Manuel Arroyo Benitez impersonated Adrián Gallardo Ortega

Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s impersonation of Adrián Gallardo Ortega is the hinge between two fugitives moving in opposite directions: Manuel uses the boxer’s identity to infiltrate a Nazi escape network and seek passage to Argentina, while the real Adrián survives in postwar Germany under papers bearing the name Alfonso Navarro López. The exchange makes identity both a practical instrument of survival and a source of moral danger: the assumed name opens a route through a system built to shelter war criminals, but it also hides the real man whose life that name belongs to.

Background: a life already made through documents

Manuel’s later use of Adrián’s identity echoes the earlier false identity that had helped him survive the Spanish Civil War. On 28 June 1937, he registered at a Madrid hotel as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, using papers issued through the Republican security apparatus. The biography attached to that name was wholly fabricated: it made him a government official born in Talavera de la Reina, a UGT member, married, and resident in Valencia. The papers gave him an administratively legible life where his real one could not safely be shown.

Manuel later passed that same invented identity to Guillermo García Medina as repayment for the life Guillermo had saved in 1937. The document was carefully tailored to survive scrutiny under the victorious regime: Rafael Cuesta Sánchez was to be a single man, apolitical, twenty-five years old, and associated with Madrid and Salamanca. Manuel explained that the identity had been constructed so that no one could verify its origins, and that even the supporting records had been altered or destroyed. This earlier exchange establishes the pattern that governs the impersonation of Adrián: a false name is not merely a disguise but a biography assembled to meet the demands of institutions.

The double impersonation

After Franco’s victory, Adrián is no longer the celebrated professional boxer he once was. He had enlisted in the Blue Division, continued fighting as an SS volunteer, and taken part in Berlin’s final defense; afterward, he was left destitute in Germany. When challenged by a patrol, he showed documents identifying him as Alfonso Navarro López. His survival therefore already depended on a borrowed identity, though the evidence does not describe how he obtained those papers.

By September 1946, Manuel has returned from exile with a dangerous secret mission: to infiltrate the clandestine network run by Clara Stauffer, which helps Nazi war criminals and other fugitives escape the Third Reich’s aftermath. Manuel plans to pose as Adrián and travel to Perón’s Argentina as one of the network’s intended beneficiaries. The novel’s opening account frames the plan as a collision of two impostors: the real Adrián remains in Germany under Alfonso Navarro’s name, while Manuel prepares to become Adrián. The apparent continuity of the boxer’s identity conceals a succession of people and documents behind it.

The plan draws Guillermo into Manuel’s operation. By March 1947, Guillermo knows that Manuel has taken Adrián’s identity to penetrate the fugitive organization and emigrate to Argentina. Guillermo, living as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, approaches Amparo because she knows his real identity; he does not initially tell her that his purpose is to help Manuel. The impersonation is thus embedded in a wider chain of secrecy, in which even an ally who knows one false identity may not know the next mission it serves.

The network and the machinery of passage

The escape system Manuel seeks to enter depends on more than forged names. Clara Stauffer’s house at Galileo 14 is refurbished as an office, furnished with new telephones, secretarial staff, men’s clothing in many sizes, and shoes to fit them. The house receives exhausted men who appear to be fugitives; they are fed, given clothes, and apparently directed toward lodging or work. Their movements through the office and the supply of documents show how private intermediaries can make an assumed identity usable in ordinary life.

The network also manipulates official records. A household observer discovers that sealed parish envelopes contain baptismal certificates bearing German names and dates, including one from 1907. In another instance, Jan Schmitt is registered as Johannes Grunwald, enabling him to apply for a municipal police post restricted to native residents of Schöneberg. Once he begins patrolling in uniform, his earlier identity disappears from the people who knew him in Berlin. These operations illuminate the system Manuel enters: the escape route is sustained by the coordinated production of documents, addresses, employment, and administrative recognition, not by a name alone.

Manuel’s own path within the network also acquires a daily, material form. On 1 July 1947, under the name José Pacheco Hernández, the man still known as Adrián within Stauffer’s circle begins working as a night porter on Madrid’s Gran Vía. The name is used selectively: his workmates call him José, while people at Galileo 14 continue to call him Adrián, and a police official who takes his fingerprints and signature greets him by that name with knowing complicity. The split between the public work identity and the network’s familiar name shows that impersonation is maintained through social relationships as well as paperwork.

Meaning and consequences

The relation between Manuel and Adrián is an asymmetrical appropriation: Manuel needs Adrián’s established identity to pass as a fugitive eligible for the escape network, while the real Adrián is displaced from that identity and remains vulnerable under the name Alfonso Navarro. The arrangement binds the two men without making them partners. One is using a name to enter a protected route; the other is trying to stay alive in Germany under another person’s papers.

The documents in the novel work in both directions. Manuel’s invented identity once protected him from political danger, and the Rafael Cuesta papers he gives Guillermo become a means of survival under Franco. But the Stauffer network’s paperwork helps former Nazis and other fugitives escape accountability, while Adrián’s borrowed documents conceal his actual circumstances. The same administrative technique can shelter a threatened person or frustrate justice; its moral significance depends on who controls the records, what the identity enables, and whose reality it erases.

The impersonation also makes the novel’s recurring pattern of false identities cumulative rather than incidental. Manuel’s life as Rafael Cuesta, Guillermo’s continued use of that name, Adrián’s papers as Alfonso Navarro, and Manuel’s adoption of Adrián’s identity form a chain in which survival is repeatedly purchased through another biography. The consequence is not simply that names become unreliable: each substitution creates a new passage through a political order that classifies, pursues, or protects people according to what their documents say they are.