Francoist Forces Take Control of Madrid

Francoist Forces Take Control of Madrid marks the defeat of the Republican city as a change in who commands its institutions, who can move through its streets, and which identities can pass as legitimate. The transition reaches Guillermo first through his hospital and then through his neighborhood: he leaves work under orders, encounters a city remade by flags and fleeing families, and recognizes the loss of the war in the apparent recovery of a stolen bag. In the aftermath, the identity papers that once protected him become a means of negotiating the victorious regime’s bureaucracy.

The hospital changes hands

By the final days of the war, Guillermo is working in a Madrid hospital under the direction of Fortunato Quintanilla. When Quintanilla calls him aside, he chooses the bathroom rather than his office as a place to speak privately. A committee led by Francisco Arrieta has arrived without warning, announced that it is taking possession of the hospital in the name of the National Army, and prevented Quintanilla from collecting his belongings. Its members wear blue shirts beneath their medical coats; Arrieta has a pistol at his belt. The occupation is not an abstract change in authority: it enters the hospital through a forceful takeover by men already inside the institution.

The episode’s food supply gives another measure of the shift. After Colonel Casado’s coup, Francoist forces begin dropping bread into the city nearly every day. Earlier drops had brought hard black military bread; beginning on 7 March 1939, the planes deliver soft, crisp rolls made from white flour. Such flour had been unobtainable even to Experta, despite her attempt to buy it with silver cutlery. The rolls arrive while Guillermo’s young son has had a mild fever for three days and Amparo is suffering from bronchitis. Guillermo has been reluctant to wean the child because there is no other food for him, and he mentions the child’s condition to Arrieta, a fellow graduate and one of the hospital’s best pediatricians. The new power thus presents itself at once as the force besieging the city and as the source of food falling from the sky.

Dismissal and departure

Quintanilla tells Guillermo to go home and stay there until events become clearer. He argues that the hospital’s uncommitted doctors and nurses can manage for a few days, and that the other staff should leave as he is leaving. He makes the instruction an order, removes his own coat, and tells Guillermo to take off his white coat as well. Guillermo is not allowed to stop at his desk for his belongings or even to retrieve his overcoat. The transfer of authority has turned a doctor into someone who must leave his workplace without his own things.

The two men exit by the ambulance entrance into a city that feels different from the one they had entered that morning. Monarchist flags have appeared on balconies, including some that displayed the Republican tricolor only months earlier. The pavements are almost empty, and the few people walking hurry alone with their eyes lowered. Quintanilla and Guillermo embrace, each moved by the possibility that this may be their last farewell. They exchange the same brief wish for good luck and thanks, then set off in opposite directions: Quintanilla toward Legazpi, Guillermo toward Cibeles, from which he will take Alcalá and walk beside El Retiro toward Velázquez Street.

The defeated city in the streets

At the corner near Velázquez, Madrid changes again. In Guillermo’s neighborhood, Francoist supporters have gathered on balconies and pavements, raising their right arms in noisy celebration. Against them move the dark outlines of refugee families, people who had occupied vacant flats in the district in the summer of 1936 and are now leaving with everything they own, apparently bound nowhere in particular. Guillermo tries to make his way home by avoiding the celebrants and sheltering behind the departing families, keeping close to the building fronts. Some people shout “Arriba España!” at him, though they have not yet reproached him for refusing to answer.

At the corner of Hermosilla and Núñez de Balboa, he stops hurrying. First he recognizes a familiar object: a travel bag of softened, worn, tan leather. A man is putting it into the back seat of a car. Only afterward does Guillermo recognize the man, who gives him a smile before joining the booty. Guillermo tries to see who is in the passenger seat beside the driver, but the car has already disappeared. Before his enemies have officially proclaimed victory, he understands that he has lost the war. The bag makes the political defeat intimate and material: the scene does not identify its passenger or explain the bag’s theft, but it shows Guillermo seeing an object he knows in the possession of someone departing with the spoils.

The home as a record of occupation

When Guillermo reaches home, Amparo has already left, and the house is not in order. Clothes lie in a heap behind the door; objects cover the available surfaces in the sitting room, as though the cupboards have been emptied and their contents examined before someone chose what to take. In the study, the wall around his grandfather’s safe has been smashed with a mallet. A blowtorch has failed to remove the lock, leaving the smell of burned paint; a locksmith has apparently opened the safe afterward. The gold belonging to Don Fermín is gone. Family documents—including copies of his grandparents’ wills and the deed to the house—have been left scattered on the floor, trampled by dark shoeprints.

The damage is hurried and selective: the safe is taken apart, the gold removed, and the papers abandoned. Guillermo experiences the footprints on the documents as an unnecessary insult, but there is no time to dwell on it. The invasion of the home extends the hospital’s transfer of power into private space, where property can be seized and a family’s documentary past treated as refuse.

Papers under the new regime

The changed authorities also make identity papers a condition of movement and survival. Before the takeover, Manuel Arroyo Benítez had been sent to Madrid by Juan Negrín and entered under the invented identity of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, a civil servant supposedly born in Talavera de la Reina in 1904, affiliated with the UGT, married, and living in Valencia. None of those details was true. Later, Manuel gives Guillermo a sealed envelope containing a version of the same identity for him to use. He explains that Guillermo will be presented as a twenty-five-year-old unmarried man who has never joined a left-wing party or union, has lived in Madrid, and most recently resided in Salamanca. The fictitious Rafael had been older, married, and affiliated with the UGT; Guillermo’s version removes those politically dangerous details. Manuel says he destroyed the UGT file and prepared the document to resemble one issued by the Nationalist authorities, including a copied Burgos seal. He advises Guillermo to avoid trouble and collect permanent papers amid a crowd.

Months later, Guillermo goes to exchange the document. At the police station, the guard’s manner changes when he sees it and directs him to window seven, the counter for papers from the National zone. Guillermo waits among Madrileños who had defended the city through nearly three years of hunger, bombing, and despair. From his position in the line, he sees them as his equals and companions, even as the new administrative process sorts him into a different category. He presents Rafael Cuesta Sánchez’s identity to an inattentive clerk, who fills out a form with his details. The earlier forged identity has carried him through the defeat; now the bureaucracy of the victorious side offers a route to different documents.

A victory built through institutions and intermediaries

The action’s progression links occupation to administrative power. The hospital committee claims an institution in the name of the National Army; the streets display monarchist allegiance and force refugees into flight; the police counter classifies applicants according to their papers. Yet the same systems that make people legible also create openings for deception. Manuel’s forged document is tailored to the expected categories of the regime, and Guillermo uses it to approach the counter where National-zone papers are exchanged. Identity here is not only a private claim: it is produced and tested through records, seals, registration, and the attention—or inattention—of officials.

The episode also places spectacular victory beside its quieter aftermath. The rolls dropped into a hungry city, the removal of hospital staff, the looted safe, the fleeing families, and the crowded document office are different faces of the same transfer of control. Guillermo’s recognition of the bag fixes the defeat in a single encounter, but the continuing work of survival unfolds through ordinary procedures: finding food, leaving a workplace, securing a home, and presenting papers that can be accepted by the authorities who now govern Madrid.