Ingeborg’s death reaches the Baroness Von Zumpe as a brief telegram from Bubis, but its effects unfold through travel, testimony, and absence. The baroness learns that Archimboldi’s wife has died in a remote village on the Adriatic coast; when she arrives, villagers say Ingeborg drowned, her body was never found, and her husband had already left alone. The death thus becomes both a personal loss and an unresolved disappearance, with neither a grave nor an account of where Archimboldi went.

The Telegram and the Departure

The news interrupts the baroness’s stay in Milan, where she has been visiting editors, meeting Italian writers whose books might be translated, and moving through a cycle of parties. She receives Bubis’s telegram without warning. Though she cannot explain why, she begins to weep as if she had lost a sister. That bodily grief precedes any investigation or confirmed detail: before she knows how Ingeborg died, the news has already made the loss intimate.

The baroness tells her hosts that she is leaving for the village, although she does not know whether the journey will require a train, bus, or taxi. The place is so remote that it does not appear in her travel guide. A young Leftist editor from Turin offers to drive her. The baroness has had a few dalliances with him, and her gratitude takes him aback; their personal history briefly intersects with the journey, but the journey’s purpose is to reach the site of a death whose circumstances remain unknown.

The Journey and the News in the Village

The drive becomes a threnody or an epicede, its character changing with the countryside. The baroness and the editor recite an increasingly exaggerated, infectious Italian litany of dead family members and lost friends, including some who have died without their knowledge. Their talk gives the journey the form of a mourning ritual before they have confirmed what happened to Ingeborg. By the time they reach the village, both are exhausted, yet they still ask after the German man whose wife has died.

The villagers confirm that a German couple arrived a few days earlier. Shortly afterward, the man left alone because the woman had drowned. Asked where he went, they cannot say. The baroness and the editor question the village priest, who knows nothing more; the gravedigger repeats what they have already heard. Ingeborg was not buried in the cemetery because she drowned and her body was never recovered. Each witness confirms the loss while leaving its central facts unresolved: there is no body, no burial, and no trace of the husband’s destination.

The Unburied Dead and the Vanishing Husband

The baroness’s search yields no discovery that can close the account. Ingeborg’s death is reported by the telegram and repeated by the villagers, but the missing body prevents the ordinary material confirmation of a grave. The husband’s departure is equally unexplained. The village can establish that he left alone after the drowning, not where he went or what followed. The scene therefore ties death to disappearance without converting uncertainty into a solution.

Before leaving, the baroness insists on driving up a mountain to see the whole area. From above, she sees winding yellow paths disappearing among small, rain-swollen-looking clusters of leaden-colored trees, hills covered in olive trees, and tiny moving specks. The landscape offers a view of the region but not access to the missing people or the missing body. The closing image holds the search at a distance: the terrain can be surveyed, while Ingeborg’s fate and Archimboldi’s whereabouts remain beyond the witnesses’ knowledge.