Edición de Bailén del Quinto Regimiento

The Quinto Regimiento’s Bailén edition is a paperback used to encode clandestine messages, and its practical value makes it more than a book: it is a tool for communication and, in a dangerous moment, a possible means of escape. Its role links Rafael Cuesta Sánchez’s attempted flight with Manuel’s later effort to send intelligence through official channels without exposing its contents.

A cipher key with a second purpose

When Rafael leaves the Junta’s headquarters after an evening event, he weighs whether to go straight home or flee immediately. He chooses to risk a visit to his apartment because the Bailén edition is on his bedside table. If the escape becomes difficult, he believes the book might save him. He walks to Infantas Street, checks that nobody is following, and reaches the building entrance—but no further. The object’s value thus rests on two connected uses: it can conceal a message, and it may help its holder survive the consequences of flight.

A message sent before the book arrives

On 22 December 1937, before the promised copy had reached Manuel, he sends a telegram from the central post office to a private address in Kensington. Its coded wording disguises a message concerning Meg, Madrid, a trip to Valencia, and health. The destination is the house Manuel had made available to the embassy secretary on returning to Spain. The delayed arrival of the book does not halt the operation: Manuel uses another channel while anticipating the edition’s later use.

The encoded letter reaches Valencia

A few days after Rafael’s death is reported, a letter with the peculiar return address of the San Carlos Hospital transfusion service is received by the Secretariat of the Presidency of the Government. Encoded according to a system based on the Bailén edition, its text appears to be gibberish; once deciphered, it gives Manuel’s surname and the name of his hospital. The book therefore provides a shared code that turns an apparently meaningless letter into identifying information.

Manuel carries the letter to Valencia in the Junta de Defensa’s special mail. He presents it to Dr. Velázquez as a report on the mobile transfusion service. Having met Velázquez at a reception for the Canadian delegation and later shown him the transfusion units, Manuel expects the doctor to recognize him, but not to receive him so quickly. Velázquez puts the letter into the outgoing-mail tray without reading its return address, sparing Manuel the elaborate explanation he had prepared. The code protects the message, while the plausible medical context helps it pass through a real administrative route.

From concealment to consequence

The edition’s significance emerges through the contrast between Rafael’s interrupted attempt to retrieve it and Manuel’s successful use of a code based on it. Rafael is knocked unconscious at the entrance to his building before he can reach the book; the narrator later reports that the man whose identity he had assumed died a second time on 17 January 1938. The coded letter, by contrast, gets through to Valencia. In the novel, the book’s power is not intrinsic: it depends on people who know how to use its text as a cipher and on the ordinary-looking routes—an address, a hospital report, the special mail—through which concealed information can travel.