Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, and Liz Norton’s search for Benno von Archimboldi in Santa Teresa turns a literary pursuit into an encounter with the city’s scale, its border economy, and the killings of women that its visitors initially struggle to comprehend. The critics arrive with a lead from Mexico City, but every practical method—hotel records, newspapers, local contacts—fails to locate the writer. Their final certainty that Archimboldi is present does not resolve the mystery; it sharpens the distance between knowing that someone may be near and being able to find him.

The decision to search

Archimboldi’s possible Nobel candidacy gives the critics’ pursuit an added urgency. They hear that he has again entered the year’s prize pool and may be on the short list. According to Dieter Hellfeld, someone associated with the Swedish Academy has contacted the publisher to ask how Archimboldi might respond to the award. The prospect prompts speculation about what the prize could mean to a man past eighty, without a public face or heirs. Mrs. Bubis is said to believe he would be delighted, though the others question whether she is thinking of the publisher’s sales. The Nobel discussion makes the possibility of a sudden public appearance vivid, but it also foregrounds the contradiction at the heart of the search: a writer can be widely discussed, even considered for the world’s most prominent literary prize, while remaining inaccessible.

The group decides to keep what it knows to itself. They tell themselves that silence is discretion, not betrayal, and that announcing Archimboldi’s possible whereabouts would only create false hope. This restraint does not end their interest; instead, it allows the search to proceed without turning their tentative knowledge into a public claim. Their decision also gives the journey a private, almost furtive quality, in contrast to the public attention that the Nobel speculation might otherwise attract.

Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton travel from Paris to Mexico City, where El Cerdo is waiting. The three academics spend the night in a hotel and fly to Hermosillo the following morning. El Cerdo is pleased to host such distinguished European visitors, though disappointed that they decline to give a lecture at Bellas Artes, UNAM, or the Colegio de Mexico. The refusal keeps their visit focused on the missing writer rather than on the public appearances their status might invite.

Following the Mexico City lead

During their night in Mexico City, Pelletier and Espinoza accompany El Cerdo to the hotel where Archimboldi had stayed. The clerk allows them to inspect the computer record. El Cerdo scrolls through the names under the date of his meeting with the writer, and the visitors find the entry Hans Reiter. The record shows a single night, paid for in cash, with no credit-card charge or minibar purchase. The name connects the elusive public figure to the identity he used at the hotel, but it supplies no onward address or explanation of what happened after his stay.

The next morning, the three critics and El Cerdo fly to Hermosillo. They call the rector of the University of Santa Teresa from the airport, rent a car, and drive toward the border before turning into the city. Their arrival is framed by the intensity of Sonora’s light, which seems to Norton to invite travel while also making a person want to endure hunger to its end. Santa Teresa appears to the visitors like a vast, temporary encampment, ready to move at the slightest prompting. They take three rooms on the fourth floor of the Hotel Mexico. The rooms are nominally identical but bear different marks: Espinoza’s has a large desert painting with mounted men; Norton’s has two mirrors positioned to face one another; Pelletier’s bathroom contains a toilet with a missing half-moon-shaped piece. These details do not identify Archimboldi, but they establish a setting in which the ordinary and the unsettling share the same close quarters.

The search begins with the university and the city’s hotels. At breakfast, the group concludes that Archimboldi did not visit the Faculty of Arts and Letters, and that there is no German consulate in Santa Teresa to pursue. Amalfitano offers to obtain a list of local hotels from the reception desk. The critics then divide the work: Norton and Espinoza call from Espinoza’s room, while Amalfitano and Pelletier call from Pelletier’s. After an hour, none has found a registration under Hans Reiter. They continue for another hour before giving up, with only a few hotels and outlying motels left to check. Amalfitano points out that many motels rent rooms by the hour or operate as brothels, places where a conventional picture of a German tourist would not seem to fit. Espinoza answers that they are looking for Archimboldi, not a German tourist. The distinction keeps their search open to the possibility that the writer’s presence would not conform to an ordinary travel record.

A city without a trace

The critics widen their search beyond hotel records. At the reception desk they obtain a list of the city’s hotels, and later they visit every newspaper office in Santa Teresa with Amalfitano. They examine papers spanning the month before El Cerdo encountered Archimboldi in Mexico City through the previous day. They look first at death notices, then at society and politics, and even at agriculture and livestock. One paper has no arts section; another gives books and cultural events only a page each week. The newspaper search yields no indication that Archimboldi has passed through the city. Their failure is not simply a lack of literary coverage: they find no trace in any of the categories through which the local press records public life.

The next day they visit the Santa Teresa crafts market, originally intended as a regional trading place for craftspeople, peasants, cattlemen, and horse dealers. By this point it serves mainly American tourists arriving from Phoenix, who leave before nightfall. The market offers the critics a contrast between its broader regional origins and its present orientation toward short-term visitors. Pelletier buys a small clay figure of a blond man sitting on a stone and reading a newspaper, with two small horns on his forehead. Espinoza buys an Indian rug after speaking with the seller, a local high-school student who hopes to become a nurse. Neither purchase advances the search, but the encounter with the young woman locates the visitors’ passage through Santa Teresa within the lives of people who live and study there, rather than only within the itinerary of foreign academics.

They also drive through the city without a specific destination, as if chance might bring them face to face with a tall, elderly German man. The landscape they cross is sharply divided but continuous: poor western neighborhoods with unpaved streets and houses assembled from scrap; an old, neglected center with arcaded plazas; more affluent eastern districts with pruned trees, playgrounds, shopping centers, and the university; and, to the north, abandoned factories, small hotels, bars, and souvenir shops. Farther out lie additional poor neighborhoods, while rail lines and informal soccer fields mark the south. They pass a gully used as a garbage dump, vacant terrain, industrial warehouses, and the horizon of the maquiladoras. On the northern edge they see the fence separating Mexico from the United States and look beyond it toward the Arizona desert. The industrial parks, too, are being surrounded by slums.

The city seems to be growing by the second. Black vultures walk through barren fields on its outskirts, and the critics note that where vultures are present there are no other birds. Their tour brings them into sight of the physical and economic geography of the border: factories and labor, shantytowns and infrastructure, highways and the fence, all within a city that appears to expand beyond any settled boundary. The search for an individual who leaves no record unfolds amid a landscape whose scale makes individual location increasingly difficult.

The killings enter the search

The critics do not arrive intending to investigate the killings of women, but the subject becomes impossible to keep outside their account of Santa Teresa. During their stay, Espinoza recalls that a boy had told them more than two hundred women had been killed. The figure is difficult for the visitors to take in. Espinoza reflects that the expression of disbelief can itself exaggerate a report, turning acknowledgment into a performance of astonishment. But he also recognizes that the number is not a recent total limited to a short interval: the killings have continued from 1993 or 1994 to the present, and the actual count might be 250 or 300. The boy says in French that no one will ever know. He has read a book by Archimboldi in Pelletier’s translation, a connection that links the local account of the killings back to the object of the critics’ search.

The account does not remain an abstract statistic. Chucho Flores later describes the way the killings periodically return to public attention: the numbers rise, reporters discuss them, the story grows, and then attention recedes as people return to work. He compares the killings to a brutal strike, a comparison that unsettles Fate because it makes the violence sound like an interruption of ordinary labor and then, by implication, like something the city learns to absorb. Chucho describes Santa Teresa as a large city with factories, maquiladoras, low unemployment, a cocaine cartel, workers arriving from other cities, Central American immigrants, and infrastructure unable to support demographic growth. There is money and poverty, violence and a desire for peace; what the city lacks, he says, is time. His description gives the visitors’ search a social frame that the hotel registers and newspaper files could not provide.

The cross-border setting is not merely scenery. On the American side, Fate crosses through Adobe, a former adobe-factory town whose houses and appliance stores line a main street leading to the border post. An American customs officer asks whether he is coming to write about the killings; Fate says he is there to cover a boxing match. At the Mexican checkpoint he must leave the car, open his suitcase, and show his papers. The border is at once a passage for travelers and a site of questioning and divided jurisdiction. Elsewhere, Klaus Haas uses a press conference to identify the Uribe family and its connections: Pedro Uribe’s more than one hundred cargo trucks carry goods from maquiladoras in Hermosillo and Santa Teresa across the border every half-hour or hour; the family also has property in Phoenix and Tucson. Haas describes the Uribe sons as associates of a narco and connected to Santa Teresa police and criminal networks. This information belongs to the larger account of the city’s killings, not to a discovery made by the European critics, but it clarifies the world through which their search passes: legal commerce, criminal power, and the border’s frequent traffic are entangled.

Departure and unresolved presence

Norton’s relationship to the search changes before the men’s conviction does. She feels insulted when Piero Morini decides not to travel with them, saying that his doctor has forbidden it and that he will write every day. Norton responds briefly and sweetly before ending their call; afterward, they do not call one another again. Morini’s refusal is presented alongside his movement toward an unusual resignation, a state in which his sense of self seems gradually to dissolve. Although this is not part of the search’s practical itinerary, it shadows the expedition with another form of absence: the group has left one of its members behind, and the distance between Norton and Morini remains unresolved during the journey.

In Santa Teresa, Norton eventually tells Pelletier and Espinoza that she is leaving the next day. They are not surprised. Her flight departs from Tucson, and despite her plan to take a taxi, her friends decide to drive her. The route requires them to cross into the United States, follow a dirt road through woods and streams, reach Sonoita, and continue on Route 83 and Interstate 10 to Tucson. At the airport they have time for coffee and talk about meeting again in Europe. Norton boards for New York, where she will connect to London. Pelletier and Espinoza return to Santa Teresa by way of Nogales and the Arizona side of the border, entering Mexico again near Lochiel. Their long drive makes the trip’s transnational shape literal: the search has moved between cities and countries, yet the crossings have not brought the target closer.

After Norton leaves, the search continues in a reduced pair. One night, Pelletier and Espinoza sit by the hotel’s pool and tennis court. Pelletier says they will not find Archimboldi. Espinoza replies that he has known this for days. Yet Pelletier insists that Archimboldi is in Santa Teresa. He gestures toward the sauna, hotel, court, fence, and distant brush, giving the claim no precise address. Espinoza believes him. Pelletier then states the paradox that closes the search: Archimboldi is there, and they are there, and this is the closest they will ever be to him. The line makes proximity a form of failure rather than discovery. The critics have followed a name, a hotel record, and a trail across the border into a city they have begun to see more clearly, but the writer remains unseen. Their search ends not with proof of his location, but with an intuition that proximity itself is the final limit of what they can know.