Guillermo García Medina’s chess set

Guillermo García Medina’s chess set is at once a family inheritance, a refuge for memory, and a means by which other people find their way back to him. Returned to him in exile from his former home, its worn board and pieces travel into his life as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez; the game first gives him a private friendship and later becomes the clue that reunites him with an old comrade and draws him toward the underground resistance.

The set among the recovered belongings

After Rafael Cuesta Sánchez learns that his distant relative Mercedes Fernández Sarmiento has written about the fate of the family estate, he opens the trunks that Experta has brought him. The return of the contents of Hermosilla 49 does not restore the home: the familiar objects occupy an alien space, and their presence makes absence newly tangible. Some belongings retain market value, but the chess set belongs to a more intimate inventory.

In one trunk lie the scratched board and pieces, dulled by use, that Guillermo received for his fifteenth birthday. They are packed alongside childhood stories, the medical manuals from his studies, letters, photographs and other traces of a life that the assumed identity of Rafael cannot simply erase. The train from his childhood toys releases his grief; the chess set, by contrast, becomes something he can use. He returns most of the family legacy to the trunks, keeping only a few things that will help the friendless, truthless Rafael begin again. The set survives not as a complete homecoming but as a portable fragment of the life he has lost.

A game that makes room for friendship

María Aránzazu discovers the chess clock in Rafael’s room after he leaves the door open. Her question about it opens a line of contact between two people whose companionship would otherwise be difficult to begin. When she tells him she knows how to play, Rafael buys a bottle of port and one of brandy before their first game. Their friendship develops through a repeated, modest arrangement: every afternoon they sit at a table with a single glass between them and a packet of cigarettes they share, alert to footsteps in the corridor that might signal an intruder.

The game is neither a performance of mastery nor a simple contest. María does not play as well as Manuel Arroyo Benítez, but she holds her own. Rafael sometimes lets her win, especially when she produces a more brilliant game than usual; at other times she earns genuine draws, which she celebrates as victories. Their play makes a discreet space for mutual attachment. As chess once had in the family home, it becomes more than recreation: here it serves as a pretext for a secret friendship beneficial to both, and María sometimes gives up asking for a rematch. The familiar board does not return Rafael to his old household, but it gives him a recurring practice through which a new life can begin.

The set as a path back to the past

The chessboard also makes Rafael locatable. At a chess club on Calle Bordadores, he has just drawn a game and is angry with himself for realizing, only after sacrificing a rook, that the move was an irreparable mistake. He accepts an unexpected challenge, although games at the club are normally arranged in advance. Before he sees his new opponent, he recognizes the other man’s youthful voice. The stranger is Pepe Moya, alive and looking well in civilian clothes after three months of searching for him.

Their reunion turns on the difference between the name Rafael is using and the person Pepe remembers. Rafael embraces him, then quietly tells him not to call him Guillermo: his name now is Rafa. Pepe indicates that he had already guessed the assumed name. They leave the club together, embrace again on Calle Arenal, and continue their conversation at a secluded table in a nearly empty café. The chess encounter thus opens a way back to an earlier life without cancelling the precautions that the new one requires. It is significant that Pepe has been looking for Rafael by remembering chess: the set and the game are not merely emblems of a past identity but practical means of finding him.

From recognition to obligation

Pepe’s reunion carries news of the danger surrounding Rafael’s profession. He says that the authorities are purging whole professions, including doctors, university teachers, railway workers, schoolteachers, judges and lawyers. Rafael’s concealment has worked so well that Pepe could not find him until he remembered the chess connection. Recognition brings relief, but it also brings a request: the underground needs a doctor for wounded guerrillas and for sick comrades who cannot safely go to a hospital, as well as help for prisoners’ families who have no money and nowhere else to turn.

Pepe reminds Rafael that he is alive because Rafael treated him, and argues that someone who is both a skilled doctor and officially nonexistent could be valuable to the movement. He does not disguise the risk or promise payment. A raid on a safe flat could find Rafael treating someone there. As Pepe describes the danger, Rafael begins to cry and denies it before going to the bathroom. The scene gives the chess set’s recurring function a sharper edge: the same game that offers companionship and enables recognition now connects Rafael to responsibilities that may expose him. It carries no guarantee of safety or restoration; instead, it links the life he remembers to the choices his hidden life still demands.