Archimboldi secretly travels to Mexico

Archimboldi’s secret journey to Mexico turns the disappearance of a celebrated writer into a physical destination: after years outside public view, he appears in a Mexico City hotel, then heads north toward Santa Teresa. The episode is relayed through several people rather than presented as a direct account of his own intentions. Its small, practical details—a midnight call, an encounter with police, a nearly weightless suitcase, and a first flight to Sonora—make the journey legible while leaving its purpose unresolved.

The Encounter in Mexico City

The account reaches Piero Morini through Rodolfo Alatorre, who says that a friend of his, the writer Héctor Enrique Almendro, known among his friends as El Cerdo, had met Archimboldi only recently. Morini initially doubts the claim: Alatorre has read little of Archimboldi’s work, while Archimboldi has long been understood to have vanished. The story therefore begins not with a public announcement but with an improbable meeting whose significance becomes clear only as it is retold.

El Cerdo’s account begins with a telephone call at midnight. After speaking briefly in German, he dresses and drives to a hotel near the Mexico City airport, arriving after one in the morning. In the lobby, a clerk and a policeman are waiting; upstairs, in a third-floor room, he finds an old German sitting on the bed in a gray T-shirt and jeans, barefoot and with uncombed hair. Three policemen are present. One watches television, another smokes by the wall, and the third has brought El Cerdo to the room.

Before leaving, El Cerdo asks the policemen whether they have stolen anything. The old man says that they demanded money but took nothing. El Cerdo then asks which station the officers belong to and sends them away. Once they are gone, he apologizes. Archimboldi goes into the bathroom without speaking; when he comes out wearing shoes, El Cerdo offers either a drive around the city or a drink. Their encounter begins under the pressure of police interference, but El Cerdo’s response is to make room for an ordinary conversation.

A Night Between Power and Literature

Archimboldi tells El Cerdo that his flight leaves at seven in the morning. It is already after two, yet El Cerdo agrees to go out with him. He puts on a leather jacket over his gray shirt, and the two travel to Plaza Garibaldi. The late hour has thinned the crowds: tourists have returned to their hotels, while night owls, people going to supper, and mariachi bands remain. As they walk, El Cerdo fingers the pistol he has carried since beginning work for the government. The weapon and his official position mark how much his place in Mexican society has changed.

Over pork tacos, tequila, and beer, El Cerdo reflects on that change. Less than ten years earlier, he thinks, speaking German with a tall foreigner in the same bar might have provoked an insult or a fight. Now his government status and the gun beneath his shirt seem to give him an untouchable authority. His thoughts move from this new power to possible work as an ambassador or cultural attaché in Europe. Such a post might let him return to writing, including an essay on Piranesi’s imaginary prisons, but it would also remove him from the power he has learned not to relinquish. Archimboldi’s arrival thus occurs within a conversation shaped by two opposed absences: the writer is a vanished public figure, while El Cerdo weighs the cost of leaving the political influence he has acquired.

El Cerdo eventually asks whether Archimboldi was supposed to have disappeared. Archimboldi responds with a polite smile rather than an explanation. The question names the contradiction at the center of the encounter: the missing writer is present, but his reappearance does not resolve why he disappeared or what he intends to do next. When Alatorre later recounts the story to Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, and Liz Norton, they call El Cerdo, who confirms the account in general terms. Alatorre and El Cerdo are not simply acquaintances; their relationship has a teacher-and-student, or older-and-younger-brother, dimension. El Cerdo had secured Alatorre a scholarship in Toulouse, a concrete sign of the esteem and influence he brings to their friendship.

The Journey North

El Cerdo and Archimboldi remain together until five in the morning. After eating more tacos and drinking tequila, they walk through the Zócalo and past the Aztec ruins, then go to Plaza Santo Domingo and drive around the Angel on Reforma. The Angel is dark that night, so El Cerdo can only describe it to his companion. The itinerary is a nocturnal tour of the capital, but it yields no account of Archimboldi’s past or a stated reason for his trip.

At five they return to the hotel. Archimboldi comes down from the elevator carrying one suitcase and wearing the same gray T-shirt and jeans. The suitcase has wheels and weighs almost nothing. El Cerdo drives him toward the airport, running several red lights on the empty roads. He has already asked whether Archimboldi has visited Mexico before; the writer says that this is his first time, an answer El Cerdo finds unusual for a European author. At the airport, Archimboldi tries to say goodbye, but El Cerdo insists on carrying the suitcase and accompanying him.

Archimboldi’s first stated destination is Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora in northwestern Mexico, near the United States border. Asked what he will do there, he hesitates and says he is going to see what it is like. El Cerdo is not certain that these were the exact words; perhaps Archimboldi said that he was going to learn something. The uncertainty matters: the narration preserves the journey’s direction but withholds a settled explanation of its aim.

When El Cerdo repeats the destination, Archimboldi corrects him: he is going to Santa Teresa, not Hermosillo. He asks whether El Cerdo knows the city. El Cerdo has visited Hermosillo to give literary talks but has never been to Santa Teresa. Archimboldi says he thinks it is a big city. The correction makes Santa Teresa the destination that gives the secret journey its narrative consequence, even though the reason he chooses it remains unstated.

Arrival at the Novel’s Border City

The later descriptions of Santa Teresa enlarge the significance of Archimboldi’s destination without supplying a motive on his behalf. The city is depicted as sprawling and uneven: its western edge includes unpaved streets and makeshift housing; its center has neglected arcades and old buildings; its eastern neighborhoods include the university and more affluent districts; and its north and south contain industrial remnants, poor settlements, rail lines, and highways. From the city’s edge, the United States border and the Arizona desert are visible. Industrial parks are being encircled by slums, and the city seems to grow by the second.

The landscape also registers the pressures gathered in Santa Teresa. The account places the maquiladora horizon beside the city’s poor neighborhoods and infrastructural strain, while black vultures move through barren fields at the city’s edge. Elsewhere, Chucho Flores describes a place with factories, maquiladoras, a cocaine cartel, workers arriving from other cities, Central American immigrants, and an urban infrastructure unable to keep pace with population growth. His account joins economic activity and disorder without treating them as separate worlds: money and poverty, violence and the wish for peaceful work coexist in the same rapidly expanding city.

Santa Teresa’s border setting is likewise a system of movement rather than a simple dividing line. Oscar Fate reaches the American border town of Adobe, whose main street leads to the border post, then crosses the short distance to the Mexican checkpoint, where officials inspect his passport, press identification, car papers, and suitcase. The checkpoints make national jurisdiction concrete, while the city’s industrial and commercial connections extend across it. A later account links the Uribe family’s transport wealth to trucks carrying merchandise from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border every half hour or hour, and to property in Phoenix and Tucson. This cross-border economy is part of the world Archimboldi enters when he chooses Santa Teresa.

Narrative Significance

The episode’s form keeps Archimboldi’s return partial. The reader does not accompany him directly from Europe, learn how he obtained El Cerdo’s telephone number, or hear a developed explanation for selecting Santa Teresa. Instead, his journey passes through Alatorre’s report, El Cerdo’s account, and a later retelling to the European critics. The layered narration turns the writer’s reappearance into both a confirmed event and an unresolved question: others can describe where he slept, what he ate, and which plane he took, but not what he seeks.

That imbalance between practical certainty and interpretive uncertainty connects the episode to the larger movement of the novel. Archimboldi, long imagined as absent, travels toward a city whose expanding geography, cross-border circulation, industrial labor, and violence exceed any single observer’s grasp. His answer that he wants to see what Santa Teresa is like offers no promise of explanation or rescue. It marks the beginning of an encounter between the vanished writer and a place whose defining pressures are already visible, while leaving the meaning of that encounter open.