Spain - La Eliana - Portrait of Vicente Martinez Gil, 47. In December 2010, Vicente Martinez Gil received a phone call that changed his life forever. His mother was in tears. “‘She told me we had to talk about something very important, so I rushed to my parents’ house”, he recounts. “She sat me on the sofa and told me I had been adopted. I was 38, and all my life up until then had been a lie”. Martinez Gil grew up being the only child of a well-off, elderly...
more »Spain - La Eliana - Portrait of Vicente Martinez Gil, 47. In December 2010, Vicente Martinez Gil received a phone call that changed his life forever. His mother was in tears. “‘She told me we had to talk about something very important, so I rushed to my parents’ house”, he recounts. “She sat me on the sofa and told me I had been adopted. I was 38, and all my life up until then had been a lie”. Martinez Gil grew up being the only child of a well-off, elderly couple. His father owned a small smelting company, and the boy was looked after and cared by the rest of the family. He didn’t know his parents were unable to have kids and - a few months before his birth - had approached a priest known for facilitating adoptions. According to Martinez Gil’s recount, at 5 am on the 14th of March 1972 his adoptive parents received a phone call: the child they had been waiting for was just born and they had to quickly go and collect him. The couple was given a newborn wrapped in a bedsheet in exchange for 200,000 pesetas, the price of a car at the time. The following morning, Martinez Gil was inscribed at the civil registry as the biological child of his adoptive parents. Martinez Gil’s wife was the first one to raise suspicions. “She used to tell me that something wasn’t right in the relationship between my parents and me. To her, it was too cold and detached”, he recounts. Rather than raise Martinez Gil’s alarm, it became the couple’s joke - up until 2010 when, aroused by several cases of stolen kids who had emerged in the media, the man finally went to look for his birth certificate. To his surprise, the birth time and the name of the clinic where he was born didn’t match what his parents had always told him. Pressed by their son for several days, they finally caved in and confessed.
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