Las cicatrices duelen con los cambios de tiempo

“Las cicatrices duelen con los cambios de tiempo” is a recurring expression that links physical scars to the return of buried pain. It appears at the threshold of a January 1977 Madrid reunion between Manuel Arroyo Benítez and Guillermo García Medina, giving the men’s bodily injuries and their long, unresolved history a single image: what has healed on the surface can still hurt when circumstances change.

The Expression and Its Return

The phrase appears as a standalone line immediately before the heading “MADRID, 12 DE ENERO DE 1977.” Its placement makes it a hinge between the preceding narrative and the reunion scene, rather than ordinary dialogue. The image prepares the reader to encounter the past not as something finished, but as a wound that can become painful again.

The scene that follows reaches back to 30 December 1976, when the two men first embraced at the international arrivals gate at Barajas Airport. By January, when Guillermo sees Manuel at the Café Lion, they have exchanged many more embraces than explanations. The phrase’s metaphor is therefore grounded in a reunion whose emotional weight precedes what either man is ready to say.

Bodies Bearing the Past

At Barajas, their changed bodies register the years between them. Guillermo’s hair has turned grey and he has grown heavier; Manuel’s hair is completely white and he has become the thinner of the two. Guillermo is about to turn sixty-two, while Manuel has already turned sixty-six. Manuel’s body is covered in scars, and the hands that once stitched him belong to Guillermo, their history of mutual rescue carried in the contrast between injured skin and healing hands.

Neither man uses his true name, although each calls the other by the name that is authentic between them. Their identities remain shaped by the disguises that helped them survive, even as their recognition of each other survives those disguises. The scars thus work alongside the names: both preserve traces of a past that cannot simply be discarded.

Reunion, Defeat, and Recognition

The embrace briefly restores a sense of the men they had once been. They know they have shared a long failure and remember reaching the bottom of defeat together; nevertheless, for an instant they feel strong, young, and powerful again. That reversal does not erase their losses. It shows instead how recognition can momentarily bring an old bond back to life, even after hope has failed them.

Manuel’s first words after the embrace are that they have to talk. When he later says he has no choice but to return and that everything seems the same everywhere, the reunion carries the weight of history repeating itself rather than offering a clean escape from it. In this setting, the changing weather of the expression is figurative: time and circumstance bring the old pain back into the present.

Memory Across Exile and Family

The image resonates beyond the two men’s reunion. Guillermo’s earlier life as an impostor begins with a night of guilt and fear, followed by the repeated ritual of hiding a crucifix beneath his bed and walking across the city each morning. The Castellana becomes, in his perception, a boundary between the life of Guillermo García Medina and that of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez. Physical displacement and assumed identity provide a way to continue living, but do not remove the past.

Family objects also preserve memories that years of silence have not extinguished. Guillermo finds his old medical degree, a union card, a photograph with Norman Bethune, and the Republican family documents concerning Amparo Priego Martínez and their son, Guillermo García Priego. Much later, the son discovers documents and photographs hidden by his mother and learns from Experta that Guillermo is his father. These discoveries show how the past returns not only through the body, but through objects and delayed disclosures that alter family relationships.

The expression’s force lies in that double meaning. Scars are evidence of injuries endured; they are also a pattern for the book’s recurrence of grief, separation, and defeat. When Manuel and Guillermo meet again, the old wounds have not vanished, but the embrace briefly makes their shared survival visible alongside them.