When Manuel Cortes, the mayor of the Spanish village of Mijas, vanished in March 1939, it seemed to have little effect on his family. Their lives went on ¡mperturbably, while efforts by both friends and the police failed to turn up any trace of Manuel.
As mayor, Cortes had organized free education for all and parceled out some of the larger estates to landless laborers. During the bitter 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, he had sided with the Loyalists against the Nationalist rebels of General Francisco Franco. But after Franco's victory, Cortes found him-self marked for execution because of his wartime sympathies.
Instead of absconding ahead of the firing squad, the thirty-four-year-old Cortes disappeared into a hollow space between two walls of his foster father's house, which he entered through a hole concealed by a large picture. Thereafter, he spent his days in that cramped space, sitting on a child-size chair, eating what his wife, Juliana, secretly brought for him in a covered basket. He emerged only after night had fallen.
Juliana developed several small businesses to support Manuel and their daughter: distributing eggs, drying coarse grass for making sacks, and operating taxi-cabs. Thanks to her earnings, the family moved to their own house. Juliana smuggled Manuel through the streets after midnight, disguised as an old woman. Through his long, self-imposed disappearance, Cortes spent his time reading, listening to the radio, and helping Juliana dry the grass and keep the books. From his hiding place, he could look out a peep-hole to the street below. When his daughter married, he watched her wedding through a keyhole.
On March 28, 1969—thirty years after his exile began—he heard by radio that Franco was pardoning political offenders from the civil war. After official confirmation of his par-don, the aging radical
emerged into the sunlight for the first time in three decades.
