Identidades falsas

False identities and forged documents are not merely disguises in the novel: they are tools for surviving war, crossing political borders, and manipulating the systems that classify and pursue people. The same documentary machinery that makes a person recognizable to officials can be turned against them, or used to create a new, usable identity. For Manuel Arroyo Benítez, Guillermo García Medina, and Adrián Gallardo Ortega, that strategy carries radically different moral consequences: a document can shelter a friend, sustain a clandestine life, or certify an identity acquired through murder.

Identity as a bureaucratic construction

The novel makes identity concrete through names, dates, addresses, affiliations, photographs, signatures, seals, and official files. On June 28, 1937, Manuel registered at a Madrid hotel as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, a government official supposedly born in Talavera de la Reina on January 12, 1904, a member of the UGT since 1929, married, and resident in Valencia. The papers had come from the Republican Directorate-General of Security and were impeccably prepared; every biographical detail they asserted was false. This was the first of the many identities Manuel would use.

The fiction worked because it was not just a name. Rafael Cuesta Sánchez had a government appointment, a published official notice, and a documentary biography designed to resist verification. The post of assistant government delegate to the Madrid Defense Council was so undefined that it had never existed before Manuel occupied it and would not exist afterward. The identity joined plausible paperwork to an invented public role, allowing the state’s own administrative authority to make its bearer legible.

When Manuel later passed this identity to Guillermo, he altered its particulars to fit a different life. Guillermo would be Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, an only child whose parents were dead, born in a Toledo village whose church and baptismal register had been destroyed in a bombing. Unlike Manuel’s earlier Rafael, Guillermo would be single, without left-wing party or union membership, and genuinely twenty-five; his latest address would be in Salamanca, though he had always lived in Madrid. Manuel had destroyed the UGT record attached to his own version. He explained that the new identity card had been filled out by hand, with a real official’s signature imitated and a seal copied from Burgos. Guillermo only needed to add his photograph and avoid trouble.

This careful tailoring shows how the novel treats documents as instruments for managing exposure. A village church destroyed with its baptismal book removes the ordinary record against which a birth might be checked; a broken union file severs a political affiliation; a copied seal lends falsehood the appearance of authority. The invented biography is effective not because it is elaborate for its own sake, but because its details anticipate what a clerk, police officer, or investigator might try to verify.

A borrowed identity as protection

Manuel’s gift to Guillermo is also a repayment of personal debt. He tells his friend that he owes his life to him and intends to pay that debt. The enclosed identity card makes the promise practical: from then on, Guillermo can travel as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez. Manuel supplies not only a name but a ready-made account of family, birthplace, age, residence, and political history, then explains how to exchange the provisional papers for definitive ones without attracting attention.

The identity proves itself in an ordinary administrative encounter. When Guillermo eventually presents his papers at a police station to exchange documents issued in Republican-held territory, the guard’s manner changes as soon as he sees them. Guillermo is directed to window seven, the counter for documents from the Nationalist zone, and is told he will not have to wait long. While people who had endured nearly three years of shortages, bombardment, and despair crowd the other queues, his forged identity moves him through the process with apparent ease. The contrast is stark: those around him are exposed to the bureaucracy as defeated Madrid residents; he passes as someone the new authorities can process without suspicion.

The papers survive even when Guillermo’s home does not. After returning to find the house ransacked, the grandfather’s safe broken open and Don Fermín’s gold stolen, Guillermo checks the envelope Manuel gave him. It is still closed and intact in a locked desk drawer. In a house where family documents have been scattered and trampled, that preserved envelope carries a different kind of inheritance: an identity created to keep him alive. Its safety does not resolve what he should do next, but it gives him an option when his former life has been stripped of security.

The protective identity later becomes so established that it outlasts the circumstances that created it. Decades afterward, Guillermo reflects that Rafael Cuesta Sánchez is supported by thirty years of good conduct and appears in numerous public documents. A police encounter with his daughters exposes the difference between the socially respectable man others see and the concealed history beneath his papers. Asked whether he is a leftist, he answers openly that he has been one since before the questioner was born. For a moment, Guillermo’s suppressed original self speaks through the identity that has protected him. The documents remain convincing; what changes is his willingness to let his political allegiance be heard.

Multiple names across borders

Manuel’s life becomes a sequence of identities adapted to changing jurisdictions and assignments. The novel’s character register records his use of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez from June 21, 1937, to January 25, 1938, alongside Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez from November 7, 1937, to January 17, 1938. In exile, he uses Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez again from the summer of 1939 until September 10, 1946. He then becomes Peter Louzán Valero, an American citizen of Spanish origin, until June 7, 1947, when he adopts Adrián Gallardo Ortega’s identity. From July 1, 1947, he also works under the name José Pacheco Hernández.

These names correspond to different kinds of passage through institutions. In Geneva, Manuel works for Pablo de Azcárate in an unofficial role connected to the exiled Republican government. He meets representatives of neutral and Allied countries in plazas, parks, and cafés, presenting himself as Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez, then sends reports to Taplow when he can find space on a British military plane. The false name is part of an intelligence routine: it accompanies discreet meetings and the movement of information across borders, rather than simply concealing him in a crowd.

The Stauffer network likewise shows identity being assembled through a practical chain of services. At Galileo 14, exhausted fugitives receive food and new clothes; the house also arranges accommodation and, for some, work. One visitor notices that the men do not speak Spanish. A replacement soldier regularly brings sealed envelopes bearing Madrid parish letterheads, and one envelope left open reveals a baptismal certificate with German names and a date in 1907. In this setting, documents and material aid reinforce one another: a refugee is not only hidden but equipped to appear as someone with a place in the records.

After taking on Adrián Gallardo Ortega’s name, Manuel also works as José Pacheco Hernández. On July 1, 1947, he begins a night job as a porter on Gran Vía, signing the contract in the office where Clara Stauffer has begun directing his life. His workmates call him José; at Galileo 14, people continue to call him Adrián, and a policeman greets him by that name while taking his fingerprints and issuing his new identity card. The two names coexist because different parts of the network require different kinds of recognition. He later rents a small, comfortable interior apartment on Calle del Pez with Clara’s help. His public and private identities are not a simple before-and-after: they overlap, maintained by separate relationships and settings.

Impersonation through violence

Adrián Gallardo’s assumption of Alfonso Navarro López’s identity provides the darkest contrast to Manuel’s borrowed papers. At a Berlin position on Wilhelmstrasse, Adrián shoots the crouching man responsible for operating the only functioning machine gun. He searches the dead man’s uniform for his documents, burns his own papers in the fire inside a perforated barrel used as a stove, and takes the dead man’s place. A Soviet tank passes without noticing him. Adrián has not fired at it; at that point he has abandoned the wish to die.

The identity change becomes decisive when Berlin falls. On May 2, 1945, Adrián emerges from the Wilhelmstrasse position with his hands raised, carrying Alfonso Navarro López’s documents but not showing the occupiers the corpse. The papers allow him to surrender under another man’s name. He needs a new identity because he had been at Klooga and fears that survivors could identify him and denounce him to the Russians. The novel explicitly distinguishes the motive from revenge or an immediate flare of guilt: he wants a chance at life under an assumed name, with hope of a future involving Agneta Müller. In taking Navarro’s papers, he commits another murder, but the new crime barely disturbs his conscience.

The assumed identity must then survive interrogation. After six weeks in a crowded cell, Adrián is questioned about why he speaks German so badly. Nearly eight months later, when a Russian officer who speaks Spanish interviews him, he gives a fictitious biography as Alfonso Navarro López. He has worked it out during days spent in darkness, eating poor food and sleeping sitting up among other prisoners. The officer does not record the details and sends him to prison to await trial, saying there is no serious charge against him for his conduct on the Eastern Front and that the Russians cannot manage the number of murderers in their custody. Here, the invented biography is a prepared defense, while the official’s indifference and the scale of imprisonment create another opening through which the identity can pass.

The character register makes the two men’s identities legible to the reader even when the institutions in the story cannot distinguish them. Adrián, born in La Puebla de Arganzón in 1917 and known as the boxer El Tigre de Treviño, becomes Alfonso Navarro López on May 2, 1945. The date anchors the impersonation in the day Berlin’s defenders surrender. For the authorities, the documents and spoken biography produce a plausible prisoner; for the reader, the narrative preserves the difference between the man named by the papers and the man who killed to obtain them.

Identity, visibility, and responsibility

The novel places forged identities alongside systems that make people visible for purposes of appointment, policing, political screening, imprisonment, and escape. Under the dictatorship in Argentina, that administrative logic becomes inseparable from state terror. The account of the Proceso describes an estimated thirty thousand forced disappearances between spring 1976 and autumn 1982, while acknowledging that the number cannot be fixed because many bodies were never recovered. Its clandestine apparatus divides repression into specialized tasks, including abduction, secret detention, torture, execution, disposal of bodies, and the theft and reassignment of children’s identities. In this context, destroying identity is not a private act of concealment but a method of government violence.

Manuel’s later report on the escape network gathers names and locations with extraordinary precision. It runs to more than four hundred typed pages and nearly a hundred photographs; it includes false and real names, private and professional addresses, dates, places, sea and air routes, and even the number of the flight Manuel took. He tells Guillermo that the information could have enabled authorities to arrest a hundred war criminals in Madrid and Buenos Aires in a single night. Instead, the report is not acted upon. The accumulation of identifying detail demonstrates that secrecy can be pierced by patient documentation, but the failure to make arrests shows that knowledge alone does not guarantee accountability.

That failure gives the novel’s recurring papers their double force. A forged identity can protect a Republican fugitive from a new regime, allow a clandestine doctor to keep working, or help an escapee disappear into postwar administration. The same skills can shelter people wanted for crimes, and a name taken from a murdered man can convert violence into apparent biography. Documents do not settle who someone is or what they have done. They determine what institutions can recognize—and, when power chooses not to look, what they are willing to let pass.