Guillermo Flees Madrid Under a False Identity

Guillermo Flees Madrid Under a False Identity is the account of how Guillermo García Medina leaves the city after the Nationalist victory using the identity Manuel Arroyo Benítez had once assumed for a Republican mission. The escape is not simply a change of name: Guillermo must navigate a city being remade by victors, abandon the home stripped of its contents, and decide what evidence of his former life—and of his son—can be carried into the next one. His false papers offer a path through official scrutiny, but the documents and objects he saves also bind that expedient disguise to the family history the new identity cannot erase.

The Identity Manuel Leaves Behind

The papers Guillermo inherits began as Manuel’s cover. On 28 June 1937, Manuel registered at a Madrid hotel as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, using impeccable documentation issued through the Republican Directorate-General of Security. The identity described a government employee born in Talavera de la Reina on 12 January 1904, a UGT member since 1929, married and resident in Valencia; none of those particulars was true. Manuel had been sent to Madrid at the request of Juan Negrín, who had chosen him because he trusted him amid the Republican government’s fear of further internal violence after the Barcelona fighting.

When Manuel later gives the papers to Guillermo, he explains that the identity was fictitious from the beginning and had been constructed to resist verification. Its original version made Rafael six years older than Manuel, married, and affiliated with the UGT. Guillermo’s version is adapted to him: he is to appear as a twenty-five-year-old bachelor, politically unaffiliated, long resident in Madrid, with a last address in Salamanca. The supporting history is designed to close off inquiry: Rafael is an only child whose parents are dead, and the parish register that might confirm his birth is said to have burned in a bombing. Manuel has destroyed the old UGT record, copied a real official’s signature, and used a seal copied from those of Burgos. The card is not merely a false name but a carefully assembled administrative life.

The Home Left Behind

After returning to the house, Guillermo finds that its contents have been disturbed and his grandfather’s study badly damaged. The wall has been smashed with a sledgehammer; the safe has been removed after an attempt to open it with a blowtorch left the room smelling of burnt paint. The intruders have taken Don Fermín’s gold. Family wills, the deed to the house, and other papers lie scattered on the floor, trampled by the searchers’ shoes. The physical assault on the house is also an attack on the records that held the family’s past together.

One locked desk drawer, however, remains untouched. Guillermo uses the key on his own key ring to check the sealed envelope Manuel had given him a month and a half earlier. He opens it, verifies its contents, and locks it away again. For three days he stays inside with the blinds down and no lights on, unable to decide what to do. When he finally prepares to leave, he abandons a small suitcase because it would make him look like a fugitive. Instead he takes the unused medical bag his grandmother gave him on completing his degree—a pointed choice for a doctor about to leave behind his profession—and puts the silver cutlery that Experta had not managed to sell at its bottom.

What He Carries

Guillermo puts Rafael Cuesta Sánchez’s identity card in the jacket pocket where he has always kept his documents. He keeps the Republican money in his wallet but hides foreign currency in a compartment of the medical bag. He also packs photographs of his parents and grandparents, the family papers the intruders had trampled, and a change of clothes. These are practical provisions, but together they make the bag a portable remainder of the life the new identity is meant to conceal.

Only after packing these things does Guillermo think of his son. He has lived with the boy for just six and a half months, but that has been enough to make the child’s existence—and Guillermo’s fatherhood—impossible to forget. Amparo has left behind the family book, the birth certificate, and the photograph of their wedding. Guillermo takes them because he is thinking about the future of Guillermo García Priego and the part he might still play in it. He cannot know that his son will grow up without his name or surname, or that these apparently ordinary documents will later matter to other people’s fates as well.

The wooden toy train he had sanded, painted, and repaired is missing: it is the only object connected to him that Amparo has chosen to take. That discovery reassures him because it means the boy will receive the train and play with it. Beneath the bed he finds a short note from Amparo, dated Madrid, 28 March 1939. It begins with an apology and breaks off before she can finish. The last letter is distorted, as if the pen had jumped when its writer was interrupted. Guillermo keeps the note beside the papers that establish his relationship with the child’s mother. Its incomplete wording offers no explanation, but it remains part of the evidence he carries.

Leaving and Passing Through the New Order

Before going, Guillermo curses, then eats the two Franco bread rolls that have remained untouched on the kitchen table since Amparo left. He has fasted for a day and a half, and the pantry has nothing else. Afterward he puts on his grandfather’s coat, which is too short and too wide, takes the medical bag, and leaves the apartment without locking the door. He descends the stairs without looking back and, by chance, meets no one on the way out.

At a dairy on Calle Ayala, he learns that the boy who used to carry messages to Experta has been absent from work for three days; the dairy staff give him the boy’s home address. When Guillermo passes his former home again, four Falangists are standing outside the entrance. One holds a typed sheet. Guillermo crosses the street and continues without stopping to find out whether his name is on it. The moment turns escape into a deliberate refusal to submit himself to a list whose contents he cannot know.

The invented identity subsequently carries him into the new administration. At a crowded police station, a guard examines his card and directs him courteously to window seven, where documents from the Nationalist zone are exchanged. Guillermo waits while people who had defended Madrid alongside him fill the other lines. He recognizes them as his companions in nearly three years of deprivation, bombing, and despair, now standing under the authority of the victors. When his turn comes, he hands over the card and receives a form to complete. The bureaucratic exchange makes his assumed identity usable, even as the people around him make visible the defeat that has driven him to use it.

The False Name as Survival and Record

The escape’s central contradiction is that Guillermo must replace himself on paper in order to preserve what belongs to his real life. The administrative fiction allows him to move through a system that examines and exchanges identity documents, while the family records he chooses to save testify to relationships the fiction omits. In this respect, Rafael Cuesta Sánchez is both shield and instrument: first fashioned for Manuel’s service to the Republic, then altered to give Guillermo a chance of surviving the Nationalist aftermath.

The book repeatedly shows that invented identities depend on institutions as much as on individual deception. Manuel’s card draws authority from official-looking signatures, seals, and records; in later episodes, forged registrations and employment papers likewise let fugitives enter systems designed to classify them. Guillermo’s passage through window seven brings that mechanism into sharp focus: the same state procedures that make a person legible can be navigated by a convincing document, while a crowded queue of defeated Madrileños shows the human cost behind the routine exchange. His departure thus connects private flight to the larger struggle over who can be named, traced, or erased.

For Guillermo, however, evasion is not the same as abandoning his past. The medical bag holds the false card alongside photographs, currency, family papers, and the remains of a marriage and a father’s claim. The absent train and the unfinished note sharpen the separation from Amparo and their child without resolving it. He leaves Madrid under a name that is not his, carrying the material proof of the life that name is meant to hide.