Manuel Arroyo is kidnapped and shot in Madrid after his covert work and assumed identity place him within reach of people who appear to know that he is dangerous. The attack nearly kills him, but he survives because a military doctor treats him and follows orders to keep his identity out of official records. His escape from death is also a lesson in the political world around him: suspicion travels through institutions, while survival depends on secrecy, improvised care, and documents capable of making one person appear to be someone else.

Background and the threatened identity

In June 1937, Manuel Arroyo registered at a Madrid hotel under the name Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, using credentials supplied through the Republic’s Directorate-General of Security. The paperwork was convincing but the life it described was invented: this Rafael was said to be a government employee born in Talavera de la Reina, affiliated with the UGT, married, and resident in Valencia. None of those biographical details was true. It was the first of many identities Arroyo would use.

The false identity belonged to an assignment entrusted to him by Juan Negrín, who had become head of government after the Barcelona fighting and the fall of Largo Caballero. Negrín tells Arroyo that he trusts him precisely because he trusts very few people, and connects the need to restore order in the Republican zone with the danger of further internal conflict. Arroyo’s cover is therefore not merely a private disguise: it enables sensitive work in a climate where political factions are watching one another and the government fears further upheaval.

By November, Madrid’s atmosphere has changed. Arroyo notices that conversations in corridors, shared coffees, shouted instructions, and jokes have disappeared; he has no proof that anyone suspects him, but sees that people suspect one another. He becomes more cautious. At a commemoration of the defense of Madrid on November 7, police commissioner Rodríguez warns him obliquely that whoever is behind the activity under discussion lacks the resources for the intended attack. Arroyo realizes that Rodríguez has pieced together the relationship between his own denunciations of Trotskyist and anarchist groups and the information reaching Valencia about them. Rodríguez, he concludes, will not expose him—but the cover has become unsafe, and Rafael Cuesta must leave Madrid.

Abduction and shooting

After the ceremony, Arroyo leaves the Junta de Defensa de Madrid’s offices with an ordinary farewell, as though he expects to return the next day. He considers leaving the city immediately, then risks going to his home in calle Infantas to retrieve a paperback edition of Bailén published by the Fifth Regiment. The book serves as a cipher for his messages and might save him if his flight becomes difficult. He walks there without seeing anyone follow him, but does not make it past the entrance.

Someone strikes him on the head as the door closes, knocking him unconscious. When he comes to, his hands are bound and a sack covers his head. He listens to at least three Spanish captors arguing about whether to take him away or interrogate him. Focused first on identifying their organization, he then recognizes that he may be about to die and that a dead man cannot pass on information. The car stops; one captor protests that this is the wrong place, while another silences him. Arroyo is pulled out while the engine is still running, thrown to the ground, and shot. He feels fire in his side and thinks he is dying; then consciousness gives way.

The attackers leave him at the entrance to a military barracks. A soldier later recounts that a black car pulled up at speed shortly before eight in the evening and stopped without switching off its engine. A passenger dragged out the sack-covered man, fired three shots, climbed back into the car, and shouted an insult as he left. The account makes the attack’s brutality plain, but not its authorship: Arroyo’s captors are Spanish, yet he never gets the information he was trying to extract from them.

Rescue and concealed treatment

The guards alert the medical staff, who carry Arroyo to the infirmary believing him dead. The doctor establishes that he is still alive. Meanwhile, the commander finds in his wallet a credential issued by the Junta de Defensa’s public-order office and telephones for instructions. He is told to remain at his post; a few minutes later, Basilio Rodríguez calls back with detailed orders and no explanation. If Rafael Cuesta is dead, he must be buried as an unknown person and entered in no register. If he is alive, he must be saved at any cost, without admission to a hospital under that name, because someone may try to kill him again.

Rodríguez tells the commander that the injured man is vital to the Republic’s interests, but the doctor understands that there is another essential fact: the attacker’s target is not simply a wounded official but a person whose identity must remain hidden. The orders make medical care and concealment inseparable. A hospital admission under the name on Arroyo’s papers could expose him to a second attack; official registration could turn the record intended to identify a patient into a route to find him.

The doctor takes control of the patient’s care, asks the others to leave, and insists that Pepe remain because he trusts him. The injured man’s blood type is recorded as B negative; the information is copied onto a separate sheet, and the credential attached to his shirt is removed and kept. When the commander doubts that there is any point in making such arrangements, the doctor assures him that the patient will live. Arroyo opens his eyes at that moment, as if his return to consciousness confirms the doctor’s authority. The doctor remembers Norman Bethune, but also recognizes how much he has learned from Fortunato Quintanilla: seal the wounds, prepare the patient for transfer to an operating theatre, and keep him calm. Arroyo can answer when asked whether he is able to speak.

Consequences and the continuing use of false papers

Arroyo survives the shooting, but the attack makes clear that his Madrid mission cannot simply continue under the same conditions. His vulnerability is heightened by the very documents that have enabled him to work: Rafael Cuesta’s papers establish a usable identity, but a name and credential can also direct hostile attention toward the person carrying them. The order to withhold him from hospitals and registers recognizes that official visibility may be lethal.

Later, Arroyo passes the fictional Rafael Cuesta identity to his rescuer, Guillermo García Medina. He explains that the identity was constructed so thoroughly that its original owner could not be investigated: Talavera de la Reina lay in the opposing zone, and the town had been bombed, destroying the church records that might otherwise test the story. Arroyo gives Guillermo a new version of the identity, with a different age and personal history, and explains that the papers have been fabricated to resemble documents accepted by the victorious authorities. The transfer turns a disguise once used for Republican intelligence work into protection for a man facing the changed dangers of defeat.

The episode’s later echoes sharpen its political significance without making the two situations identical. In Madrid, an attacker leaves an unregistered, apparently dead man at a barracks, and a commander is instructed to bury him without a name if he has died. In the later dictatorship, an unidentified body from the Casa de Campo is sent to a common grave under a routine death explanation, while evidence of the gunshot remains visible. The novel also places this earlier concealment beside the Argentine dictatorship’s organized system of clandestine detention, forced disappearance, executions, and disposal of bodies. The contrast is one of scale and system: Arroyo’s attempted killing is a covert attack amid Republican factional suspicion, while the later examples show disappearance operating as an instrument of state terror.

The shooting therefore links bodily survival to the struggle over who can be named, recorded, or erased. Arroyo lives because the doctor refuses to treat him as a corpse and because the commander follows instructions that keep the false identity from becoming an official trail. The episode leaves the attackers unidentified, but its consequences are specific: a near-fatal wound, a concealed recovery, and a newly urgent need to move through political danger under papers that can both save and expose their bearer.