The Pyrenees are the mountain frontier between France and Spain through which refugees and fugitives attempt to cross when legal passage is closed or unavailable. In the novel, the range is not merely a geographical barrier: it is a dangerous, improvised route connecting postwar displacement to the protection network operating in Madrid, and a recurring measure of the risks people accept to escape pursuit.

A Frontier of Flight

After France’s liberation, German fugitives crossed the Pyrenees into Spain to avoid reprisals by the Resistance. Many were ordinary soldiers, but as Germany’s defeat became imminent, other kinds of fugitives began entering the country as well. Some were detained at Nanclares de Oca, a prisoner camp built by Republican prisoners and later used especially to confine International Brigades members. The mountain passage thus led not directly to safety, but into a Spanish system in which some arrivals were imprisoned while others received protection.

Routes Made by Networks

The clandestine crossings depended on guides and intermediaries. Witness accounts described German prisoners who had crossed the Pyrenees and were later held at Nanclares; a woman with influence at the camp supplied them with food and clothing and carried their correspondence. In Madrid, Clara Stauffer’s house received escaped prisoners and helped provide for their next steps. The mountain route was therefore one link in a broader chain of passage, shelter, documentation, and onward movement rather than an isolated act of escape.

The Invented Journey and the Real Crossing

When Manuel Arroyo Benítez and Guillermo constructed a cover story for the false Adrián Gallardo, they built it around a plausible wartime journey through Catholic contacts. In the story they presented to Stauffer, a Berlin priest shelters Adrián and a German companion in Bavaria; after the priest’s health fails, he arranges for a farmer to hide them in a van and take them across the Swiss border. They travel onward with homemade safe-conducts supplied by priests, reach France, and separate. The account then has Adrián cross the Pyrenees on foot in April 1947 with a guide provided by a priest near Perpignan, before spending more than a month reaching Madrid. The route is fabricated for one listener, but its details draw on the real use of religious networks to obtain shelter and transport.

Crossings, Risk, and Exile

For Arroyo’s own return to Spain on 10 September 1946, the Pyrenees were a route he considered but did not take. The French border was closed, and crossing the mountains with a clandestine guide risked a fall that could end his mission before it began. He entered through Gibraltar instead, under an American identity. The contrast makes the mountains a practical choice as well as a symbol: a passage could offer concealment, but it could also expose a traveler to physical danger and derail the purpose of the journey.

The range also belongs to the novel’s larger history of repeated displacement. After the fall of France, German fugitives crossed into Spain; in the fabricated account, Adrián makes the same passage in reverse circumstances as a Spanish volunteer returning from exile. Decades later, the dictatorship’s repression in Argentina drives thousands to seek refuge abroad, while Spanish Republicans who had once made new lives across the Atlantic face another forced exile. Across these movements, borders and routes repeatedly divide safety from danger without guaranteeing a secure home.