Caída de Madrid (1939)

Caída de Madrid (1939) is the novel’s intimate account of Francoist victory as a sequence of dispossessions: Guillermo García Medina loses his place at the hospital, sees the city’s public life turned inside out, and returns to a home already emptied by others. The decisive blow is not only the change of power but the moment Guillermo recognizes that Amparo has left with a man and a travel bag; before the victors formally declare victory, he feels that he has lost the war.

The hospital changes hands

That morning Guillermo is still making rounds and has not finished visiting the first ward when Fortunato Quintanilla interrupts him. Quintanilla’s haste is troubling, but it is the unusually formal way he addresses Guillermo that signals the gravity of the news. Rather than take him to his office, he leads him to a first-floor bathroom and checks each of its three cubicles to make sure no one can overhear them. He explains that he no longer has an office: half an hour earlier, a committee led by Francisco Arrieta had arrived, entered without knocking, and announced that it was taking possession of the hospital in the name of the National Army.

The new authorities have made the takeover physical as well as ceremonial. The men wore blue shirts beneath their white coats, and Arrieta had a pistol fastened to his belt. Quintanilla admits he had not expected Arrieta or realized there were so many Francoist sympathizers inside the hospital. The occupation therefore exposes an existing presence within the institution even as it replaces its leadership.

Quintanilla tells Guillermo to go home and remain there until the situation becomes clearer. Uncommitted doctors and nurses, he says, can manage the hospital for a few days; he is sending the others home, and will leave himself. He removes his own white coat and orders Guillermo to take his off. Guillermo is not allowed to stop at his desk for his belongings, or even to retrieve his overcoat. The command abruptly ends his work and separates him from the hospital that had structured his day.

A city divided in the streets

Quintanilla and Guillermo leave through the ambulance entrance. Outside, Madrid looks like a different city from the one in which they had woken that morning. Monarchical flags have appeared on balconies that had never displayed them, as well as on others that had shown the Republican tricolor only months earlier. The pavements are nearly empty; the few people moving through them walk alone, hurry, and keep their eyes lowered.

Before they go their separate ways, Quintanilla embraces Guillermo. Guillermo returns the embrace, moved by the possibility that it might be their last. Their farewell is brief, reduced to the same exchange of good wishes and thanks. Quintanilla walks toward Legazpi; Guillermo heads toward Cibeles, then takes Alcalá and walks along the edge of Retiro Park toward Velázquez Street. The route gives the city’s transformation a human scale: a colleague disappears in one direction while Guillermo makes his way toward home through streets where the old order has already begun to vanish.

In Guillermo’s neighborhood, the public mood is louder and more divided. Francoist supporters lean from balconies and gather on pavements, raising their right arms and shouting the Falangist greeting, “Arriba España!” Across from them, refugee families who had occupied empty apartments in the district since the summer of 1936 are now leaving, carrying what they own and heading toward nowhere in particular. Guillermo avoids the jubilant supporters and uses the departing families as cover, moving close to the building fronts. The contrast makes the victory visible not as a single public celebration but as celebration and forced flight sharing the same streets.

The recognition at Hermosilla and Núñez de Balboa

Near the corner of Hermosilla and Núñez de Balboa, Guillermo stops hurrying. First he recognizes a familiar object: a travel bag of worn, softened brown leather being placed in the back seat of a car. Only afterward does he recognize the man putting it there, who smiles at him briefly before joining the spoils. Guillermo cannot make out the person in the front passenger seat before the car disappears.

The order of recognition gives the bag its force. It connects the political defeat outside to an intimate departure inside Guillermo’s life, while the missing passenger leaves the scene partly unresolved. At that instant, before his enemies have officially proclaimed victory, Guillermo feels that he has lost the war. The public collapse and the personal loss arrive together, but they are not identical: the car’s departure makes the conquest of Madrid immediate in a way that flags and slogans cannot.

The house stripped bare

Guillermo’s return reveals that the home has already been violated. Amparo has not left the rooms in order: clothes are piled in the entrance, objects cover the available surfaces in the sitting room, and the hallway is littered with rubble. Guillermo had left at eight that morning, and it is not yet two. The damage is therefore the work of a few hours, carried out in haste but with deliberate force.

The intruders have broken through the wall of his grandfather’s study with a sledgehammer to remove the safe. Someone then tried a blowtorch on its lock, leaving a strong smell of burned paint, before a locksmith apparently succeeded in opening it. The safe stands open and empty. Only Don Fermín’s gold has been taken; copies of the grandparents’ wills, the house deed, and other family papers have been left scattered on the floor. Dark shoeprints trample the documents. Their destruction is materially unnecessary, yet it wounds Guillermo as an added insult to the theft.

Before leaving, Guillermo curses, then eats the two Franco rolls still untouched on the kitchen table. He has gone a day and a half without food, and there is nothing else in the pantry. The bread is hard, but he finds it better than he would have liked. He puts on his grandfather’s coat, which is too wide and too short and much worse than the overcoat he has lost, takes his briefcase, and walks out without locking the door. Even this small sequence registers how much has been taken: food, clothing, papers, and the ordinary security of returning home.

The typed list and the unfinished flight

At a dairy on Ayala Street, Guillermo asks after the boy who usually carried messages to Experta. He learns that the boy has not been to work for three days and is given his home address. Later, as Guillermo passes the house that will never again be his, he sees four Falangists standing outside the entrance. One carries a typed sheet of paper. Guillermo changes sides of the street and keeps walking rather than stopping to discover whether his name is on the list.

The ending replaces certainty with a threat that remains unconfirmed. The loss of the home has become a possible arrest, but Guillermo does not learn what the list contains or whether he is named. His decision not to check it is also a practical necessity: with the new authorities already at the door, stopping could expose him. The fall of Madrid is thus rendered not as a completed public ceremony but as a narrowing series of choices, ending with Guillermo moving forward without his home, his belongings, or knowledge of what awaits him.