Adrián Kills Alfonso Navarro and Assumes His Identity

Adrián Kills Alfonso Navarro and Assumes His Identity marks the moment when Adrián Gallardo turns a dead man’s documents into a chance at survival. As Soviet forces close in on Berlin, he kills Alfonso Navarro, hides the body, and surrenders carrying Alfonso’s papers. The novel presents this not as a final act of wartime hatred but as a deliberate exchange of identity, driven by Adrián’s hope that he might live beyond defeat and someday have a chance with Agneta Müller. The disguise saves him from immediate recognition, but its first consequence is a life built around a lie.

The killing and the surrender

On 2 May 1945, after Berlin’s defenders had prolonged their resistance beyond the Soviet celebration of May Day, a tank’s gun pointed directly at Adrián’s position in a shell hole on Wilhelmstrasse. Adrián emerged with his hands raised. He did not surrender alone: he carried Alfonso’s documents, while leaving Alfonso’s corpse unseen by the Soviet occupiers. The surrender and the identity theft are joined in the scene. Adrián gives himself up to the victors, but presents himself to them as another man.

The murder follows Adrián’s encounter with Jan Schmitt de Wandaleer. Adrián had just told Jan that he loved him, calling him a son of a bitch and the best friend he had ever had. Then he knocked Jan down with a right hand so Agneta could reach him and try to revive him. Adrián left them, wandered for hours, and returned to find Alfonso alone in the shell hole. That sequence places the killing within a tangled field of attachment and abandonment, rather than reducing it to a simple contest between enemies.

Why Adrián takes another name

Adrián understands that Alfonso is wrong to believe Agneta chose Jan because of his race, skin, or surname. In Adrián’s view, what Jan possessed and Adrián lacked was love: the absence had left him competing at a disadvantage while Berlin remained the Führer’s capital. Yet Adrián does not kill Alfonso to punish his mistaken belief, nor simply because Alfonso had embodied a long-standing nightmare. At the instant he pulls the trigger, he is not thinking of Bilbao, the terror that cost him the chance to become Spain’s champion in 1941, or Christmas Eve 1942. The narration insists that resentment, guilt, and fear do not motivate the act; it is an all-consuming love that occupies his inner life.

That account does not make the murder an act of generosity. Adrián’s love for Agneta is bound to a plan for possessing a future with her: he imagines kissing her, resting his head against her, and living long enough to do so. He believes he must stop being himself if he is to have any chance with her once the war ends. Assuming Alfonso’s identity offers a way out of Adrián’s own past, not a way to repair the damage he has done. The novel’s emphasis on his stated motive therefore sharpens rather than resolves the moral contradiction: tenderness toward Agneta coexists with the killing of a man whose identity Adrián appropriates.

A disguise built for survival

The false identity answers two threats. First, Adrián no longer wants to die without having experienced the intimacy he desires with Agneta. Second, his service at Klooga leaves him exposed to denunciation. Kleiber, his men, the camp guards, and the many soldiers stationed at Narva could identify him; Adrián assumes that too many witnesses survived for him to count on remaining unknown. He needs both another person’s name and documents to make that change credible. The novel states that he kills Alfonso for this reason, and that the crime barely stirs his conscience as he surrenders.

The new identity is not secure simply because the papers are convincing. After six weeks in an overcrowded cell, an interrogating officer asks why the supposed Alfonso speaks German so badly. Adrián answers that he is Spanish. Asked whether he had been a volunteer, he says yes, though he would have preferred to deny it and expects the officer would not have believed him. The exchange exposes a seam in the disguise: the stolen name can be carried into Soviet custody, but Adrián’s Spanishness and military past remain difficult to conceal.

Nearly eight months later, another Russian officer speaks Spanish with the prisoner. By then Adrián has spent innumerable days in darkness, eating poor food and sleeping seated among men who are malnourished, exhausted, and filthy. During that confinement he has slowly composed a fabricated biography, which he now gives as Alfonso Navarro López. The officer does not record its details; he sends Adrián to prison to await trial, saying that he may be transferred to a British or American tribunal because the Soviets have no serious charge against him for his conduct on the Eastern Front and cannot cope with the many murderers in custody. Adrián’s impersonation thus persists through interrogation, but survival under the name does not amount to freedom.

Identity, guilt, and the dead man’s papers

The episode makes identity at once practical and moral. Alfonso’s papers can make Adrián legible to authorities under a different name, but they cannot erase the events that led him to steal them or the witnesses he fears. The borrowed identity is an instrument for escaping consequences, not proof of innocence. Adrián’s readiness to kill and then inhabit another man’s biography also carries a bitter contrast: he hopes for a future founded on love while acting through the erasure of the person whose life he takes.

That contrast is reinforced by the novel’s movement from intimate motives to bureaucratic classification. Adrián survives the battlefield by passing as Alfonso; in Soviet custody, his Spanish accent and invented biography become the details by which officials decide where to hold him and whether another government should try him. The papers establish a usable fiction, while questioning tests its limits. The episode therefore begins a prolonged double life whose apparent success depends on other people accepting the name—and on the dead man remaining absent from the account.