Archimboldi and El Cerdo meet in Mexico City when the vanished German writer is detained by local police and El Cerdo is summoned to intervene. Their night together turns an abstract literary disappearance into a brief physical encounter, yet offers no explanation for Archimboldi’s absence or destination: after hours in the city, he boards a flight north and disappears from El Cerdo’s life as abruptly as he had appeared.

The Call and the Hotel

El Cerdo’s account begins with a midnight telephone call and a short conversation in German. He dresses, drives to a hotel near the Mexico City airport, and arrives after one in the morning. In a third-floor room he finds two policemen and an old German sitting barefoot on the bed in a gray T-shirt and jeans, his hair uncombed, as though the police had interrupted his sleep. El Cerdo identifies himself as a senior government official and accompanies the officers upstairs.

The encounter is not presented as a formal arrest or a literary reception. One policeman is watching television; another leans against the wall smoking. When the officer who brought El Cerdo turns off the television and orders the policemen to leave, the second objects, only to be told to keep quiet. Before the officers go, El Cerdo asks Archimboldi whether they have stolen anything. Archimboldi says they wanted money but took nothing. El Cerdo’s response is that this is progress, a small, dry measure of the conditions surrounding the encounter.

Once the officers have left, El Cerdo sits beside the television and apologizes. Archimboldi says nothing, gets up, and goes into the bathroom. El Cerdo describes him as enormous—at least six foot six, nearly seven feet tall—and notices that, when he comes back, he has put on his shoes. The detail gives the encounter an unceremonious scale: the elusive writer is not introduced through his books or reputation, but through a room, a police interruption, and the practical signs of a person preparing to leave.

A Night Across Mexico City

El Cerdo offers Archimboldi a drive or a drink, adding that he will leave immediately if the older man is tired. Archimboldi replies that his flight is at seven in the morning. It is already after two, and El Cerdo is at a loss for what to say. He knows little of Archimboldi’s work; the Spanish translations have appeared in Spain and arrived late in Mexico. Three years earlier, while running a publishing house, he had tried to publish The Berlin Underworld, only to find that the rights belonged to a Barcelona publisher. The thought of how Archimboldi obtained his number, and who had given it to him, fills him with a happiness that seems to vindicate him as both a person and a writer. He agrees to go out.

Wearing a leather jacket over his gray T-shirt, Archimboldi follows El Cerdo to Plaza Garibaldi. The square is nearly empty of tourists; the remaining company consists of drunks, night owls, people going to supper, and mariachi bands discussing the latest soccer match. Shadowy figures watch the two men on the streets approaching the plaza. Since entering government work, El Cerdo has begun carrying a pistol, and he fingers it as they pass. In the bar, El Cerdo orders pork tacos, while Archimboldi drinks tequila and beer.

The meal draws El Cerdo into thoughts about how his standing has changed. Less than ten years earlier, speaking German in that bar with a tall old man might have provoked an insult or a fight; he would have had to apologize, explain, or buy drinks to prevent trouble. Now, he thinks, the gun beneath his shirt and his position high in government give him an authority that even the killers and drunks recognize. The episode places his new public power beside the everyday threat of violence, without making the danger disappear.

Over the meal El Cerdo weighs whether to leave Mexico for a diplomatic post in Europe. An ambassadorship, or at least a cultural attaché position, might allow him to write again; he imagines living in Italy or near it and spending long stretches in Tuscany and Rome on an essay about Piranesi’s imaginary prisons. He also considers the cost: distance from power, which he has learned is never advantageous. These reflections are his, not Archimboldi’s. The older man’s presence occasions them, but remains largely unreadable.

At some point El Cerdo asks whether Archimboldi was supposed to have disappeared. Archimboldi looks at him and smiles politely. The question makes the encounter’s central contradiction explicit: the writer is present, but his presence does not resolve the disappearance. No explanation follows, and the smile supplies no answer.

From the Historic Center to the Airport

After eating, the two walk around the Zócalo, past the plaza and Aztec ruins that El Cerdo describes as stone flowers amid wasteland. They continue toward Plaza Santo Domingo, whose arches by day shelter scribes with typewriters ready to prepare letters and legal claims. They also drive around the Angel on Reforma, but it is dark, so El Cerdo can only describe it to Archimboldi, who looks up from the open window of the car. The route carries them through landmarks and civic histories, while the late hour repeatedly limits what can actually be seen.

They return to the hotel at five in the morning. El Cerdo waits in the lobby, smoking, while Archimboldi comes down in the same gray T-shirt and jeans with one small suitcase. The streets toward the airport are empty, and El Cerdo runs several red lights. He struggles to find conversation. He has already asked whether Archimboldi has visited Mexico before; Archimboldi says this is his first time, an answer El Cerdo finds unusual for a European writer. As traffic thickens near the airport, Archimboldi tries to say goodbye, but El Cerdo insists on carrying his suitcase. It has wheels and is so light that it hardly weighs anything.

The destination changes in the final stretch. El Cerdo understands that Archimboldi is flying to Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora in northwestern Mexico. When he asks about Hermosillo, Archimboldi corrects him: he is going to Santa Teresa, a city El Cerdo has never visited. El Cerdo knows Hermosillo from earlier literary talks and describes Santa Teresa as large, industrial, and troubled, not a pleasant place. Archimboldi says he thinks it is a big city; El Cerdo confirms that it is.

The Card and the Disappearance

Using his identification, El Cerdo accompanies Archimboldi to the departure gate. Before they part, he gives him a government contact card in case he runs into trouble. Archimboldi thanks him. They shake hands, and El Cerdo never sees him again. The card is a modest practical gesture, but it marks the limit of what their meeting can provide: access and protection are offered, while the reason for Archimboldi’s journey remains unstated.

El Cerdo later recounts the encounter to Rodolfo Alatorre, who repeats it to the European critics Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, and Liz Norton. The chain of retelling frames the meeting as a report passed between people rather than a direct account from Archimboldi himself. The critics decide not to tell others what they know, reasoning that discretion is preferable to raising false hopes. Archimboldi’s appearance has therefore made the rumor of his disappearance more concrete without making him available to the public or to the scholars seeking him.

Santa Teresa and the Wider Narrative

The encounter’s destination links Archimboldi’s private itinerary to the novel’s account of Santa Teresa. During their later drive through the city, the critics see unpaved western streets and makeshift housing, neglected central plazas, wealthier eastern neighborhoods, abandoned factories to the north, and poor districts extending beyond them. To the south are rail lines, shantytown soccer fields, a garbage-filled gully, and the distant industrial warehouses of the maquiladoras. The city seems to expand continuously; at its northern edge, a fence divides Mexico from the United States and the Arizona desert beyond. Black vultures stand in barren fields at the outskirts.

That setting gives weight to the otherwise unexplained choice of destination. El Cerdo has warned that Santa Teresa has factories and problems, while the critics’ later tour makes visible an uneven urban landscape shaped by industrial growth, poverty, and the border. Much later, the novel’s account of the killings identifies the Uribe family’s cross-border business connections: Pedro Uribe’s more than one hundred cargo trucks carry goods from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border, while property and family ties extend into Arizona. These later details do not explain Archimboldi’s purpose, but they place his arrival in a city where industrial, political, and cross-border networks converge.

The meeting is consequently both a rare contact and a withheld answer. Archimboldi is seen eating, walking, riding in a car, and boarding a plane, but the narrative gives no account of what he intends to do in Santa Teresa. He departs with a single light suitcase and a card from a government official; El Cerdo is left with the memory of the night and a story that passes onward. The encounter narrows the distance between the missing writer and those who seek him, then restores that distance at the departure gate.