Tudela is a destination associated with family duty and an irretrievable separation: María Eugenia León travels there with Esteban while Fernando remains imprisoned, and Fernando’s father later seeks to bring his body there for burial. The planned family burial never takes place; Fernando is buried on Formentera, and María Eugenia never gets to lay flowers on his grave.

Family Destination and Separation

On 15 July, after returning from Paris, Esteban asked María Eugenia to accompany him to Tudela the next day because he wanted to see the children. His affectionate manner and his decision not to reproach her made the journey a tactful announcement that their affair was over. María Eugenia accepted, grateful for his restraint, but the trip placed her farther from Fernando: Alicante prison was already too distant for her to visit him, and by the time she returned to Madrid he had been transferred to a penal detachment on Formentera.

The Burial That Did Not Happen

Fernando died of pneumonia in the winter of 1941, aged thirty. Hunger, forced labor, and the insanitary conditions of the camp contributed to his death. His father asked for the body so that Fernando could be buried in the family mausoleum at Tudela. The authorities told him that Fernando had already been buried on the island. The intended family burial therefore remained unrealized, while María Eugenia, his lover, never had the chance to bring flowers to his grave.

Tudela in the Family’s Hidden History

Tudela also belongs to the novel’s longer history of concealed parentage. Years after the separation, Guillermo García Medina finds a hidden envelope among papers in a leather folder. It contains a family record in the names of Guillermo García Medina and Amparo Priego Martínez, their son’s birth certificate, and a photograph of their wedding. The documents recover a family history that had been kept out of sight, just as the requested burial at Tudela marks a family claim to Fernando’s body that the authorities deny.

The family’s account reaches the next generation through objects and guarded disclosures. José Antonio Urbieta learns from Experta that Guillermo is his father, that Guillermo buried his great-grandfather during the war, and that he had hidden Amparo; he also learns that his father was a leftist. In 1958, José Antonio discovers his birth certificate and a Republican family record among papers hidden by his mother, along with a photograph of her pregnant beside the doctor who had visited him when he was ill and taught him chess. Tudela’s family-mausoleum association thus sits within a narrative where documents, photographs, and burial repeatedly expose the difference between official identities and private kinship.

A Place Recalled Through Distance

The novel’s later reunion between Guillermo and Manuel Arroyo Benítez gives this pattern a different ending. At Barajas Airport on 30 December 1976, the two men embrace after years apart: both have aged, bear scars, and still use assumed names, though they call each other by their true ones. Their reunion cannot undo earlier losses, including Fernando’s unfulfilled burial at Tudela, but it makes kinship and loyalty visible through a gesture rather than through official records. Across these episodes, Tudela stands less as a narrated setting than as the family destination imagined for the dead—a place of belonging that the story repeatedly places beyond reach.