Manuel Arroyo Benitez and Gertrudis Benitez's parent-child relationship

The relationship between Manuel Arroyo Benítez and Gertrudis Benítez is a bond of duty without warmth: she feeds and cares for him, but rarely embraces or kisses him, and he grows up conscious of being less cherished than several siblings. Its final rupture comes after he has risen far beyond the future his mother imagined for him. When she asks him to find a position for a favored daughter, he agrees to help, then leaves without giving her the expected kiss. His parting words make their emotional ledger explicit: he attributes what he has become to her, including her failure to love him.

Family and Childhood

Manuel is born in Robles de Laciana, a small village in León, the sixth of eight children. His mother manages the household and garden and is often tired; his father is largely absent from family life, occupied with the cows. Until Manuel is seven, little attention is paid to the curious, alert boy. There are no boys his age in the village, and he is left to his own devices, solitary despite himself.

The difference between practical care and affection shapes his place in the family. Gertrudis does not beat him: she feeds him, clothes him, tends him when he is ill, and presents her face for the formal morning and evening kiss. Yet the gestures that would make care intimate are largely withheld. She seldom kisses him, never throws her arms around him when he comes home, and does not dance with him in the kitchen as she does with Juan and Toribio. Nor does she sit him on her knees to clean green beans or rock him with a song, the tenderness she gives Tula and Asunción.

Manuel therefore experiences himself as belonging to the other children, alongside Hermene, María, and Leocadia. The four siblings love, protect, and help one another. His position among the less-favored children is softened by his being the youngest and, within that group, the most indulged. This sibling solidarity offers a counterweight to his mother’s uneven attention, but it does not erase the distinction he sees between the children she chooses to lavish with affection and those she does not.

Separation and Education

Shortly after Manuel’s first communion, Gertrudis takes him to the priest, Don Marcos, and proposes that he stay with him. The prospect is practical: the son of Juana has turned fourteen and is going to work in the mine, and Gertrudis suggests that Manuel could serve Don Marcos and learn to help at Mass. In her description, he is bright enough to notice grass growing; the priest, she believes, could put that ability to use.

When Don Marcos asks Manuel what his parents think, the boy answers with restrained bitterness. He has seen his father only at Sunday Mass for nearly a month, and believes that his mother would accept almost anything if it meant getting him out of her sight. Don Marcos does not argue. Manuel is enrolled, just after turning ten, at Sierra Pambley College, where his education is free and meals are provided. Gertrudis does not object. His father learns that he has returned to sleep at home only after Manuel has spent almost two months commuting to school.

The arrangement makes the emotional distance concrete. Before dawn, Manuel walks with Hermene to the crossroads where the mine truck stops; after studying in the college library, he returns to Robles in the vehicle carrying the afternoon-shift miners. At home, he eats alone in the kitchen whatever María has managed to save for him, trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. He continues serving Don Marcos at Mass on Sundays, a link to the priest who arranged his education even as home becomes a place where he feels like an unwelcome guest.

Return and Reversal

Years later, Manuel returns to Robles with a changed appearance and a standing very different from that of the boy his mother had sent away. At the family funeral, his suit and the ease with which he wears his hat diminish the private satisfaction of Juan and Toribio, who have just been confirmed as their father’s sole heirs to the cows. The inheritance gives the brothers a local advantage, but Manuel’s visible success makes clear that he has traveled farther than the future represented by the family’s livestock.

Gertrudis cannot accept that reversal as evidence of her son’s own ability. She thinks instead that Madrid atheists have defeated her plans and cannot understand why educated benefactors chose to invest effort and money in frustrating the household order she had established. She never considers that Manuel may have been her most intelligent child, or that Juan and Toribio might have benefited from the same schooling. Her understanding of parental responsibility allows provision and obedience to stand in for fairness: parents must feed and care for children, while affection and indulgence remain optional.

The narrator locates this pattern in inherited deprivation rather than in an exceptional cruelty invented by Gertrudis. She too came from a large family and had suffered from being an unwanted girl; she had also been married to a man she did not love. In her view, the old arrangement is simply how families work: some children inherit, while others must put up with less. The history helps explain her conduct without undoing its injury. Manuel, who has known the cost of being one of the unchosen, recognizes both the hardness and the poverty from which it has grown.

The Final Encounter

As they walk toward the cemetery, Gertrudis does not celebrate Manuel’s prosperity or ask about the life that brought him there. She asks him to place Tula in the director’s household when Leo leaves her position to marry. When Manuel says nothing, she presses the request, insisting that it is not much to ask. Her appeal reproduces the family’s familiar pattern: even in the presence of the son who has escaped the future she selected for him, her attention turns to securing an opportunity for one of her favorites.

The request brings Manuel close to tears, but he does not cry. He thinks of cultivated women who speak French and play the piano, and of the affection they appear to distribute naturally among their children. He grieves for himself, for his mother, and for his siblings, while recognizing the way poverty and habit have hardened a mother who was herself denied tenderness. He clenches his teeth, as he had done when she first placed him with Don Marcos, and decides to leave Robles that afternoon and sleep at an inn in Villablino.

He tells Gertrudis that he will return with Leo and speak to the director about calling Tula when the position becomes vacant. He acknowledges the request as reasonable, then gives his mother a deliberately devastating answer: everything he has and everything he is, he owes to her—everything, because she did not love him. When she leans toward him for the customary kiss, he does not give it. This small refusal reverses the childhood ritual in which she offered her face and he supplied the expected sign of affection.

That is the last time Manuel sees Gertrudis. The following day he returns to Madrid, and two days later leaves for Geneva. He continues sending money to his siblings, but does not return to Spain until December 1936, travelling from London. The separation does not end his care for the family; instead, it distinguishes practical support from reconciliation with his mother. Their relationship closes not with an exchanged embrace, but with the withheld kiss and the departure that follows.