European critics travel to Santa Teresa to search for Archimboldi

The journey of Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, and Liz Norton to Santa Teresa turns a literary search for Benno von Archimboldi into an encounter with the city’s unsettled geography and the limits of what evidence can reveal. A hotel record in Mexico City confirms that Archimboldi used the name Hans Reiter; in Santa Teresa, however, systematic inquiries produce no registration under that name. The critics come to believe that he is nearby, perhaps among the spaces they have already crossed, but the search ends without locating him.

The lead in Mexico City

The three critics travel from Paris to Mexico City, where El Cerdo is waiting for them. He is delighted to host the distinguished European academics, although they decline his suggestions that they lecture at Bellas Artes, UNAM, or the Colegio de Mexico. Their purpose is narrower: they want to follow the trace of Archimboldi, whom El Cerdo met in the city.

That night, Pelletier and Espinoza accompany El Cerdo to the hotel where he says Archimboldi stayed. The clerk lets them consult the computer, and El Cerdo scrolls through the names registered under the date of their meeting. Pelletier notices the dirt under El Cerdo’s fingernails, a detail that explains the nickname he has been given. Then El Cerdo points out the entry: Hans Reiter.

The record is precise but spare. Reiter stayed one night, paid in cash, did not use a credit card, and took nothing from the minibar. The name gives the search a concrete direction, while the other details offer no further trail. When El Cerdo asks whether the visitors want to see tourist sites, Pelletier and Espinoza refuse; the hotel record, rather than the city’s attractions, is what matters to them.

Arrival in Santa Teresa

The next morning, Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton fly to Hermosillo, call the rector of the University of Santa Teresa, rent a car, and drive toward the border. Entering Santa Teresa from the south, they see a city that appears ready to move at the slightest prompting. They take three rooms on the fourth floor of the Hotel Mexico. The rooms are alike but marked by separate details: Espinoza’s has a large desert painting with mounted men in beige shirts; Norton’s has two mirrors positioned so that they reflect one another; and Pelletier’s bathroom toilet is damaged, with a missing section visible only when its seat is raised.

The hotel’s small distinctions sit against the scale of the place they have entered. Santa Teresa is not simply a destination on their route but a city whose rapid growth and uneven development shape what the visitors can see. Their search moves between transient accommodations, institutional contacts, and the streets at the edge of the border; no single vantage point gives them a comprehensive view.

An inquiry without a name

The rector listens to the visitors’ account and gives them a tour of the university. The next morning, Oscar Amalfitano joins the critics for breakfast and helps them consider possible leads. They establish that Archimboldi did not visit the university’s Faculty of Arts and Letters, and that Santa Teresa has no German consulate to check. Asked how many hotels the city contains, Amalfitano says he does not know but can find out by asking the reception desk.

The hotel staff provide a list of hotels and motels. Amalfitano suggests calling from the university, but the critics prefer to make calls using their hotel room accounts. Norton and Espinoza call from Espinoza’s room, while Amalfitano and Pelletier call from Pelletier’s. After an hour, none has found Hans Reiter registered at a hotel. They continue for another hour, then stop, with only a few hotels and motels on the outskirts left to consider. Amalfitano observes that many of the motels rent rooms by the hour or function as brothels, places where a German tourist seems unlikely to stay. Espinoza counters that they are not looking for a German tourist but for Archimboldi. Amalfitano accepts the distinction and admits that he can imagine Archimboldi at one of those motels. Their search has reached an impasse: the name on the Mexico City record has not appeared in Santa Teresa, but the absence of that name does not settle where the writer might be.

The city as a search landscape

The critics later drive through Santa Teresa without a fixed plan, letting chance guide them as if they might encounter a tall old German man on the street. Their circuit reveals sharply contrasting districts. In the west, many streets are unpaved and houses are assembled from scrap. The old center has neglected buildings and plazas, while the eastern districts include middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, public playgrounds, shopping centers, and the university. To the north, abandoned factories and sheds give way to bars, souvenir shops, and small hotels; farther out are poorer neighborhoods and vacant lots where schools sometimes stand. In the south they pass rail lines, soccer fields ringed by shacks, two highways leading away from the city, and a gully used as a garbage dump. Industrial warehouses and the distant horizon of the maquiladoras complete the view.

The journey also exposes the city’s relation to the border. Continuing east, the critics see how middle-class neighborhoods give way to slums amid hills, valleys, dry riverbeds, and the remains of old ranches. Northward, they reach the fence separating Mexico from the United States and look across toward the Arizona desert. In the west, industrial parks are themselves being surrounded by slums. The visitors are convinced that Santa Teresa is growing by the second. Their search for a single absent man thus unfolds in a landscape of expansion, unequal development, and multiple routes across and out of the city.

Nearness without discovery

The limits of the search become explicit one evening beside a hotel pool. Pelletier tells Espinoza that they are not going to 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, the hotel, the court, the fence, and the dry brush beyond the unlit grounds, making the claim encompass the immediate surroundings rather than any one identifiable hiding place. Espinoza says he believes him, and Pelletier concludes that the group is as close to Archimboldi as it will ever be.

That conclusion is not a discovery in the ordinary investigative sense: no encounter or new record confirms Archimboldi’s presence in the city. Instead, the journey closes on a conviction of proximity paired with failure to find him. The search has produced one firm identity—the Mexico City guest registered as Hans Reiter—and a careful picture of Santa Teresa, but not a location for the writer. The distance between knowing a name, believing someone is near, and actually finding him gives the expedition its unresolved ending.