Francoist forces enter Madrid in March 1939, ending the Republic’s control of the city and turning a military defeat into a struggle over homes, records, and identities. As the hospital is seized and the streets fill with jubilant supporters of the victors and departing refugees, Guillermo García Medina understands that the new order will not merely replace one government with another: it will decide who can remain, who must run, and under what name anyone can hope to survive.

The hospital changes hands

On the morning of the takeover, Guillermo is still making his rounds when Dr. Quintanilla summons him aside. Their conversation takes place in a first-floor bathroom rather than the doctor’s office. Quintanilla has no office left: half an hour earlier, a committee led by Francisco Arrieta had entered the hospital without knocking and announced that it was taking possession in the name of the National Army. Its members wore blue shirts under their white coats; Arrieta had a pistol at his belt. The abrupt seizure puts the new authority inside the very institution where Guillermo had been working, and makes clear that the change of regime is already being enforced at close quarters.

Quintanilla admits that he had not known there were so many supporters of the victors inside the hospital. His loss of the post is thus not simply a matter of a formal transfer of authority. The committee’s arrival reveals how suddenly familiar institutions can be occupied and how little warning even their staff may have. Guillermo and his former chief part in different directions: Quintanilla heads towards Legazpi, while Guillermo walks towards Cibeles and then takes Alcalá, skirting Retiro Park on his way to Velázquez Street.

A city divided between celebration and flight

The streets present two competing scenes. Francoist supporters crowd balconies and pavements, raising their right arms in noisy celebration. Refugee families, many of whom had occupied empty apartments in the district since the summer of 1936, move away carrying all they own. Guillermo threads between the cheering crowds and tries to advance close to the building fronts, using the departing refugees as cover. The victors shout their salute at him, but have not yet begun to challenge him for failing to answer. In this brief interval, the danger is palpable precisely because it has not fully declared itself.

At the corner of Hermosilla and Núñez de Balboa, Guillermo recognizes a worn, tawny leather travel bag being placed in the back of a car. Only after recognizing the bag does he identify the man carrying it. The man smiles at him before rejoining what he has taken; by the time Guillermo can see who is sitting in the passenger seat, the car has disappeared. He cannot establish the passenger’s identity, but the sight is enough to make the military outcome intimate and irreversible. Before the victors have officially proclaimed their triumph, Guillermo feels that he has lost the war.

When he reaches home, Amparo Priego Martínez has already left, and the house bears the disorder of a hurried search and departure. Clothes lie in a heap in the entrance; the available surfaces in the sitting room are crowded with objects apparently removed from cupboards for sorting. The damage in the hall does not surprise Guillermo, who had left at eight that morning and has returned before two. In the study, intruders have smashed the wall around his grandfather’s safe with a sledgehammer, tried unsuccessfully to prise off its lock with a blowtorch, and ultimately had a locksmith open it. The safe stands empty. They have taken only Don Fermín’s gold, but family documents, including copies of the grandparents’ wills and the deed to the house, lie trampled on the floor. The occupation reaches into the private home through theft and desecration as well as through the public seizure of the hospital.

A false identity becomes a means of survival

Guillermo’s vulnerability in the new Madrid is sharpened by the false papers prepared for him through Manuel Arroyo Benítez. The identity of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez had first been devised for Manuel, who registered under that name in Madrid in June 1937. Its administrative detail was convincing, but none of the personal facts behind it was true. Manuel later gives Guillermo a different version of the same invented identity: Guillermo is to be a twenty-five-year-old bachelor, with no left-wing party or union membership, who has lived in Madrid and most recently in Salamanca. The story is made harder to disprove by the claim that his birthplace’s church burned in a bombing along with its baptismal register.

Manuel explains that he destroyed Guillermo’s UGT record and made the identity papers resemble those issued by the Francoist authorities. He filled them in himself, imitated a real official’s signature, and copied a Burgos seal. This is not merely concealment by an assumed name; it is an attempt to manipulate the administrative machinery by which the new regime sorts, registers, and recognizes people. Guillermo keeps the envelope Manuel gave him in the locked desk drawer he had reserved for it. After returning to the ransacked house, he checks that the envelope remains intact and examines its contents again before locking them away. Preserving the papers becomes one of the few deliberate acts he can still perform in a home others have searched.

When Guillermo finally leaves the house, he has been without food for a day and a half. He eats two of Franco’s bread rolls, left untouched on the kitchen table since Amparo’s departure, then puts on his grandfather’s coat, which is both too wide and too short. He takes his briefcase and walks out without locking the door. On Calle Ayala he learns that the boy who had carried messages to Experta has been absent from work for three days, but receives the address of the boy’s home. When Guillermo passes his former home again, four Falangists are standing outside the entrance. One holds a typed paper. Guillermo crosses the street and continues without stopping to discover whether his name is on it. The false identity offers a route through bureaucracy, but the typed list makes the threat of identification immediate.

The city’s new paperwork

Guillermo spends the early period after the takeover in hiding, staying first at Facundo’s boarding house and later at Doña Enriqueta’s. His walks are less a purposeful search than an effort to persuade himself, and his landlady, that he is doing something. He avoids going beyond the western edge of the Castellana. A woman crying in a doorway or a group of armed soldiers or police can abruptly end a walk. At times he imagines surrendering to Paco Arrieta, but recognizes that he will not do it; the knowledge itself torments him.

When he eventually goes to a crowded police station, the Rafael Cuesta Sánchez papers produce a sudden change in how an official treats him. The guard at the entrance asks for his documentation; on seeing it, he softens his manner and directs Guillermo to window seven, where documents from the Nationalist zone are being exchanged. The contrast between that courteous service and the exhausted people waiting in the first six lines is stark. Guillermo sees them as fellow inhabitants of the Madrid that endured almost three years of deprivation, bombardment, and despair. He regards them as his equals, yet must approach the new administration through a document that disguises his political past and separates him from them.

While waiting, Guillermo has time to observe the crowded rows before him. When his turn comes, he hands over the identity card with a smile that conceals his inner turmoil. The clerk pays little attention as he fills in a form with Guillermo’s details. The scene completes the immediate consequence of the occupation: authority has changed hands, but survival now depends on passing through its offices under an identity deliberately made to look as though it belongs to the victorious side. The paper that Manuel devised for a Republican operative becomes Guillermo’s means of remaining legible to the new regime without revealing who he is.