The Execution of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, is a decisive fact in the political history remembered by the novel: his execution in Alicante prison on 20 November 1936 turns him into the Falange’s “Great Absent One” and a martyr of the Crusade. The event also stands beside later scenes in which the dead are buried without names or records, exposing how political power can shape not only who lives and dies but whether a death is publicly acknowledged.

Identity and Political Legacy

José Antonio Primo de Rivera was the younger brother of Pilar Primo de Rivera, who became the Falange’s first, last, and only National Chief. The novel links his family status to the movement’s posthumous political language: after his execution in Alicante prison, he is elevated as a martyr of the Crusade and remembered as the “Great Absent One.” His death thus becomes more than a biographical endpoint; it supplies a potent symbol for the organization and its followers.

That legacy appears in the account of the Falange’s women’s organization. Its National Chief, Pilar Primo de Rivera, is described both through her place in the Primo de Rivera family and through her relationship to her executed brother. The juxtaposition shows how the movement’s leadership and memory are bound to family lineage, political martyrdom, and the public construction of a dead founder.

Death and the Concealment of Identity

The book’s later episodes echo the execution’s political significance through a different kind of death: a wounded man found with a credential from the Public Order Council of the Defense Junta must not be entered into any hospital under his own name. A police commissioner instructs the military commander to save him if he is alive, or to bury him as an unknown person if he is dead, without registering the body. The explanation is withheld; the man is described only as vital to the Republic’s interests. In this scene, concealment is not merely a consequence of death but an order imposed in advance, designed to prevent another attempt on the man’s life and obscure his identity from those seeking him.

The same logic becomes starkly visible when the narrator returns to his home after Madrid’s defeat. The house has been ransacked and the gold stolen, while family papers lie scattered under the footprints of those who searched it. Amid the destruction, he checks that a sealed envelope left by Manolo remains untouched. The episode places the protection of documents beside the erasure of people: papers can preserve a hidden history, while authorities and armed forces can strip a dead or endangered person of a name and a public trace.

Burial, Bureaucracy, and State Violence

A later account of a body recovered from Casa de Campo shows how official procedure can disguise violence. The coroner records death in the afternoon of 29 December and agrees that the autopsy can be skipped; the only injury is a fatal gunshot to the neck. The police report is attached to the death certificate, and the inspector’s superior assures him that he will handle the rest of the paperwork. By the next day, the body has already been buried. The inspector reflects that nothing makes police work easier than a good dictatorship.

At La Almudena, the corpse is assigned to a common grave for unidentified people. The cemetery official notes that, across the preceding decade, many people in Madrid had supposedly died from the same cause: cardiorespiratory arrest, with no further details. The grave workers see the bullet wound in the dead man’s neck, but the official explanation has already reduced him to an anonymous body and a routine cause of death. Their attention then turns to the dead man’s new-looking coat, which they decide to take and gamble over. The mundane theft sharpens the scene’s indictment: the machinery of concealment has made a killing administratively ordinary, and even the corpse becomes an occasion for casual exploitation.

From Political Martyrdom to Disappearance

The book also sets Spanish wartime and postwar concealment against Argentina’s later state terror. It describes the Operativo Independencia, launched under María Estela Martínez de Perón’s decree of 5 February 1975, as an intervention nominally directed at guerrillas in Tucumán but used to divide the country into five military zones and give their commanders sweeping authority. General Acdel Vilas framed its objective as cultural as well as military; the resulting terror struck civilians, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures. The account presents this campaign as a prelude to the more systematic repression of the Argentine military dictatorship.

Between the spring of 1976 and the autumn of 1982, that dictatorship forcibly disappeared thousands of people; the estimated toll is about 30,000, although many bodies were never recovered. Its clandestine apparatus divided repression into specialized tasks: abduction, secret detention, torture, execution, disposal of bodies, and the removal and reassignment of children born to detained women. In the “death flights,” living prisoners were drugged, bound, and thrown from military aircraft into the sea. These practices extend the novel’s concern from the posthumous elevation of José Antonio Primo de Rivera to the destruction of identity and evidence: political violence can turn a person into a martyr, an unregistered corpse, or someone whose disappearance leaves no body to bury.