Post-war exile of Adrian Galindo

Adrián Gallardo’s postwar flight turns identity into a means of survival—and a vulnerability that others can exploit. A former professional boxer who fought with the Blue Division and then volunteered for the SS, he survives the final defense of Berlin only to become a beggar there, carrying papers issued to Alfonso Navarro López while an impostor prepares to take Gallardo’s name and flee to Argentina.

Identity and Background

Gallardo had once enjoyed a moment of glory as a professional boxer. He later enlisted in the Blue Division and continued fighting as an SS volunteer, joining the last defense of Berlin. His wartime trajectory links the public identity of an athlete to successive military allegiances; after defeat, neither his earlier fame nor his service provides security.

Life After Berlin

By the time the war has ended, Gallardo is reduced to begging in Berlin. When a patrol stops him, he shows documentation belonging to a man named Alfonso Navarro López. The papers make clear that his survival depends on passing as someone else: the defeated soldier has no stable, recognized identity of his own in the circumstances described.

The Imposture and Its Consequences

Gallardo is not the only man whose future is bound to his name. Manuel Arroyo Benítez plans to assume Gallardo’s identity, infiltrate a clandestine network that helps Nazi war criminals and fugitives escape, and travel to Perón’s Argentina as one of them. The contrast is stark: Gallardo uses another man’s papers to survive in Berlin, while Arroyo intends to use Gallardo’s identity to enter an organized route out of Europe.

The identity substitution makes Gallardo’s name a contested instrument rather than a secure marker of personhood. In the novel’s account of three impostors, the real Gallardo is already living under borrowed documentation before another man sets out to become him. His flight therefore remains precarious even as it becomes the means by which Arroyo’s clandestine mission can proceed.