False Identities and Forged Identity Documents

False Identities and Forged Identity Documents are not merely disguises in the novel: they are administrative tools that can grant a person room to move, conceal a political mission, or erase the evidence of violence. The forged identity of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez begins as a cover for Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s dangerous investigation in wartime Madrid, then becomes a means of survival for Guillermo García Medina. Across these episodes, documents and names determine what the authorities can recognize—and what they can make disappear.

A fabricated identity for a dangerous assignment

On June 28, 1937, Manuel registered at a Madrid hotel with documentation issued through the Republic’s Directorate-General of Security. The papers looked impeccable because they came from a government office, but identified him as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior. They gave this invented man a precise biography: born in Talavera de la Reina on January 12, 1904, a member of the UGT since 1929, married, and resident in Valencia. None of those particulars was true. The specificity was part of the protection: the fiction took the form of a life that could be entered into official records.

The false papers supported work that could not safely be done under Manuel’s own name. After the Barcelona May Days, the new government of Juan Negrín was trying to impose order in the Republican rear and determine whether similar internal conflict might break out again. Negrín asked Manuel to return from London, join the Public Order Council under an assumed identity, and report on uncontrolled brigades, unofficial repression, and the Military Intelligence Service’s relationship with Soviet secret police. Rafael Cuesta’s official appointment as an auxiliary government delegate provided an uncertain but usable cover; Manuel took up an office in the Council’s Public Order Department on July 1.

The disguise was made with his appearance as well as his paperwork. A month before returning, Manuel grew the beard whose shadow had troubled him since adolescence. It made him look six years older, closer to the invented Rafael’s age. He also ordered round, neutral-lensed glasses in London. Rather than hide the small scar from a 1934 car accident or the long bald mark across his right eyebrow, he rejected frames that would cover them. The resulting identity was not a perfect visual erasure: it was a deliberately assembled likeness, supported by papers that supplied the biography his face could not.

Making a person administratively invisible

The danger attached to an assumed name becomes plain when Rafael is found near death. A military commander discovers the Public Order Council credential in his wallet and contacts the police. Basilio Rodríguez gives instructions without explanation: if Rafael is dead, he must be buried as an unknown person and left out of every register; if he is alive, he must be kept alive without being admitted to a hospital under his own name, because someone may try to kill him again. The credential therefore identifies the wounded man to the people who need to protect him, while the instructions forbid that identity from entering the ordinary public record.

At the hospital, the narrator and Pepe make that concealment practical. They compare the wounded man with the bodies of three soldiers and select the one whose age, height, and build most closely resemble his. From that soldier’s pinned-on paper they copy the name Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez and retain both the note and its details. The substitution is not a new biography developed for its own sake; it is a way to keep the living man from being registered under a name that would expose him to another attempt on his life. Rodríguez’s earlier instruction and the hospital’s improvised procedure make clear how identity can become a matter of who is recorded, under which name, and by whom.

The arrangement has a second, delayed consequence. Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez is reported dead on January 17, 1938, although the hospital does not learn of the death until the following day. A few days later, the government presidency receives a coded letter whose strange return address names the Hospital of San Carlos blood-transfusion service and the Sierra Pambley Foundation. In the narrator’s account, the false name dies again with the man whose identity had been borrowed, while the coded communication carries information onward without making the real person readily legible. A name can thus serve as a shield, a record, and a disposable endpoint.

Passing the cover to Guillermo

After Manuel and Guillermo have both faced the defeat of the Republic, Manuel gives Guillermo a sealed envelope containing the identity of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez. He explains that the identity had been invented from beginning to end for his own mission and that Negrín had arranged matters so it could never be checked. Manuel now offers it to Guillermo. The biography is changed to fit its new user: this Rafael is twenty-five, unmarried, has never belonged to a left-wing party or union, has always lived in Madrid, and most recently resided in Salamanca. His supposed parents are dead, and the parish records that might otherwise confirm his origins are said to have burned in a bombing.

The papers are manufactured to withstand routine scrutiny. Manuel says he destroyed the original UGT record himself, borrowed a form that would not be missed, used matching paper, imitated a real official’s signature, and applied a seal copied from those used in Burgos. The document is not simply a name written on a blank page: it is built to resemble the administrative evidence that makes a name credible. Manuel instructs Guillermo to add his photograph and avoid trouble; when the documentation is exchanged for definitive papers, choosing a crowded day is supposed to reduce the risk of questions. He also gives Guillermo Swiss francs and British pounds, half his savings, because the new identity must support a life, not just pass an inspection.

The identity consequently changes hands without remaining identical. Manuel’s Rafael had been an older, married UGT member from Valencia; Guillermo’s Rafael is younger, single, politically uncommitted on paper, and attached to Madrid and Salamanca. What passes between them is the usable framework and forged credential, not a fixed personal history. Manuel’s act turns a cover created for Republican intelligence work into protection for a defeated Republican trying to survive in the victorious Francoist state.

The papers’ material vulnerability is visible when Guillermo returns to his looted home. The gold has been taken, his family documents are scattered across the floor, and the strongbox has been removed after the wall of his grandfather’s study was smashed. Yet the envelope Manuel gave him remains inside a locked desk drawer, intact. Guillermo opens it to check its contents, then locks it away again. In a house where official and familial records have been exposed to theft and destruction, the forged identity is preserved as a small, concealed reserve of possible life.

Identity, state violence, and testimony

The novel sets this personal use of forged papers beside states’ more coercive power to classify and erase people. In its account of the Argentine dictatorship, the state’s clandestine system divides repression among task groups responsible for abductions, secret detention, torture, executions, the disappearance of bodies, and the removal and reassignment of children born to detained women. The theft of a child’s identity is presented as one function within the machinery of state terror: violence acts not only on bodies but on records, kinship, and the possibility of establishing who someone is.

In the same historical account, a fictitious medical explanation helps turn an unidentified corpse into an administratively unremarkable death. At La Almudena Cemetery, the body is assigned to a common grave with other undocumented dead described as having suffered cardiac arrest, while the gunshot wound is plainly visible to the gravediggers. The scene makes the official record’s falsehood legible without granting the dead person a name. In the earlier hospital episode, an assumed identity helps keep a living target alive; here, a routine death certificate and burial process help conceal the circumstances of a killing. The contrast shows that administrative invisibility can be used for protection or imposed as part of repression.

The novel also examines identity through the making and circulation of testimony. Its account of La fin de l’espoir describes a manuscript written in French by Marcelo Saporta, who escaped clandestinely to France with it in 1948. Jean-Paul Sartre changed its title, and the book was published in Paris in 1950 under the pseudonym Juan Hermanos rather than Saporta’s own name, so that the experience might represent Spanish resistance collectively. Its prefatory note stresses the danger faced by the writer, typist, and courier, and insists that the book is testimony rather than autobiography or propaganda. The work’s identity is therefore deliberately layered: an individual author, a pseudonym, a collective claim, and a text that travels across borders under conditions of risk.

That layering extends to language. The novel points out that the Spanish passage presented to readers of the French journal Les Temps Modernes is not an original Spanish text translated into French and then back into Spanish, as its readers might assume. Its gallicisms reveal that the Spanish version is itself translated from the French publication. This reversal unsettles the apparent direction of transmission and makes the document’s route part of its meaning. Across forged credentials, pseudonymous testimony, and manipulated records, the novel treats identity as something produced and recognized through paper, language, and institutions—not as something those systems can reliably establish.