Nochevieja

Nochevieja, New Year’s Eve, becomes a sharply divided threshold in Rafael’s life: the day he commits his first murder is also the night he meets Rita for dinner and imagines that love, friendship, and his cause have survived. The sequence sets a private celebration against concealed violence, making the turn of the year an uneasy passage rather than a clean beginning.

A meeting arranged around a secret

Rafael cannot tell Rita that he intends to kill a man the following day. He tells her only that he is tired and that he needed to see her; the second statement is true, even as the first conceals the reason for his distress. When Rita asks whether he is coming because of the New Year’s Eve plans, she adds that he need not attend if he does not want to and says she has rebuked her mother for pressuring him.

Rafael reaches across the table and takes Rita’s hand. He says he is glad to dine with her and her mother, explaining that he spent Christmas Eve alone and went to bed at eleven because he has no family. He then asks Rita to spend the next evening with him in private. She points out that they could meet the day after, but he says he cannot: his company is holding a modest office party, with plenty of poor wine and little food, and he cannot miss it. The ordinary details of dinner plans and workplace obligations give the approaching murder a deceptively familiar frame.

The day of the killing

On the day he makes his debut as a killer, Rafael tells himself that Rita is waiting for him on the other side of the act. He imagines that, by the time he sees her again, he will have saved his love, his friend, and his cause, and that Rita would have understood him and been proud of him, though she would never know what he had done. His anticipated reunion becomes a private justification for the violence, joining the personal and political stakes in a thought he allows himself only briefly.

At seven in the evening he enters the Sociedad Europea de Comercio Exterior office. The previous day he had taken apart the Luger and returned it to its hiding place; now he reverses those steps. He retrieves the key from the fourth volume of Goethe’s complete works and takes the pistol, already fitted with its silencer, from a hollow above the desk’s right-hand drawer. From his briefcase he removes a clean shirt and rubber gloves, placing the shirt in a drawer and hiding the gloves with the weapon.

He also rearranges the room to control the meeting with Adrián Gallardo. The rectangular office has a main entrance and a small lavatory; a desk stands beneath the window, and a round table with four chairs occupies the center. Rafael puts two chairs in the lavatory, moves a third into a corner, and pushes the table toward it, leaving the one readily accessible chair with its back to the desk and facing the briefcase. The methodical staging turns a routine office into a prepared killing place.

The turn of the year after the murder

At ten to nine, Rafael looks over the office, retrieves the shirt he had left draining in the bathtub, rolls it into one coat pocket, and puts the gloves in the other. He takes his briefcase, switches off the light, and locks the door. Descending the stairs, he feels a bodily pressure like indigestion, with his insides tense and his knees difficult to bend. The cold outdoors eases the reaction but does not end it until he drops the damp shirt into a rubbish bin in Ópera Square.

When Rafael walks back along Arenal Street, the street seems more beautiful, the people kinder, and the women more attractive. He is dazed by what he has done and astonished that he was capable of doing it. He forces himself to put aside thoughts of guilt, promises himself that he has never killed anyone before and will never kill anyone again, and tries to think like a soldier, concentrating only on the people he loves. The brief transformation of his surroundings does not erase the killing; it registers the shock of returning to ordinary life immediately afterward.

At a quarter past nine, Rita is waiting at the bar of the seafood restaurant where Rafael and Rolf used to celebrate successful operations. She wears a fitted dress and heels and has painted her lips red. Rafael tells her she looks beautiful; when she kisses his cheeks, he finds that her presence restores peace to his spirit. He says he has been out walking while he waited, concealing how recently he left the office and how carefully he has disposed of the shirt and gloves. His question about sitting at the back carries them from the street into the private celebration he had proposed, while the reader knows what Rita does not.

Significance of the date

The New Year’s Eve meeting is not simply a respite after danger. Before the killing, Rafael imagines Rita’s approval as part of what he will save; afterward, her affection briefly steadies him as he tries to suppress guilt. The contrast makes intimacy both a genuine source of comfort and a screen behind which the truth remains hidden.

Elsewhere, the novel places the end of hope in another January threshold: the clandestine Spanish testimony later published as La fin de l’espoir recalls resistance and abandonment, while the framing discussion explains that its young protagonists had believed the Allied victory would bring down Franco. Against that larger historical disappointment, Rafael’s private New Year’s Eve offers no resolution. The year turns, but the killing and its secret accompany him into the life he is trying to preserve.