Sitio de Madrid (1936–1939)

The siege of Madrid (1936–1939) is both a military condition and a lived urban reality: the city remains encircled by active fronts while political divisions, shortages, and fear govern daily life. It frames Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s intelligence work and the narrator’s experience of a city whose inhabitants are watched, hungry, and eventually driven into flight.

A besieged city divided

By the summer of 1937, the disappearance of Andreu Nin had inflamed the small group of POUM supporters in Madrid and drawn support from many of the city’s anarchists. Socialists were more numerous but deeply divided; socialists and communists together outnumbered them, and broadly supported the government in Valencia and the Madrid Defense Junta, a parallel authority in the besieged city. Agreement on that support was itself incomplete. The political map of Madrid was therefore not a simple contest between the besieged city and its enemy: competing factions struggled within the Republican side while the fronts remained active outside it.

Manuel is warned that the Military Intelligence Service is a nest of vipers, with Soviet advisers exercising considerable influence, communists looking away, and socialists undermining one another. Although the Madrid Defense Junta had closed the city’s checas at the end of the previous year, illegal detention centers continued to operate without oversight; when one was shut, another opened. The danger of the siege thus extended beyond bombardment and military defeat to unaccountable repression in the Republican rear.

The Republic’s dependence on Soviet military aid sharpens that conflict. Breaking with the Soviet Union would mean losing the only available source of aircraft, tanks, and heavy weapons, while continuing the war without them would risk handing Spain to Franco. The siege leaves political and military leaders confronting a brutal constraint: the power they distrust is also the support they cannot readily do without.

Intelligence under surveillance

Manuel accepts a mission that places him inside this fractured wartime city. His direct contact offers a coded system and access to a guarded security chamber in the Telefónica building, where Manuel would send messages himself, without an operator. The arrangement reflects the need to protect intelligence in a place where even official channels are compromised by suspicion and factional rivalry.

His two official contacts keep him under surveillance from his first day in Madrid. Rodríguez provides a daily cleaner for the apartment on calle Infantas, while Romero supplies a car and chauffeur for travel around the city. Manuel adapts to both forms of scrutiny: he leaves nothing incriminating at home and limits conversation with the driver to football and women. He works without incident through the summer, carefully separating his outward routine from the intelligence he is gathering.

By September, Manuel is certain that Madrid will not see an episode like the Barcelona uprising. That conclusion might have ended his mission, but he has accumulated too much valuable information to abandon it. His continuing work shows how the siege persists as an intelligence environment even when a particular feared uprising seems unlikely: the city’s danger lies as much in the information it conceals and the rival authorities watching one another as in the battle lines around it.

Hunger and the altered city

A later meeting gives the siege a bodily measure. The narrator has grown used to seeing Manuel in pajamas, but when Manuel returns after roughly a year away, his transformation is unmistakable. He wears a well-brushed camel-hair coat and a fine-quality hat; his skin looks relaxed and glossy, suggesting a varied diet rich in fresh produce. In Madrid, by contrast, the narrator and other residents have almost forgotten fruit and vegetables. The contrast makes food scarcity visible through Manuel’s appearance rather than through an abstract account of privation.

The city’s hunger becomes a collective fixation. The narrator recognizes that the inhabitants of besieged Madrid share an unhealthy interest in food, an obsession that, as he observes retrospectively, would stay with them for many years. The siege therefore continues in memory beyond its immediate military chronology: deprivation leaves a durable mark on those who lived through it.

Flight and the feeling of defeat

As Francoist victory comes into view, Madrid changes street by street. In the narrator’s neighborhood, Francoist supporters celebrate from balconies and sidewalks, raising their right arms and shouting the Falangist greeting. Against them move dark silhouettes of refugee families, carrying what they own from apartments left empty in the summer of 1936 and heading toward an uncertain destination. The narrator avoids the celebrants and uses the departing families as cover, moving close to building fronts.

Near the corner of Hermosilla and Núñez de Balboa, a worn, tawny leather travel bag catches his eye as a man places it in the back seat of a car. The narrator recognizes the bag before recognizing the man, who smiles briefly before joining what the narrator calls his spoils. The person in the front passenger seat has already disappeared by the time the narrator can look closely. Before the enemy has officially proclaimed victory, the narrator feels that he has lost the war.

The apartment he enters afterward records the abruptness of the city’s collapse. Clothes are scattered across the entrance, objects cover the available surfaces in the living room, and rubble lies in the hallway. The wall of his grandfather’s study has been smashed with a sledgehammer in an attempt to remove the entire safe; a blowtorch has failed to release its lock, leaving the room smelling of burnt paint. In this sequence, the siege’s ending is not presented as a clean change of military control. It arrives as flight, celebration, looting, and the destruction of a private home, with the narrator’s personal sense of defeat preceding the formal announcement.