Partido Comunista de España

The Partido Comunista de España is both an organized force in the novel’s political landscape and a source of clandestine commitments that alter individual lives. Its history here is marked by contradiction: during the war it is part of a divided Republican coalition dependent on Soviet aid, while after the war its underground organizers seek alliances beyond the party itself. For Manuel Arroyo Benítez, the party becomes a cause he serves without formally joining; for Rita Guillermina Cuesta Velázquez, communist identity gives political purpose to grief and hatred, but does not settle how she understands love or personal loyalty.

Position in the wartime Republic

The party appears within a fractured Republican camp, where political groups disagreed even when they supported the same government and Madrid Defense Council. By the time Manuel arrives in Madrid, the disappearance of Andreu Nin has further inflamed the few POUM members in the capital, who have substantial backing among Madrid’s anarchists. The Socialists are more numerous but divided, while Socialists and Communists together are more numerous still. Their agreement on supporting the government in Valencia and the besieged city’s parallel defense council is described as one of the very few points they share.

The Republic’s reliance on the Soviet Union makes the Communist position especially consequential. In a conversation about the military crisis, the government leader acknowledges that Soviet advisers exercise great influence, yet says that expelling them would mean giving up the only source of the Republic’s aid. Without Soviet aircraft, tanks, and heavy weapons, he argues, continued resistance would amount to handing Spain to Franco. The exchange situates the party’s influence within a larger dilemma: a political alliance could be resented or feared, but breaking with it threatened the Republic’s ability to fight at all.

Monzón’s underground alliance

In July 1943, Pepe Moya brings Manuel to a house in Ciudad Lineal, where Jesús Monzón presents a different kind of Communist initiative. Monzón says that the course of the war has changed after Stalingrad and argues that Franco’s position will be vulnerable once the Allies defeat the Axis. Rather than waiting passively for that moment, he wants democratic forces to prepare for the restoration of the Republic and civil liberties.

His proposed Unión Nacional Española is deliberately broader than the party. Monzón describes a clandestine coalition that would include Basque nationalists, anarchists from the CNT, and non-fascist monarchist and conservative circles. He tells Manuel that the country’s interests must come before the interests of the party. This is not merely a rhetorical appeal: Monzón asks Manuel to join because his job at a transport agency brings him into contact with people across social positions, including those close to the regime and those being persecuted. He needs observers who can read what is left unsaid and draw conclusions from life on the street.

Manuel accepts immediately, moved by Monzón’s appeal and by the idea that national interests outrank his personal ones. He does not yet know that Monzón is the secretary general of the Partido Comunista de España in France and inside Spain; the disclosure gives the recruitment a specific organizational meaning without changing Manuel’s decision. He later recalls that knowing the truth would not have made him act differently.

The recruitment leads to a sustained routine of secret meetings. Manuel returns to the Ciudad Lineal house many times, usually at dusk and after receiving an appointment several days in advance. Around ten or twelve people gather; they neither exchange names nor expect to hear his. They talk for a couple of hours, air and dispute different views in a cordial but not intimate atmosphere, then leave one by one at staggered intervals. The meetings continue for more than a year, but Manuel does not know how many are held or who attends them all. The changing guest list makes the organization legible through procedure and trust rather than through a complete roster.

Membership, identity, and intimate commitment

The novel distinguishes between service to a Communist-led clandestine project and formal party membership. Manuel works for Monzón’s coalition and gives it his attention and judgment, but his later relationship with Rita does not lead to his joining the party. Rita refuses to let him affiliate simply to please her. She considers the matter too serious for a romantic gesture and says that Manuel is too important to the people around her as a doctor: if he joined for her and later left, she and her comrades would have lost both his commitment and his medical help. Her refusal makes care for the network a reason to restrain, rather than demand, a lover’s political declaration.

Rita’s own communism is rooted in a different personal history. She explains that hatred of those responsible for preventing her family from taking her father home to die there gives her strength rather than embittering her. She says she would not kill out of revenge, but would use lethal force if necessary to save herself or someone she loved. Political action, in her account, keeps hatred from paralyzing her or turning her into a bad person; she identifies this need to act as part of why she is a Communist.

Her account also complicates the boundary between political identity and private desire. Rita had decided that she could marry only a Communist and had tried to fall in love with party comrades, but none of those relationships came to anything. She describes a friend, Manolita, who risks herself to live near a Communist prisoner at Cuelgamuros, while Rita’s own attempts at a politically matching romance have failed. With Manuel, who is not a party member, she wonders whether attraction to him connects with the class into which she was born and with his resemblance to her father. The relationship therefore does not erase her political commitments; it makes their limits and contradictions personally visible.

Repression and the costs of resistance

The party’s work takes place against a history of coercion and political division. During the war, the disappearance of Andreu Nin sharpens tensions among the Republican factions. The novel also shows how allegations about Communist influence and Soviet control enter wider political arguments, while the underlying military dependence on Soviet assistance remains difficult to escape. The organization’s importance cannot be separated from the contested coalitions and pressures surrounding it.

Rita’s family has its own exposure to political danger. Her mother warns her not to risk arrest and a beating while pregnant, and insists that Rita keep the pregnancy from her brother. That brother, Germán Velázquez Martín, lives in Switzerland; although he had no blood crimes and served only briefly in a wartime battalion, returning to Spain would mean military service and the loss of his ability to leave again. The family’s caution reveals the reach of political repression beyond party meetings: even a sibling’s visit or a woman’s activism can carry consequences for a family’s safety and freedom of movement.

The broader postwar setting gives such caution an international dimension. Manuel later argues that Western powers’ public prosecution of war criminals at Nuremberg coexists with rumors that some Nazis are being recruited for anti-Soviet work. In his view, that contradiction weakens any expectation that democratic powers will act decisively against Franco, who presents himself as an anti-Communist ally in the emerging Cold War. The novel thus places Communist resistance within a world where anti-Communism can override democratic solidarity, limiting the prospects on which underground activists might otherwise rely.

Narrative significance

The Partido Comunista de España is not portrayed only as an institution or a label. Its presence is conveyed through clandestine routines, arguments over the national interest, the discipline of remaining unnamed, and the moral choices of people who may support Communist work without becoming members. Monzón’s coalition proposal imagines unity across political divisions; the meetings enact that ambition in a guarded, provisional form, where disagreement is possible but personal identities remain concealed.

The party also gives political action a human scale. Manuel’s usefulness comes from his ordinary position in a transport agency and his medical work, rather than from a public title. Rita’s commitment arises from grief and an effort to keep hatred from governing her, while her refusal to recruit Manuel for romantic reasons shows that a movement’s needs can require restraint as well as loyalty. Across wartime factional conflict, postwar conspiracy, family danger, and intimate attachment, the organization stands at the intersection of collective resistance and private life. The novel’s emphasis is less on formal membership than on the difficult question of what it means to serve a cause under conditions where alliances are fragile and political choices can endanger those one loves.