Manuel Arranges His Family’s Escape from Buenos Aires

Manuel Arranges His Family’s Escape from Buenos Aires follows Manuel Arroyo Benítez as he recognizes the danger gathering around his daughter Simona and organizes the departure of his family during Argentina’s military dictatorship. The episode turns his long history of exile and assumed identities into practical means of protection: documents, a cover story, and a carefully staged journey carry the family away, but cannot make the separation painless or guarantee that Spain will feel like home.

Danger Reaches the Family

By the time Manuel goes to the Spanish consulate seeking passports, the military has already come looking for Simona’s boyfriend, Charlie. The soldiers failed to find him, but took his flatmate, a journalist who worked with Simona at La Nación. Simona’s mother insists that the young man was not a leftist; Simona, crying into a cushion, says Charlie will not talk if he is found, and that José Ignacio knows nothing. Manuel is initially motionless, absorbed in a memory his family cannot share. When he returns to the present, he asks the question that matters for immediate safety: does José Ignacio know that Simona and Charlie are together? And does he know that she is politically active?

Simona confirms that José Ignacio does not know about her militancy. Manuel accepts this as crucial, then turns to the whole family: if the authorities come for Simona and fail to find her, they may take the others instead. His warning comes from experience, not speculation. He has lived through a civil war and knows that interrogators can break a prisoner’s body and sense of self until the person speaks without being responsible for what is said. In his account, the danger extends beyond the accused: relatives who know nothing can still be seized. The family must leave together if they mean to remain together and alive.

The episode places that domestic decision against a system of organized terror. Under the Argentine dictatorship, disappearances, secret detention, torture, executions, concealed bodies, and the theft and reassignment of children form parts of a clandestine machinery of repression. Manuel’s urgency is thus not a private fear detached from politics. The danger facing his family belongs to a wider campaign in which state violence is designed to remove people and obscure what has happened to them. His earlier experience of exile gives him no immunity, but it teaches him to recognize the pattern before it closes around his household.

A Plan Built from Cover Stories

Manuel’s first practical move is to seek Spanish passports. At the consulate, he initially presents himself as a Spanish citizen who needs documents so that his family can leave the country. A week later, he returns with a collection of identity papers from different countries and periods. The photographs on them all show the same man. The documents make visible what his past has taught him: identity can be a matter of paperwork, and paperwork can be used to shelter a family from official attention.

He also constructs a plausible reason for the journey. Simona is to say that she did not know what her boyfriend was involved in and that the news has so distressed her that she needs a break. The family will go to Fortín Tiburcio, ostensibly for a holiday and to deal with selling the country house. Manuel offers this story as something other people will believe, even if they call Simona a coward or speak badly of her. The cover does not require the family to persuade the authorities of their innocence; it gives the household an ordinary explanation for leaving Buenos Aires.

The plan meets resistance at home. Simona asks whether Manuel has gone mad, while Guillermo objects that he still has two examinations left before completing his engineering degree. Juan also says he has things to do in the city. Manuel does not answer these objections by pretending that the departure is convenient. He asks Simona directly whether she wants to disappear, then asks the others whether they want her to disappear. The question exposes the choice beneath their disagreements: leaving means disrupting each person’s life, but staying may expose the family to the same machinery that has made Simona’s boyfriend a target.

At the consulate, Manuel explains that he had entered Argentina as an agent of the Spanish Republic in exile on a diplomatic mission that failed, and that he had not come by choice. He says that his family is now in danger and that he believes he has the right to return. When the consul asks how to address him, Manuel gives his actual name, Manuel Arroyo Benítez, but points out that his three children bear the surname Pacheco. The family will keep that surname. The papers therefore do more than secure passage: they preserve the identity under which his children are known, while Manuel reveals his own name to the official who can help them.

A Family Divided Before Departure

The family’s departure begins with unequal consent. On 23 November 1976, Simona warns her father that she will never forgive him as she gets into the car after saying goodbye at the newspaper. Her mother is preoccupied with Guillermo, who has gone to stay with a friend after announcing that he will remain in Buenos Aires. Juan blames his sister for much of what is happening, then falls silent during the drive. The silence is not agreement; it is the sound of a family moving together while carrying different versions of the loss.

At Fortín Tiburcio, Manuel and Simona take a walk, and the neighbors hear the intended story: she is visiting with the children, the country house may be sold, and her husband needs to return to work in the capital but will come back for Christmas Eve. Manuel asks his wife to call him each night. When he returns north with the son who had stayed behind, there is still nothing important to report; Charlie remains hidden, while Manuel distributes passports and plane tickets. Guillermo keeps the documents meant for him but continues to say he will not go to Spain.

The full family returns to Buenos Aires on 28 December for the final time. Manuel’s brother-in-law has agreed to represent his interests during the family’s absence. At Simona’s request, they will sell the country house but not everything else; the flat in Recoleta will be rented, and Manuel signs a power of attorney so that his sister-in-law can handle the property and collect the proceeds from the language academy. His mother-in-law promises to look after these affairs. Her concern moves him: she is the only person who has thought to ask what will happen to him. At the end of the meal she tells him that he will no longer be able to retire. Manuel agrees. With his work and property left behind, he knows he will have to begin again, but says they will manage.

Departure and the Uncertain Return

The next day, the family packs beneath a bright sky in near silence. Each person is absorbed in private grief, although they share the same forced departure. When Guillermo brings his suitcase to the hallway, Manuel understands that his mother-in-law has helped persuade him. He embraces the son who had meant to stay behind and feels some relief. The change matters: the family’s departure is no longer contingent on leaving one of its children behind in Buenos Aires.

At the airport, Simona asks to buy a box of alfajores as a keepsake. Manuel tells her to buy two, so they can eat one on the plane. He then promises they will not be gone forever and will return as soon as they can. His promise is a comfort, but the narrative sets it against the knowledge that exile offers a date of departure without a reliable date of return. Juan recognizes the gap and apologizes for joking about how long his father once took to come back. Manuel does not tell him that he is right; their embrace makes clear that the son already understands.

As they prepare to board, Manuel remembers the committee that welcomed him to Argentina nearly thirty years earlier, including Clara Stauffer, Magda Ivanissevich, and Walter Kutschmann. At the time, he had counted the months until he could return to Spain as the victor of a war he had lost again. Guillermo’s voice breaks the painful recollection, and the family boards an Iberia flight, occupying five seats in the same row. After crossing the ocean and sleeping little, they land at Barajas and enter Spain as Spanish citizens with new, immaculate passports.

The formal return does not reproduce the welcome Manuel once felt at Gibraltar. Spain’s air does not seem to embrace him, and hearing the rough, dry accent of his own voice does not move him as it did before. His wife tells him he has come home and deserves to be happy; his reply, asking whether she believes that, leaves the meaning of home unresolved. The escape has brought the family to safety from the immediate threat in Buenos Aires, but it has also made Manuel an exile again, returning to a country that no longer feels simply like his own.