Hesus Montson

Jesús Monzón is the clandestine political organizer who recruits the narrator into the Unión Nacional Española, persuading him to imagine opposition to Franco as a broad democratic undertaking rather than a matter of party loyalty. His influence rests not only on the program he describes but on the sincerity and composure with which he presents it; after Monzón disappears, the narrator is left with the memory of that conviction and a resistance effort whose ambitions have outrun its means.

Identity and Political Project

In July 1943, Pepe Moya takes the narrator to a chalet in Ciudad Lineal. The narrator expects a medical call, but there is no gravely ill patient. Instead, a large, bald, cheerful man who has offered him a beer begins asking about the political situation. Monzón argues that the course of the war has changed after Stalingrad and that an Allied victory over the Axis will determine Franco’s fate. The opposition, he says, should prepare in advance: democratic forces must form alliances, consider how to restore the Republic and liberties, and be ready to assume power.

The proposed coalition is deliberately expansive. Monzón says he is working toward unity among democrats ranging from Basque nationalists to CNT anarchists, as well as non-fascist elements in monarchist and conservative circles. Although he identifies himself as a communist, he insists that the country’s interests must take precedence over those of the party. The Unión Nacional Española, he explains, will operate clandestinely against the dictatorship until democratic forces can return to power. The political design is therefore both oppositional and coalitionist: it seeks to bring together groups with different traditions around the anticipated restoration of democratic government.

Recruitment and Personal Authority

Monzón invites the narrator to join the effort. The narrator is taken aback and asks what he could contribute, judging himself to be nobody. Monzón counters with the practical value of his medical work and his position at a transport agency. Through that job, the narrator encounters people across social lines, including the well-connected and those persecuted by the regime. Monzón needs additional eyes and ears: people able to interpret what is left unsaid, observe the street, and draw their own conclusions. He presents the narrator’s ordinary access to people and information as an asset to the organization.

The narrator accepts immediately, offering to help with whatever is required. Only after saying goodbye with an embrace does he learn that he has been recruited by Monzón, the secretary general of the Communist Party of Spain in France and in the interior. The revelation does not change his decision: he believes he would have agreed even if he had known in advance. Monzón’s persuasive force lies partly in how completely he makes the political cause seem larger than personal interest. The narrator is moved by the proposal, while recognizing in retrospect that he may also have been so ready to hear it because he had long wanted someone to speak of such a cause in his presence.

The Ciudad Lineal Meetings

The recruitment leads to a prolonged routine of clandestine meetings at the chalet. The narrator receives each appointment three or four days beforehand and arrives punctually at the appointed time; the door opens from inside with matching precision. No more than ten or twelve people attend. They do not exchange names, and none expects the narrator to give his. For about two hours, they offer and dispute different views in a cordial atmosphere that is not quite friendly, then leave one at a time, as carefully staggered as their arrivals.

The gatherings continue for more than a year, but the narrator cannot tell how many meetings take place or who attends them all. The invitations vary from meeting to meeting. At his first, Elena is the only woman present; later he encounters a small number of other women, some older and resembling civil servants or teachers, others young and visibly fervent in their political commitment. The shifting attendance and deliberate anonymity give the meetings a particular texture: the coalition Monzón describes is enacted as a changing circle, while secrecy limits what any one participant can know about the organization as a whole.

In February 1944, an especially striking visitor arrives and calls Monzón “Sito.” He rises to embrace and kiss her on both cheeks, greets her as Geni, and tells her there is no need to introduce herself. Her familiarity with him—and his warm response—stands out in a room where names are ordinarily withheld. She sits beside the narrator and asks him for a light. After the meeting they leave together, and she offers him a ride toward the city; they are nearly neighbors and cross paths again during 1944. The scene briefly opens the closed world of the meetings to a personal connection, though the narrator is not given an account of the visitor’s role in the organization.

The Aran Valley and Disappearance

By late September 1944, the owner of the chalet raises for the first time the possibility of moving troops across the Pyrenees to invade part of Spain. Twenty days later, the Unión Nacional’s army occupies the Aran Valley. The sequence gives concrete form to the political and military expectation circulating in the meetings: clandestine preparation is followed by an actual incursion into Spanish territory. Yet the occupation does not lead to the restoration of the Republic or liberties that Monzón had urged the coalition to prepare for.

The narrator never sees Monzón again. The abruptness matters: a figure who had made national political purpose feel immediate becomes inaccessible just as the organization’s project enters its most consequential and dangerous phase. Monzón’s disappearance leaves the narrator’s account suspended between the promise of democratic unity and the failed outcome of the incursion. His role in the story is therefore concentrated but decisive: he recruits the narrator, gives clandestine cooperation a national purpose, and then vanishes from the narrator’s life without resolving what became of the political project.