Nina

Nina, the surviving daughter of Manuel Roca, is introduced as a child concealed beneath the floor of a farmhouse and later known to the surrounding community as Donna Sol. Her life is shaped by successive acts of concealment: first a hiding place chosen to keep her from approaching visitors, then years spent unseen in another household, and finally a public identity that obscures the name she remembers as her own. The story’s decisive contrast is between the quiet, hidden child and the adult woman who can speak of what was taken from her, even as others have long believed she never spoke at all.

Identity and the First Hiding Place

Manuel Roca prepares Nina’s hiding place by moving baskets of fruit and lifting a concealed trapdoor. It opens onto a crude hole in the earth, an enclosure likened to an animal’s den. He tells her that people are about to arrive and that she must remain below, out of their sight, until they have gone. Nina answers that she understands, then stays where she has been told. The scene establishes concealment not as an abstract condition but as a physical arrangement: a child is placed beneath the ordinary contents of a room, hidden under baskets and a lid.

Later, Tito searches a disordered room while el Gurre fires a machine gun against the other walls, trying to find hidden doors. The room contains overturned chairs, trunks, tools, and baskets of partly rotten fruit. Seeing a carefully cut trapdoor in the floor, Tito moves aside more baskets, kneels, and opens it. Nina is crouched on her side, hands tucked between her thighs and head bent toward her knees; her eyes are open. Tito points his pistol at her and calls for Salinas. The discovery gives the earlier hiding instruction a later, stark consequence: the shelter that kept Nina out of sight also leaves her exposed when someone finally finds her. The passage records the discovery and Tito’s reaction, but does not establish here what he does next.

Survival and the Name Nina

In a later conversation, the woman tells her companion that her name was Nina when she was a child, but that everything ended on a particular day and no one called her by that name afterward. She also says that she liked the name. The distinction is more than a change of label: Nina remembers a self and a before, while the people around her have allowed that identity to disappear from ordinary use. Her statement does not explain every circumstance of the break, but it makes the loss explicit through the simplest evidence available—the name she once had and the fact that it was no longer spoken.

The exchange also places her adult voice against a long account of silence. After saying that she has now been found, she and the man sit quietly: he has nothing more to say, and she says nothing. Yet she does speak about her childhood name. The narration therefore holds two facts together without resolving them into a neat explanation: Nina can speak in this private conversation, while the story she recounts belongs to a life in which her name vanished and her speech became a subject of rumor. Silence is both a condition others attach to her and a pause that occurs between two people in the present.

Salinas, Uribe, and a Hidden Life

The narrative identifies Nina as Manuel Roca’s surviving daughter and explains that Ricardo Uribe concealed her. After being questioned about his wartime connections, Uribe presented himself for interrogation, explained himself, and was released. He then left for a small, secluded town in the southern countryside, bought a pharmacy, and resumed his trade. He lived alone with a young daughter called Dulce, saying that her mother had died years earlier; people believed him. The account then reveals the concealed truth: the child he was hiding was Nina, not the daughter he presented her as being.

This arrangement gives Nina a place in a household while keeping her actual identity out of view. Uribe’s story about Dulce provides the public explanation for the girl’s presence, while the account identifies Nina as Manuel Roca’s child. The deception is thus practical as well as personal: her survival is bound to a false family description and to a life in a remote town. The text does not describe the details of her day-to-day life there, but it makes clear that she remained hidden under Uribe’s protection and that this concealment precedes the identity later associated with Donna Sol.

Donna Sol and the Public Story

The later account says that everyone expected the Count of Torrelavid to make Nina disappear, and that he was told he ought to kill her. Instead, he kept her in his house, continued hiding her, and eventually married her. The marriage became local talk for months before people moved on. Nina grew up and had three children with the count, but people rarely saw her outside. He gave her the name Donna Sol, and that was the name by which the community knew her.

The public story about Donna Sol is marked by uncertainty and fear. People said she did not speak and had never spoken; no one had heard her utter a word since Uribe’s time. Some wondered whether this was an illness, while others treated it as simply her nature. The account does not confirm either explanation. Instead, the woman’s later conversation complicates the rumor: the supposedly speechless figure can tell a man that her childhood name was Nina and that she liked it. Her history consequently remains divided between what others say about Donna Sol and what she herself can still name. The hidden child, the unseen count’s wife, and the adult who recalls Nina are not separate lives so much as successive identities organized around other people’s efforts to conceal, rename, or explain her.