Zarauz is the coastal town where Aurora Sarmiento Gutiérrez, Guillermo García Medina’s elderly grandmother, went in the summer of 1936 and died in January 1937. Though Guillermo never returns there in the supplied episodes, news from the town makes it a decisive place in his memory: her death confirms that the family life he has lost cannot be recovered, even as the surviving objects from that life gather around him in Madrid.

Aurora’s Final Journey

In June 1936, Aurora traveled north to Zarauz as she approached her eighty-sixth birthday. Her health was already precarious. That winter she had suffered a cerebral seizure so severe that her doctors thought she would never speak again. She recovered speech, but often could not find the words she wanted and substituted others, leaving her sentences confused. Her body remained frail, and Guillermo feared she might not survive the journey.

A maid called the hospital the day after Aurora arrived to report that the women were all well. Because Aurora had forgotten to write, the telephone message became the means by which she reassured her grandson. The July coup then cut communication between the Republic and the rebel-held zone, ending Guillermo’s ability to hear from her.

News of Her Death

After moving into a room at 24 Calle Españoleto, Guillermo wrote to his great-aunt Mercedes, Aurora’s niece, to ask after his family. Mercedes replied from Valladolid in a letter dated 24 April 1939. She reported that Aurora had died in Zarauz in January 1937, and that Mercedes’s own sister had died in Valladolid two months later.

The letter carried more than news of a death. Mercedes asked where Guillermo was and acknowledged that the answer mattered to her claim on her aunt’s properties. She considered that he might be dead, imprisoned, in hiding, or otherwise unable to inherit because of his political beliefs. The family’s private loss was thus entangled with displacement, political danger, and the uncertain fate of its property.

A Place Held in Memory

By the time Guillermo read the letter, he had already wept for his grandmother, grandfather, parents, and family as a whole. In the room at Españoleto, he opened the trunks that Experta had brought him from the family home at 49 Calle Hermosilla. Familiar possessions—books, fountain pens, his grandfather’s watches, silver and porcelain—made the room feel temporarily inhabited by the home he had lost.

Other contents mattered to him beyond their market value: his worn chess set, childhood stories, medical books, family photographs and letters, and blankets and sheets that still smelled of his grandmother, his mother, and his childhood. Zarauz is not described as a place Guillermo knew firsthand; its importance comes through the letter that fixes Aurora’s last months and death there. The town becomes a point on the map of his separation from home, while the objects in Madrid give that separation a tangible, intimate form.