«Arriba España»

«Arriba España» is a nationalist salute whose repeated appearance marks the pressure to display allegiance in a Spain remade by war and victory. Spoken aloud, called across streets, or reduced to a raised arm, it works both as a political password and as a demand for visible conformity. The phrase’s force lies in its changing circumstances: Amparo uses it defiantly, Guillermo repeats it under pressure, and Manuel learns how to reproduce its gestures without surrendering his mission.

From childhood intimacy to political division

Shortly before the end of 1935, Guillermo encounters Amparo on the apartment-house landing. They had once been childhood friends, but after an earlier rupture they have stopped greeting each other on the stairs; both have since become more radicalized. In the cold, Amparo unbuttons her coat to reveal that she is dressed in Falangist colors despite the fact that Carnival is still two months away. Wearing a blue shirt embroidered with the yoke and arrows, a close-fitting gray skirt, and high black heels, she raises her right arm and cries the salute.

Guillermo finds her beautiful, but the old intimacy cannot bridge their new political division. He answers with an insult rather than a compliment. Amparo responds with a snort, tightens her coat belt as if to deprive herself of breath, and only speaks again after descending three stairs. In this encounter the phrase is no incidental greeting: it is a declaration of identity staged before someone who knows her from before that identity took over. The landing, once a place where neighbors might acknowledge each other, becomes a boundary between opposing allegiances.

A victor’s greeting and a defeated man’s gesture

When Guillermo returns to his neighborhood after the Nationalist victory, he sees supporters at balconies and on pavements raising their arms, while refugee families leave with what they can carry. People call the salute to him as he threads along the walls, using the crowds of departing refugees as cover. At the corner of Hermosilla and Núñez de Balboa, he recognizes the worn leather travel bag being put into a car before he recognizes the man carrying it. The brief sight of his stolen property and its smiling bearer makes the scene feel like a personal defeat before the enemy has officially proclaimed victory.

The salute’s coercive quality becomes unmistakable the following morning at the Hostal Moderno. Facundo greets Guillermo with the raised arm and the words, and Experta drives an elbow into Guillermo’s ribs. Guillermo answers with the abbreviated «¡Arriba!»: his arm rises as though pulled by a mechanism, without an act of conviction behind it. Experta does not imitate them. She stands with her arms crossed, looking around the lobby like a spectator outside the ceremony. Facundo recognizes her as an enemy but does not demand that she answer. Her refusal makes Guillermo’s automatic compliance newly visible to him.

Guillermo already knows that he has lost the war; in the lobby, he begins to glimpse what survival will cost. He says farewell to Experta with the two kisses they exchanged as children, and she returns them, touching his face with her fingertips. After she leaves, he feels alone in the world. In the dark room where he is lodging, an enormous crucifix is his only company. His involuntary salute and Experta’s deliberate silence thus lead into a crisis over the moral price of staying alive: the greeting is small, but it registers the pressure under which a defeated person must perform the victor’s rituals.

Learning the rules of the performance

Years later, as Manuel prepares Guillermo for an infiltration mission, the salute becomes one item in a practical manual of political survival. In the ten days before a gathering in Cercedilla, Manuel repeatedly rises at four in the morning to attend an accelerated course on Nazism in a building on Gran Vía. He is less concerned that Guillermo will know too little about the Third Reich than that he will say too much. His instruction is to keep quiet and to understand the gathering’s codes of speech and behavior.

Manuel distinguishes the Spanish fascist greeting from the more explicit rituals expected of the former German volunteers. He tells Guillermo that no one raises an arm or shouts «Heil Hitler!» until someone gets drunk. Manuel, who volunteered for the SS and swore loyalty to the Führer, will join in when that point comes; Guillermo must not go that far. As a Spanish comrade, he may raise his arm, and at most say «¡Arriba España!»—though it is better to say nothing. If questioned, he can call himself a fascist, but he must avoid the words Nazi and National Socialist, which the group does not use. Its members prefer to describe themselves as Europeans and refer to the Third Reich obliquely as the good old days. The salute is therefore both a recognizable Spanish performance and a carefully limited one: it helps Guillermo pass, while its boundaries keep him from adopting the group’s most direct ritual language.

At the gathering, Guillermo nevertheless shouts the greeting several times. By then it is part of the role he has been coached to play, not a return to Amparo’s open declaration. The contrast between these uses is central to the phrase’s development in the story. Amparo deploys it as a claim to a political self; Guillermo learns to use it as camouflage, under instructions designed to keep his cover credible without letting the performance exceed its purpose.

The greeting travels with the escape network

The phrase also appears in Buenos Aires, where Manuel, operating under Adrián Gallardo’s assumed identity, encounters a welcome shaped by the same political habits. On 20 December, Kutschmann takes Gallardo to the office of the European Refugee Reception Service. Its director, Radu Ghenea, welcomes him, tells him to rest and adjust to the change of season and time zone, and says they will consider what can be done for him later. Then Ghenea straightens, brings his heels together, raises his right arm, and gives the Spanish salute.

Manuel takes a moment to realize what response is expected. He returns an emphatic «¡Arriba siempre!», and Ghenea smiles, pleased by what he reads as a forceful answer. Kutschmann, the German guide who accompanies the supposed Gallardo from the office, does not raise his arm. The staged greeting does not extend beyond the director’s office; the next official Manuel meets, Sofía Ferreti, needs no fascist ceremony to be efficient. Within half an hour she gives him an envelope containing one thousand pesos in cash. The amount combines a government subsidy of four hundred pesos a month for up to six months with money from a solidarity fund supported by earlier refugees who, like Kutschmann, already have work.

The moment connects public ideology to material assistance: the salute greases an encounter in an institution that welcomes an assumed identity and provides money. Yet Manuel’s delayed response also reveals how much he must consciously learn to inhabit the role. What Guillermo once produced automatically in defeat, Manuel now reproduces as a trained performance, with an added word that reassures Ghenea. Across the novel’s Spanish and Argentine settings, «Arriba España» survives as a portable sign of allegiance—one that can expose a political division, compel a gesture, or help an infiltrator move through a network whose members mistake performance for belonging.