La dictadura franquista

La dictadura franquista is portrayed not only as a victorious authoritarian regime but as a machinery of identification, coercion, concealment, and impunity. Across the novel, a document can determine whether someone is protected or exposed, while a death can be made administratively invisible; the same political order that shelters Nazi fugitives also normalizes the disappearance of evidence and responsibility.

Power, surveillance, and identity

During the Spanish Republic’s wartime crisis, Manuel Arroyo Benítez is sent to Madrid under an identity supplied by the Republican security authorities: Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, a fictitious official whose papers describe him as a married UGT member born in Talavera de la Reina. The episode establishes that identity documents are not neutral background details. They are instruments through which a state makes people legible, assigns them a place in public life, and can expose them to danger. Later, Manuel gives Guillermo García Medina a carefully adapted version of the same identity, complete with a false biography and papers designed to pass inspection under Francoist rule.

The regime’s documentary authority is visible at the police station where Guillermo presents those papers for exchange. The guard’s suspicion gives way to deference when he sees the credential, and Guillermo is directed to the proper counter. In the crowded lines, however, he recognizes the defeated people of Madrid: the people who endured nearly three years of deprivation, bombardment, and despair now waiting to have their own papers processed. The contrast makes bureaucratic recognition double-edged. The false document helps Guillermo survive, but the same administrative system sorts the population into those who can move safely through official channels and those left exposed to the victorious state.

That vulnerability extends to people pursued for political reasons. A Republican official’s orders concerning the wounded Rafael Cuesta instruct military personnel to save him if alive, but to bury him as an unidentified person if dead, without entering his name in any register. The instruction is presented as an effort to prevent another attempt on his life, yet it reveals how secrecy can be used even by those trying to protect someone: a person’s survival depends on controlling whether the authorities can identify and locate him. The novel’s recurrent concern with false identities therefore has a grim counterpart in official anonymity imposed on the dead.

The defeated city and its dispossessed

When Guillermo returns to his home in Madrid, the new order has already reached inside it. The house is ransacked; a wall in his grandfather’s study has been smashed with a sledgehammer, and the safe has been taken after an unsuccessful attempt to force its lock with a blowtorch. The gold belonging to Don Fermín has been removed, while family documents—including copies of wills and the deed to the house—lie trampled on the floor. The violence is at once material and archival: property is seized, and the papers that might establish family history or ownership are treated as disposable.

The scene follows Guillermo’s glimpse of the changed streets. Francoist supporters raise their arms and shout the regime’s salute, while refugee families leave the district carrying what they can. He sees a familiar leather travel bag being loaded into a car and recognizes the man handling it only after the bag catches his eye. The sight of those departing families and the apparent seizure of his own household’s property makes the political defeat intimate: before victory is officially proclaimed, Guillermo feels that he has lost the war. The surrounding household, neighborhood, and records are all being reorganized by the victors.

At the same time, the novel does not reduce the regime’s operation to public spectacle. Its power is also expressed in quiet accommodations: people seek papers, avoid attention, and survive by learning how official procedures work. In that setting, the invented identity is not merely a disguise but a way of navigating a state whose records and checkpoints can turn ordinary life into a test of political safety.

Sheltering fugitives and obstructing accountability

The regime’s postwar political protection becomes visible through the traffic at Clara Stauffer’s home at Galileo 14. After renovations in 1945, the house has office rooms, a new telephone line, secretaries, and closets filled with men’s clothes and shoes in a range of sizes. New visitors arrive: thin, exhausted men who appear to have escaped from European prisons or been released from Nanclares. They are fed, given clothing, and apparently helped to find lodging and perhaps work; they return to the office looking much better than when they arrived.

The clandestine assistance has a documentary dimension. A Spanish replacement soldier brings sealed envelopes bearing the letterheads of Madrid parishes. When one is left open, Sole finds a baptismal record carrying German names and a date in 1907. The parish document, normally a record of religious identity, has become part of a mechanism for giving fugitives a usable past. That system is supported by more than private hospitality: it involves papers, an office, a telephone, clothes, and repeated administrative activity. Its ordinary-looking routines make escape and concealment sustainable.

The danger of exposing the network shapes Manuel’s later calculations. He believes that Guillermo may be helping to move stolen artworks, jewelry, antiques, and perhaps precious metals out of Spain, and suspects that the operation could connect Clara Stauffer’s network to Hans Lazar and Otto Skorzeny. He hopes that a dossier of names, dates, and concrete evidence could do what a published interview alone could not: establish that Spain sheltered and helped war criminals escape. In his assessment, proof that Spanish territory had been used to move looted property could force Franco’s government to sacrifice the network to contain the political damage. The proposed pressure point is not merely the fugitives’ presence, but the state’s possible complicity in protecting them and facilitating the movement of plunder.

A separate episode shows the network’s use of postwar bureaucracy to conceal a fugitive’s past. Jan Schmitt, a war criminal in hiding, is given papers as Johannes Grunwald, a native and resident of Schöneberg. With help from his girlfriend’s father, he obtains a municipal police post that is formally restricted to people from the district. Once he begins patrolling in uniform, the trace of his former identity disappears. He marries Agneta in June 1946, and their first child is born the following February. The narrative’s bitter irony lies in the ordinary shape of this new life: false registration and local connections convert an unacknowledged criminal past into respectable employment and family security.

The administration of an unrecorded death

The novel’s treatment of Francoist impunity reaches a stark conclusion in the investigation of a body found in the Casa de Campo on New Year’s Day. Inspector Roberto Conesa is asked to assess the scene before the matter reaches a judge. His superior distinguishes what can be said officially from what is known unofficially, and leaves open the possibility that the death might expose risks for the authorities. Conesa finds no signs that the victim fought back: the man has been killed with a single close-range shot beneath the jaw, apparently fired through a silencer. The method points to a professional execution, not an accidental shooting or a drunken quarrel.

The process that follows turns this evidence into an administrative fiction. A forensic doctor estimates that the man died on the afternoon of December 29. The autopsy is waived, the body is dressed again, and the police report is attached to the death certificate in an envelope pinned to the burial sack. Conesa has written the familiar explanation; his superior congratulates him and takes responsibility for the remaining paperwork. By the time Conesa returns to work, the body has already been buried. He understands that the dictatorship makes police work easier precisely by permitting the machinery of justice to be bypassed.

At La Almudena Cemetery, the corpse is assigned to the common grave used for unidentified people. The cemetery’s workers recognize the bullet wound in the neck, even as the paperwork reduces the death to the same supposed cardiac arrest routinely recorded for other undocumented dead. Their attention turns, too, to the victim’s new overcoat: one proposes taking it because the dead man no longer needs it, and another suggests hiding it in a locker before they draw lots for it. The scene does not confuse their opportunism with the state’s responsibility; instead, it shows how a false official account can pass down through institutions and meet the casual self-interest of those handling the evidence.

A legacy reframed by Argentina

The novel places Francoist rule within a larger history of authoritarian state violence rather than treating it as an isolated national case. Its account of Argentina links military dictatorship to the Cold War National Security Doctrine and to the earlier Operation Independence. In 1975, that operation is presented as a campaign against guerrillas in Tucumán, but its military structure divides the country into five zones and grants their commanders sweeping power. The stated objective broadens from armed insurgency to what the army calls cultural subversion, making civilians—including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures—targets of terror.

After the coup of March 24, 1976, Argentina’s repression becomes a clandestine system of forced disappearance. The novel estimates that about thirty thousand people disappeared between the spring of 1976 and the autumn of 1982, while noting that figures vary because many bodies were never recovered. Specialized task groups carry out abductions, secret detention, torture, executions, disposal of bodies, and the separation of newborn children from detained mothers for adoption by families aligned with the dictatorship. The death flights represent the system in its most explicit form: living prisoners, bound and drugged, are taken out over the sea and thrown from military aircraft.

That later history sharpens the novel’s reading of Francoist Spain. Spain becomes, paradoxically, a destination for Argentines fleeing repression, even as the account recalls how Franco first protected and later protected Perón, and how Latin American dictators treated Franco as a model. The story thus links political refuge and political inheritance: the same Spain that had sheltered Nazi fugitives and obscured executions is also a place people flee to escape another dictatorship, whose practices include the theft of children from political prisoners. Across these periods, the recurring struggle is over who can be identified, whose suffering enters the record, and whether the state can make violence disappear by controlling the documents that describe it.