hero who died in Russia. The picture is the only photograph on the piano and gives the false story a place of honor. Meanwhile, Guillermo watches his son arrive at the house over several afternoons, seeing him grow from a distance without stopping him.

The truth survives in documents rather than in the child’s everyday knowledge. In 1939, Guillermo had placed a family book naming himself and Amparo Priego Martínez, the birth record of their legitimate son Guillermo García Priego, their wedding photograph, and Amparo’s brief apology in a white envelope. Years later, José Antonio discovers concealed family papers while looking for money in his mother’s underwear drawer. He also finds a photograph of a note asking forgiveness and a photograph of his mother pregnant, holding flowers beside the doctor who has visited him during his illness and taught him chess.

José Antonio’s suspicion has developed through scraps of information. He has questioned Experta, who tells him that Guillermo is his father and that Guillermo is a leftist. He has also found his parents’ wedding photograph, with Experta smiling beside the groom. When he confronts his mother’s hidden past, these fragments make the identity of the doctor who cared for him newly legible: the man who taught him chess was not merely a familiar visitor, but his father.

The clock given to José Antonio therefore carries a history that he cannot yet fully know. It is the last truly valuable object Guillermo has kept from the trunk, and giving it away is a gesture of attachment as well as an acknowledgment of the distance between them. The later clock in Guillermo’s home repeats the shape of that gift without replacing its original meaning.

The Daughter and the Inheritance of Memory

The novel locates Rita Guillermina’s relationship with her father in the ordinary continuities of family life: her birth, the family’s move, her skill at chess, and Guillermo’s promise that the clock will someday be hers. She does not inherit the object immediately. It remains on the mantel, a visible but withheld legacy shared with the history that produced it.

The clock gathers the contradictions of Guillermo’s life. He is Guillermo García Medina, living as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez; a doctor only partly and secretly; a leftist who became rich through work connected with the Nazis; and a successful businessman who would have exchanged his office for a place in a simple public clinic. He says he had stopped hoping, yet would give anything to be able to hope again. In that context, the clock’s place in the family home makes private memory part of the household’s daily landscape. Rita’s talent at chess and her father’s promise connect her to the object, while the object keeps open the history of the other child whose fatherhood Guillermo could not publicly claim.</body_en