Arroyo's Escape from Madrid Under a False Identity

Manuel Arroyo’s escape from Madrid is bound to a reversal: as the Republican defeat becomes imminent, he cannot take Guillermo García Medina with him, so he gives Guillermo the false identity that once protected him. The handover makes survival a debt repaid in kind. Manuel leaves the city; Guillermo is left to face the victors as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, equipped with forged papers and money but warned that staying alive will depend on not attracting attention.

Background and the borrowed identity

When Guillermo first encountered the wounded man, the soldiers had taken him to the infirmary believing him dead. The commander found a Public Order Council credential in his wallet and received urgent instructions from Commissioner Basilio Rodríguez: if the man was dead, bury him as an unknown person without registering him; if he lived, save him, but keep him out of any hospital under his own name, lest someone try to kill him again. The warning made concealment part of the patient’s treatment from the outset. The man was already living behind an identity that could not safely be spoken aloud.

That identity was Rafael Cuesta Sánchez. As the war turned decisively against the Republic, Manuel explained that he owed Guillermo his life: without Guillermo, he would not have survived to deliver the news of defeat or contemplate exile. He offered to repay that debt by giving Guillermo the papers. The exchange is more than a practical arrangement between companions. Manuel’s own borrowed name, once a shield against assassination, becomes a means for Guillermo to survive the same political danger after the balance of power changes.

Arranging Manuel’s departure

The escape required preparation and patience. Guillermo approached Commissioner Rodríguez with the truth: the man known to him as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez was alive, living in Guillermo’s house, afraid for his life, and needed help getting out of Madrid. Rodríguez laughed at the request’s timing and asked why it had to be the third week of January. Guillermo did not know. After noting something in his agenda, the commissioner said that on the Monday of that week a corpse would appear bearing papers in the name of Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez, and that he would take care of it, although he was unsure whether everyone concerned would believe the story.

The arrangement was matched by a coded communication. On 22 December 1937, before the promised copy of Bailén reached them, Guillermo sent a telegram from the central post office to a private address in Kensington. Its compressed wording referred to a “fiancé,” Meg, Madrid, an episode, and travel to Valencia. Four days later Amparo told him that a telegram from London had arrived and admitted that she had opened it. Guillermo claimed it was a message for Quintanilla about money for the transfusion units, and used a teasing threat of punishment to divert her from asking why London wished his chief a good journey. The deception kept the travel arrangements and the telegram’s real purpose concealed inside the household.

Manuel had calculated the timing carefully. On 17 January 1938, the man called Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez died for a second time: the death made the identity he had assumed disappear with him. Guillermo did not learn of it until the next day, when Rodríguez sent the death certificate to the hospital. A few days later, a letter addressed in the name of the Hospital de San Carlos transfusion service arrived at the Government Presidency. Its apparent return address was deliberately strange, and its message was encoded using the Bailén edition Pepe had obtained. Decoded, it identified Guillermo and his hospital. The letter travelled to Valencia in a special Defense Council courier, passing through the hands of Dr. Velázquez, who accepted it as a report about the mobile transfusion service and placed it in outgoing mail without scrutinizing its address. The escape depended on ordinary professional contacts and a plausible medical pretext as much as on false names.

Leaving the house

Manuel warned Guillermo that someone would come to the hospital asking for him, then probably go to the house and take him out of Madrid that same day. It would not happen immediately, he thought: the arrangements would take at least five days, perhaps a week. In the event, Guillermo did not have to wait long. A civilian arrived, said that he had known Meg in Geneva, and gave the expected password. Guillermo took off his doctor’s coat and accompanied him home.

There Manuel briefly went to his room, then embraced Amparo and said goodbye to Guillermo. He left without taking even the clothes they had bought him when he recovered. His last words to Guillermo referred to their chess rematch: Manuel said the score stood at two to one and that he could still come back because it was his turn to play black. Guillermo answered that he would remember and told him to take care. Manuel urged both of them to be careful, especially Amparo. Guillermo did not understand the emphasis, but saw the moisture in her eyes. After Manuel had gone, Amparo declared that she had known from the beginning that he was a spy. His long confinement, the sudden visitor, and his departure without belongings made the secret legible to her at last.

The identity passed to Guillermo

When the war’s end became undeniable, Manuel told Guillermo that those in the central zone would be too far from the borders to escape. The Levante road might remain open until the last moment, but reaching it would not be enough: departure from Spain would require democratic powers to send ships to Valencia or Alicante and break the Francoist blockade. Manuel did not expect such help. Guillermo answered bitterly that this was as usual. Manuel agreed, then insisted that Guillermo still had him: Guillermo had saved his life, and he intended to pay that debt.

From a white envelope Manuel produced an identity card in the name of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez. He explained that the identity had been invented from beginning to end and could never be checked. When Manuel himself had used it, Cuesta had been six years older than Manuel, married, a member of the General Workers’ Union, and resident in Valencia. Guillermo’s version was different: he would be twenty-five, single, without membership in any left-wing party or union, a lifelong Madrid resident whose last address was in Salamanca. The changes were not incidental. They made the same assumed name fit Guillermo’s age and history while severing the political affiliations that could put him in danger under the victorious regime.

Manuel had destroyed the record of Guillermo’s union membership two days earlier. He said the card was indistinguishable from one issued by the Francoists: he had borrowed a genuine card because he could not request one openly, used matching paper, imitated an official’s signature, and copied a seal from Burgos. Guillermo needed only to add his own photograph and avoid trouble. The papers would eventually be exchanged for definitive documents, and Manuel advised him to apply on a crowded day. Forgery here is not a single false name but a full administrative performance, designed to survive inspection by looking routine.

Manuel also placed Swiss francs and British pounds in a smaller envelope. The money was half his savings, not a fortune, but he judged that Guillermo would need it more. He predicted that foreign currency would become more valuable in the new Spain. His instruction to Guillermo reduced the immediate task to its starkest terms: live—or, more cautiously, survive. The papers and cash did not promise safety; they made a precarious chance possible.

Defeat and the aftermath of escape

The story’s later return to the identity makes clear that departure from Madrid did not erase what had happened there. As Francoist supporters celebrated in the streets and refugee families moved away carrying their possessions, Guillermo saw a man loading a familiar, worn leather travel bag into a car. He recognized the man only after recognizing the bag. By the time he could look toward the passenger in the front seat, the car had disappeared. Before the victors formally announced their triumph, Guillermo felt that he had lost the war. The image of the departing bag and car turns Manuel’s escape into a personal absence witnessed amid the larger flight from the city.

When Guillermo reached home, he found that it had been ransacked. The intruders had smashed through the wall of his grandfather’s office with a sledgehammer to remove the safe; a blowtorch had failed to break its lock, leaving the smell of burnt paint, before a locksmith opened it. They took only Don Fermín’s gold, but family wills, the house deed, and other documents lay trampled on the floor. In the desk, however, the drawer that mattered to Guillermo had not been forced. He used the key on his own key ring to check that the envelope Manuel had given him a month and a half earlier remained sealed and intact. He then locked it away again. For three days, with the shutters down and no lights on, he stayed in the house unable to decide what to do. The identity had reached him safely; the city around it offered no clear route forward.

The episode’s later account of another body in Madrid sharpens the danger implicit in Manuel’s arrangement. An unidentified man shot through the neck was assigned to a mass grave at La Almudena Cemetery, where deaths among the undocumented were habitually recorded as cardiac arrests without further explanation. The burial process reduced a killing to paperwork and disposal; even the gravediggers discussed taking the dead man’s new coat. In the earlier escape, a death certificate and a fabricated name are tools for smuggling a living person out of danger. In the later burial, bureaucratic language helps conceal a real death. Across both episodes, documents and names are not neutral records: they can protect a fugitive, erase a person, or make violence pass as ordinary administration.