Hermes Popescu and Asuncion Reyes

Hermes Popescu and Asuncion Reyes’s marriage joins a personal love story to an ambitious, protracted development scheme in Honduras. Reyes’s request that her wealthy husband do something for a country in need prompts Popescu to pursue a metro for Tegucigalpa, a venture that becomes profitable for him and benefits political and ecclesiastical leaders, yet remains in its preliminary stages for more than fifteen years. Their happiness ends in divorce, while the project’s ultimate completion is left unstated.

Meeting and Marriage

Years after the events surrounding Popescu’s earlier life, he had amassed a considerable fortune and fell in love with Asuncion Reyes, a Central American actress described as exceptionally beautiful. Her European film career was brief, whether in French, Italian, or Spanish cinema, but she gave and attended innumerable parties. Popescu married her, forming a partnership that would bring her concern for Honduras into direct contact with his wealth and business instincts.

Reyes’s Appeal and the Honduras Project

Reyes asked Popescu to do something for a country in need, given his great wealth. He initially thought she meant Romania; he then understood that she was referring to Honduras. On their first Christmas trip to Tegucigalpa, he saw business opportunities but became wary of investing. He judged that theft was widespread and could turn violent, and tried to abandon his original idea.

Reyes persisted. On their second Christmas trip, Popescu approached the country’s ecclesiastical leaders, whom he trusted, and spoke with several bishops and the archbishop of Tegucigalpa. He considered possible investments but found that the country’s functioning, profitable sectors were already controlled by Americans. At a gathering hosted by the president and his wife, Reyes suggested that Tegucigalpa should have something like the Paris metro. Popescu presented the idea to the president as a project he could build, and the gathering responded with enthusiasm.

Profits, Delay, and Separation

Popescu set to work on the proposed metro and made money. The president, ministers, and secretaries also profited, as did the church. The scheme generated opening ceremonies for cement factories and contracts with French and American companies, but its preliminaries continued for more than fifteen years. The account does not say that the metro was completed: the contrast between the public excitement surrounding the proposal and the protracted preliminaries leaves its realization unresolved.

The narrator says that Popescu found happiness with Reyes, then lost it; they divorced. Their relationship therefore ends not in a shared resolution of the Honduran project but in separation, while the account preserves both the personal happiness of their marriage and its eventual dissolution.

Narrative Significance

The relationship is narrated through the overlap of intimacy, philanthropy, and profit. Reyes’s appeal begins as a request to help a country in need, while Popescu approaches the opportunity as a potential investment and discovers that even an outlandish proposal can yield money. The metro’s lengthy preliminaries and the gains made by political and church leaders complicate any simple distinction between public service and private advantage. The marital story, meanwhile, is compressed into a rise and break: love, shared travel, a project shaped by Reyes’s insistence, and divorce, with no account of a reconciliation or of the metro’s final fate.