Spanish Navy

The Spanish Navy is central to Norberto Machimbarrena’s history and to the delusion that continues to organize his life in the asylum. His account links naval discipline to a triple killing, while his later belief that he serves naval intelligence makes the Navy both the supposed source of his authority and the institution through which his illness is narrated.

Machimbarrena and the Navy's imagined command

Machimbarrena came from Bilbao and worked as a mechanic in the Navy. He had served during the war aboard a bou and received the Individual Military Medal, although the person recounting his story admits not knowing which action earned it. That gap in the account leaves his actual military distinction separate from the far more consequential command he later claimed to receive.

In the postwar years, when Spain was under pressure to enter the world war, Machimbarrena believed that the Navy’s admiral in chief had sent him an order directly from mind to mind. He understood it as an instruction to kill two sailors and a petty officer because they were Basque separatists. Acting, as he saw it, with the discipline of a sailor, he killed the three men by slitting their throats one after another. He expected to be decorated and promoted; instead, a military tribunal declared him irresponsible and sent him to the asylum.

The Navy as a continuing delusion

The military tribunal’s decision did not end the Navy’s hold over Machimbarrena’s life. More than thirty years after his admission, he had spent five years confined and roughly a quarter-century at semi-liberty. Although he was no longer considered dangerous, he had not been discharged: he still believed he was serving the Navy’s Information Services, now under orders to identify and report Basque separatists among the asylum’s doctors and patients. The imagined mission had changed from killing alleged enemies to denouncing them, but it continued to give his institutional confinement the shape of naval duty.

The novel presents this belief as part of his paranoia, an illness described as practically incurable, though the doctor allows that Machimbarrena might be a rare exception. He had received electroshock treatment, yet the supposed intelligence assignment persisted. The Navy therefore operates here not as a depicted organization with a broader structure or policy, but as the authority Machimbarrena’s delusion borrows: the admiral’s imagined command first made murder seem like discipline, and the later intelligence mission lets him interpret asylum life as service.

Alicia encounters the contradiction at close range. During the asylum’s open routine, Machimbarrena greets her courteously from a window; she is interested in him because he is a paranoid and she is pretending to suffer from the same condition. His continued belief that he is a naval spy is taken as evidence that he has not fully recovered. Yet Alicia wonders whether his account might be true in the same way that she believes herself to be a detective—and actually is one. Her comparison does not establish that Machimbarrena’s mission is real; it makes the boundary between a delusion and a possibly true account harder to settle from appearances alone.

The Navy as an Unverified Authority

The Navy is present through two kinds of claim that the narrative does not treat as equally established. Machimbarrena’s service and medal belong to the account of his past, while the supposed commands attributed to the admiral and the later intelligence assignment belong to what he believes. The distinction matters: the novel gives his delusion the vocabulary of a real chain of command without allowing that vocabulary to verify the orders. His conviction supplies a coherent explanation for his actions, but coherence is not confirmation.

Alice Gould’s comparison with her own detective identity sharpens this uncertainty without resolving it. Her case makes it possible for a belief that appears delusional to coincide with reality; it does not establish that Machimbarrena’s account of naval espionage is true. The parallel therefore unsettles easy reliance on appearances while preserving the difference between the two claims. The Spanish Navy remains an authority invoked within his story, not an independently heard witness to it, and the reader is left to distinguish the force of his belief from proof of the mission he describes.

Political Meaning and Narrative Function

The Navy’s place in Machimbarrena’s story is defined by an unresolved collision between military authority and the limits of his own account. In his version, Basque separatism turns three fellow servicemen into targets, and obedience makes their killing an act of naval discipline; the tribunal’s finding of irresponsibility instead removes that action from the realm of legitimate service. The institution is thus not shown directing or confirming either mission. Its significance lies in the competing meanings attached to its authority: command supplies Machimbarrena with a framework for violence and, later, a purpose within confinement, while the tribunal marks the point at which that claimed authority no longer persuades the world around him.