Nochevieja y Año Nuevo

Nochevieja y Año Nuevo frames a stark collision between the promise of a new beginning and the persistence of political violence. In Madrid, the transition into 1950 brings a shepherd upon another body in Casa de Campo; the killing is quietly processed as an ordinary death, and the dead man is buried without identification. Set beside an anonymous appeal dated January 1946, this New Year’s episode gives the calendar threshold a grim double meaning: those who resisted Franco had asked the outside world to act before they fell, but by 1950 the machinery that concealed their deaths was still working.

The turn of the year in Madrid

On 1 January 1950, Zacarías González Peña enters Casa de Campo at six in the morning, as he does every day. Sixty-eight sheep follow him to a hollow where he discovers a body. The date is a holiday, but the shepherd’s first response is shaped by the routine of his work and the danger of leaving his animals unattended. The day’s ordinary obligations continue around a discovery that, for him, is no longer unprecedented: he has found other dead people in the same place over the preceding five years.

This corpse differs from those earlier bodies. Someone has wrapped it in a carpet that circles the body several times; the carpet looks new and is mysteriously clean, with the blood at the wound in the man’s neck barely visible among its colorful patterns. Zacarías pulls the covering away, and the body rolls onto its back, lying like the other dead found in that patch of land. The care taken over the wrapping contrasts with the familiar fact of another killing. The carpet seems to preserve a trace of deliberate handling, while the corpse’s position returns it to a grim local pattern.

A shepherd, a watch, and a report

The man’s exposed left wrist reminds Zacarías of a lesson from his schoolteacher: private property was theft. He takes the dead man’s watch, apologizing to him and reasoning that the man no longer needs it while he has five children. Zacarías hides the watch beneath a loose floor tile and stows the carpet in the stable behind firewood before returning to his sheep. His act is neither presented as an investigation nor as a solution to the killing; it is a small, compromising response to poverty, made possible by the dead man’s absence of any further claim.

Only after tending to the animals does Zacarías go to the forest guards, whom he has notified about similar discoveries before. They call the Civil Guard. The local corporal is unavailable because he alone avoided the mussels that poisoned his colleagues at the New Year’s Eve dinner, so officers come from Pozuelo de Alarcón. Asked to accompany them by motorcycle, Zacarías protests that he cannot leave the flock: only thirteen of the sheep are his, and losing any of the others could ruin him. A forest guard offers to lead the officers instead. At the scene they confirm the shepherd’s account and find a man aged roughly thirty to thirty-five, about 170 centimetres tall, with dark brown hair and a robust build. His broken nose is the only possible identifying mark. Although dressed in a grey suit, white shirt, and dark overcoat, he has no wallet, papers, or even coins in his pockets.

The holiday’s police machinery

The discovery reaches Roberto Conesa Escudero, an inspector in Madrid’s Political-Social Brigade, as he is getting dressed for New Year’s Day. His chief asks him to inspect the body before notifying the court, since the location and circumstances might make the case one the police can manage without drawing attention. Conesa asks cautiously whether the dead man could be one of theirs; his chief says he has no official or unofficial information and directs him to decide whether the authorities can take the risk. The exchange makes the uncertainty itself part of the procedure: the police do not begin with a transparent inquiry, but with the question of what can safely be acknowledged.

Conesa takes charge at the scene and says he will handle the body and report himself. When a young guard asks whether they should call the judge, the older guard silences him with an elbow to the ribs. By three in the afternoon, Conesa has reported that a young on-call forensic doctor estimated the time of death as the afternoon of 29 December. The body bears no injury other than the fatal gunshot to the neck. Conesa persuades the doctor to agree that the autopsy can be skipped, avoiding a delay in burying a corpse already three days dead. They dress the body again and leave it at the depot with the police report attached to the death certificate in an envelope pinned to the sack. Conesa has written, as he puts it, the usual report; his chief congratulates him and takes responsibility for the rest of the paperwork.

Burial, anonymity, and the meaning of the date

The next day, Conesa learns that the body was buried soon after he left the forensic depot. It reached the old Eastern Cemetery, now called La Almudena, around seven in the evening and was assigned to a common grave for unidentified people. The narrator connects these anonymous Madrid dead to a decade-long pattern: people without identification repeatedly appear to have died from the same unexplained cause, cardiac arrest, with no further details supplied. Here the official language does more than fail to identify the victim. It turns a gunshot wound in the neck into an unremarkable death, and the common grave removes the possibility of a public record or a family’s claim.

The undertakers are told to remove the corpse from its sack because the sack must be returned; their supervisor remarks that such things cost money. They see the bullet wound and understand the absurdity of the stated cardiac arrest, yet the practical business of burial proceeds. The New Year episode thus shifts from the shepherd’s compromised but human encounter with the dead man to the state’s systematic handling of an identityless body. The season’s language of renewal is countered by concealment, routine, and the repetition of deaths that cannot officially be called what they are.

The abandoned appeal of 1946

The date resonates with a separate text in the novel: a testimony headed Madrid, January 1946, later presented to readers of the Paris journal Les Temps Modernes. Its anonymous writer says that the manuscript was written to prove that resistance continues, despite the risks borne by its author, typist, and courier. It insists that the book is neither autobiography nor propaganda, but an account of what is happening, and urges readers and governments to act before the remaining fighters fall. Its closing appeal, “For the honor of the Republic,” makes the stakes explicit: the hope facing its end is the belief that the Allied victory over the Axis will also bring down Franco.

The path of that testimony complicates the apparent immediacy of its plea. Marcelo Saporta wrote the manuscript in French, escaped clandestinely to France in 1948, and used the pseudonym Juan Hermanos rather than his own name, seeking to speak for Spanish resistance collectively. Jean-Paul Sartre, editor of Les Temps Modernes, changed the title to La fin de l’espoir. The novel explains that the Spanish version of the note is itself a translation of the French version published in 1949, not a straightforward original Spanish text. Its language bears traces of that route, while the anonymity and danger described in the appeal are also part of its actual transmission.

Read together, the 1946 appeal and the New Year’s death in 1950 give the turn of the year its political weight. The young people in Saporta’s testimony were students, apprentices, and young women newly entering work, many from impoverished republican middle-class families; they chose clandestine resistance in the conviction that the Axis defeat would be followed by Franco’s fall. Their expectation was not fulfilled. The appeal asks the world not to abandon them, while the later scene shows a dictatorship in which a man can be shot, stripped of identifying papers, removed from the ordinary legal process, and buried as an anonymous casualty. Nochevieja y Año Nuevo therefore marks not a clean break between past and future, but the persistence of a violence that the official record works to make disappear.