Organización de las Naciones Unidas

Organización de las Naciones Unidas matters in the novel less as a distant institution than as the object of a desperate political wager. Spanish Republicans look to it for pressure on Franco and, at moments, for decisive intervention; its actual limits leave them confronting the distance between international condemnation and rescue.

Hopes for Intervention

During the Spanish Civil War, the Republican government’s dependence on Soviet military aid constrains its freedom to act. A speaker close to the government describes Soviet influence and clandestine detention as part of a fractured political landscape, while explaining that expelling Soviet advisers would mean giving up the only available source of aircraft, tanks, and heavy weapons. Without that assistance, he argues, Spain would effectively be handed to Franco. The passage establishes the predicament behind later appeals to international institutions: opposition to Franco exists, but opposition alone cannot supply the arms or intervention the Republic needs.

After the war, Manuel Arroyo expects the United Nations General Assembly to approve a resolution condemning Franco without imposing a harsher economic blockade, making a military threat, or authorizing an Allied invasion. Pablo de Azcárate and Juan Negrín agree that such a limited outcome is likely. The distinction is crucial: international disapproval may deny Franco full acceptance, but it does not amount to a plan to remove him from power.

A Reversal of the War’s Meaning

In conversation with Azcárate and Negrín, Manuel connects the anticipated restraint to the changing public account of the Second World War. The Soviet Union, once an ally, is no longer being openly credited with its part in defeating Hitler; the narrative instead gives greater prominence to the Normandy landings and less to the Eastern Front. Manuel fears that schoolchildren may soon be taught that the Americans took Berlin. This revision favors Franco, who can present himself as a champion of anticommunism just as that cause becomes more important to Western governments.

Manuel also describes the contradiction he sees in Allied policy. War-crimes defendants are publicly tried at Nuremberg, yet rumors circulate that some Allied commanders are recruiting Nazis as anti-Soviet agents in Germany and Eastern Europe. If former Nazis are useful rather than obstructive to the emerging Western strategy, he reasons, Franco’s dictatorship may be tolerated for the same reason. The scene sets formal judgment beside practical accommodation: condemnation remains visible, while the political calculations that might give it force are changing.

The Failed Uprising

The prospect of decisive United Nations action shapes a planned student assault on the Palace of Communications near Cibeles. Ramón Mateos, an engineering student whom Manuel meets through a contact in Madrid, is among the young men prepared to take the building by force if the organization intervenes decisively for Spanish democrats. Ramón’s family circumstances sharpen the cost of the plan: his father is dead, one brother died at Brunete, another is serving a penal sentence, and his sister works cleaning houses so he can continue studying. A scholarship from Franco, secured in part through a relative who served as a military chaplain for the victorious army, weighs on him even as he joins the opposition.

The hoped-for international intervention does not arrive in the form on which the students have staked their action. When Manuel finds the young men on the Paseo de Recoletos, their plan to seize the communications palace has collapsed with the news. He feels relief that he need not deliver the news himself and, at the same time, the pain of seeing their hopes broken. The failed plan makes the institution’s limits immediate: an anticipated decision abroad has helped mobilize students in Madrid, but it cannot turn their readiness into a successful uprising.

International Authority and Its Limits

The novel’s treatment of the organization links two moments of political disappointment. During the Civil War, Republican leaders fear that breaking with the Soviet Union would leave them without the weapons needed to resist Franco. In the postwar period, Manuel doubts that international censure will become military action, while the changing priorities of the Cold War make Franco’s anticommunism newly useful to Western powers. In Madrid, students act in expectation of a decisive intervention that never comes. Across these scenes, the institution remains a focus of hope and a forum for judgment, but neither condemnation nor expectation is equivalent to protection.