Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s multiple assumed identities and life in hiding

Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s multiple assumed identities are more than disguises: they are the means by which political power makes people legible, and by which a hunted man slips between systems of identification. From the Republican capital to Francoist Madrid and Buenos Aires, documents allow him to survive, work, and move through clandestine networks; at the same time, each new name deepens his sense that his own life has been spent in fragments. His eventual disclosure of his real identity to Simona marks a turn from borrowed existence toward a life he can claim, even as his political hope collapses.

Identity and the First Disguise

On 28 June 1937, Arroyo registered at a Madrid hotel with papers issued by the Republic’s Directorate-General of Security. Their administrative appearance was exact, but their identity was wholly invented: he was presented as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior, born in Talavera de la Reina on 12 January 1904, a member of the General Workers’ Union since 1929, married, and resident in Valencia. None of those details was true. It was the first of the many identities he would use.

The name belonged to a political operation, not simply to an individual’s private deception. Arroyo’s appointment as an auxiliary government delegate to the Madrid Defense Junta had appeared in the official bulletin while he was still in London. The post was deliberately vague, unprecedented, and temporary: it had not existed before him and would not exist after him. In Madrid, as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, he could act under an identity designed to resist verification. The fictitious biography gave the state a usable official and gave Arroyo a precarious form of protection within a fractured Republic.

That protection was tested when he was found badly wounded. Guards summoned medical staff, who initially took him for a corpse. A credential from the Public Order Council of the Defense Junta led a commander to call for instructions. Basilio Rodríguez, identifying himself as a police commissioner, gave orders without an explanation: if Rafael was dead, he was to be buried as an unknown man without a registry entry; if alive, he had to be kept alive without being admitted to a hospital under his name, because someone might try to kill him again. Rodríguez said that the man was vital to the Republic’s interests. The instructions expose the double edge of the alias: it could conceal Arroyo from his enemies, but his survival also depended on officials willing to manipulate the records that would ordinarily establish whether a person lived or died.

Passing an Identity On

When Arroyo later gave Guillermo the name Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, he transferred not just a document but a carefully adjusted biography. In a sealed envelope was a forged identity card for a twenty-five-year-old man: an only child whose parents were dead, born in a Toledo village whose church and baptismal register had burned in a bombing. The destroyed register made the claimed birth difficult to check. Arroyo explained that his own earlier version of Cuesta Sánchez had been six years older, married, a union member, and resident in Valencia; Guillermo’s new version would be single, politically unaffiliated, and associated with Madrid and Salamanca.

The document was assembled to withstand ordinary bureaucratic scrutiny. Arroyo had destroyed the union record that might contradict the new biography, used paper identical to the official stock, imitated a real official’s signature, and added a seal copied from those used in Burgos. He had obtained the blank identity card without authorization because he knew an official request would be refused. The point was not to create a convincing story in the abstract, but to make a particular person appear administratively plausible in the changing circumstances of postwar Madrid.

When Guillermo returned to his home after Francoist forces took the city, he found that the house had been ransacked: the family safe had been removed, the gold taken, and family papers scattered and trampled. The envelope Arroyo had given him, however, remained intact in the locked desk drawer. After three days indoors with the shutters closed, Guillermo went to exchange his papers. At the police station, the guard directed him to the counter for documents from the Nationalist zone; the identity Arroyo had prepared passed into the new administration’s system. The exchange scene places the disguise amid a crowd of defeated Madrileños, men and women who had shared the city’s hunger, bombardment, and despair. Guillermo’s documents let him pass, but the act of passing also separates him from the people he recognizes as his own community.

The Network of Names and Work

By the time Arroyo reached Argentina, the false identities had become a succession of lives rather than a single protective disguise. He had spent time in Geneva under the name Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez, and in Madrid he had lived as Adrián Gallardo Ortega. In March 1949, decisions made to escape Kutschmann’s control and the generosity of SARE helped shape what the narrative calls his real life, an unexpected existence that seemed more authentic than either of those earlier periods. Even that life began under another name: he applied for work in Buenos Aires with a passport identifying him as José Pacheco Hernández.

Two months after arriving, Arroyo began looking for work independently. He wanted a position that would keep him in a central, middle-class neighborhood and spare him the need to cross Buenos Aires in areas where the Nazis he meant to avoid lived. He considered an advertisement for the 1949–50 academic year at La Europea Language Academy, near the Palace of Justice. Although he lacked formal teaching experience beyond leading a Spanish conversation group in Madrid, he spoke English, French, and German fluently. The academy’s owner, Héctor Brioschi, hired him to teach advanced conversation, idioms, and technical vocabulary rather than grammar. A passport identity meant to facilitate concealment thus became the credential under which Arroyo established an ordinary occupation.

His passage through the Madrid escape network likewise depended on the traffic between false papers and practical assistance. At Galileo 14, Clara Stauffer’s organization received European fugitives, fed and clothed them, and apparently helped secure lodging and work. A regular stream of sealed envelopes bearing Madrid parish letterheads contained baptismal records with German names and dates, documents that could help reconstruct a usable biography. The scale of this work is visible in the house’s routines: renovated rooms used as an office, a new telephone line, secretaries, and wardrobes stocked with men’s clothing and shoes in many sizes. Such aid did not merely hide people; it supplied the material and documentary means to make them socially present under another identity.

A Name That Becomes a Life

In Buenos Aires, the name José Pacheco Hernández attached Arroyo to a particular routine. He taught at La Europea, where the students included employees of the nearby courts, and remained in the city center rather than moving into the residential districts associated with the Nazis he sought to evade. His work and location were chosen with concealment in mind, but they also gave structure to a life that had previously been organized around flight. The false name was not simply a mask he put on for an encounter; it governed where he could work and how he could move safely through the city.

His relationship with Simona brought the contradiction into sharper focus. As he approached forty, Arroyo understood that he had spent nearly half his life struggling against defeat, pursued by failure from Geneva to London, Valencia, Madrid, and Buenos Aires. He had built no vocation, home, or family, and had not even retained his own name. He describes his existence as a succession of borrowed, stolen, and false lives. Simona’s experience of frustrated years made that recognition newly legible to him: their histories were not identical, but their sense of lost time allowed him to see his own life differently.

The news from Washington, delivered in Buenos Aires after more than a decade of waiting, ended his remaining expectation that outside intervention would redeem the Spanish cause. In his account, hope had narrowed after 1945 until it finally ran dry. The political disappointment and the personal question of identity meet here: the words he speaks become the last possession he can place in the suitcase of a stateless person, and a means of recovering the names of his parents and the identity he had sacrificed to hope. The moment does not restore the years spent under aliases; it makes the loss of them speakable.

When Simona agrees to marry him, Arroyo tells her who he is, what he is called, where he was born, what work he does, why he came to Buenos Aires, and what her love means to him. He speaks until daylight fades into night. Simona listens without interrupting, recognizing something of her own unhappiness in his account, and asks what she should call him now. He asks her to keep calling him Manolo. The answer is modest but decisive: after years in which names were tools of survival and documents supplied the terms of his existence, he chooses to keep the intimate name by which she knows him.

Concealment, State Violence, and the Return of Identity

The novel’s recurring concern with documents is set against systems that use records not only to protect or identify people but also to erase them. In Madrid, a political official’s orders determine whether a wounded man will be entered into a hospital or buried without a name. Under Franco’s dictatorship, the ransacking of Guillermo’s house demonstrates how seizure and destruction reach beyond property to family records and private history. The forged card answers such pressures by making identity something that can be fashioned, transferred, and made acceptable to a new regime’s clerks.

The later Argentine setting enlarges this contrast. The military government’s repression rests on secret detention, disappearance, and the deliberate destruction or appropriation of identity. Its task groups divide abduction, torture, execution, disposal of bodies, and the handling of children stolen from political prisoners into specialized operations; the so-called death flights carry living, drugged prisoners out over the sea. The regime’s methods make the earlier administrative improvisations of Arroyo’s clandestine world resonate differently. A fabricated biography can help a fugitive evade persecution, but the state’s power to conceal a body or falsify its fate turns the same struggle over legibility into a machinery of terror.

Arroyo’s aliases therefore carry both practical and personal consequences. They open doors to hotels, jobs, and escape routes, and they allow him to survive changes of regime; they also leave him describing his own life as one that has been consumed in borrowed forms. The resolution is not a return to a wholly recoverable past. It is the narrower achievement of telling Simona the truth and allowing her to retain the name she already uses for him. In a story where papers repeatedly decide who can be recognized, his choice to remain Manolo with her becomes an intimate claim to continuity.