Archimboldi’s departure for Mexico begins after an intimate visit with Lotte and takes shape in a pause between family grief and travel: a night in a Hamburg park, a paid-for ice cream, and a brief exchange with a stranger who calls the dessert a mysterious legacy. By the next morning, Archimboldi is on his way to Mexico, where the novel’s final movement carries him toward his imprisoned nephew, Klaus Haas.

The parting from Lotte

Lotte’s questions give the departure its emotional weight. She admits that many things have slipped from her memory, but says she does not forget kind people; she recalls a woman who had treated her well even while her son was rotting in a Mexican prison. Her attention turns from that kindness to the fear that Klaus has no children, no friends, and no one to remember or care for him after she dies. As dawn approaches, she offers Archimboldi tea, coffee, or water and asks whether he will take care of everything. He asks for a beer, which she does not have. The request does not resolve her plea, but it leaves the practical and familial question hanging over his departure.

Archimboldi sits down and stretches his legs; his bones crack. The gesture makes the distance between the siblings’ ages and the journey ahead bodily present, while the conversation has already placed Klaus’s fate between them. The scene ends not with an explicit promise, but with the unresolved question of care that Archimboldi carries away from his sister’s home.

The night in Hamburg

After leaving Lotte, Archimboldi goes to Hamburg, planning to take a direct flight to Mexico. Because the flight will not leave until the following morning, he walks through an unfamiliar park. Its trees and small paved paths form a temporary stopping place populated by women walking with children, young people skating, and students cycling. He sits on a terrace far from the bar itself, nearly in the woods, and reads while eating and drinking.

The terrace has a particular rule: customers must pay immediately for everything they order. Archimboldi pays for a sandwich and a beer, then orders a Fürst Pückler and pays for that as well. The dessert is defined by its precise combination of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry—not simply any three flavors. This small, exact routine of ordering and settling the bill gives the pause a self-contained quality: he is already in transit, yet for one evening his attention rests on a book, a meal, and the details of an unfamiliar place.

A conversation about inheritance

The only other person at the terrace is an elderly gentleman, seated three tables away at a heavy wrought-iron table. He reads a magazine and sips a cappuccino. As Archimboldi is finishing his ice cream, the man asks whether he liked it. Archimboldi says that he did and smiles. The stranger then describes the dessert’s legacy as mysterious. Archimboldi agrees and takes his leave of him, identified in the narration as a descendant of Fürst Pückler.

The encounter is modest, but its placement gives the word “legacy” an echo beyond the dessert. Lotte has just worried about who will remember Klaus when she is gone, while Archimboldi is leaving her to travel toward the country where Klaus is imprisoned. Against that family anxiety, the stranger’s remark links inheritance to a name preserved in a familiar three-flavor confection. The text does not turn the conversation into an explanation or a revelation; it lets the small exchange resonate alongside the unanswered question of remembrance.

Departure and narrative significance

Soon after the conversation, Archimboldi leaves the park. The next morning, he is on his way to Mexico. The departure is therefore both a concrete journey—with Hamburg as the point of departure and a direct flight planned—and the culmination of the preceding encounter with Lotte. Her appeal about Klaus gives the trip a personal stake, while the quiet park scene delays its onward movement long enough to place family memory beside cultural inheritance.

The ending preserves the uncertainty that has shaped the exchange: Archimboldi has left his sister, Lotte’s question has not received a clear answer, and Klaus remains in a Mexican prison. Rather than supplying a settled resolution, the narrative closes this episode with movement toward Mexico. Its final transition makes departure itself the answer the scene can establish: Archimboldi goes, carrying the unresolved family concern into the journey.