Madrid is both a working city and a place of private uncertainty in the novel’s account of Manuel Espinoza. He studies and builds a career there, but the city also holds his literary disappointments, his longing for Liz Norton, and his unsuccessful attempts to recover the memory of a woman he met there. Its episodes are linked less by a single civic portrait than by the different ways its streets, apartments, and journeys concentrate desire and disorientation.

Espinoza’s education and literary ambitions

Espinoza’s intellectual life in Madrid begins with an ambition he eventually abandons: as a young man he dreams of becoming a writer and studies Spanish literature. His early German reading is limited. At sixteen he immerses himself in poetry because he believes he is destined to be a poet; later, a schoolteacher points him toward Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and he also reads a play by Schiller. He subsequently encounters Jünger through the Madrid writers whose admiration he both shares and resents. Their shifting enthusiasms—from Jünger in autumn to Baroja in winter, Ortega in spring, and celebratory verse for Camilo José Cela in summer—convince him that the literary circle is less steadfast than it presents itself as being.

When those dealings end, Madrid becomes the setting of Espinoza’s loneliness and contradictory resolutions. He comes to think he will never write fiction, but also recognizes a capacity for bravery. He privately experiences deep resentment and the possibility of violence, while choosing to concentrate instead on his decision to pursue scholarship. He remains in Spanish literature while enrolling in the German department, sleeps only four or five hours a night, and spends the rest of his time at his desk. A twenty-page essay on Werther and music appears in a Madrid literary magazine and a Göttingen university journal. By twenty-five he has completed degrees in both fields; in 1990 he earns a doctorate in German literature with a dissertation on Benno von Archimboldi, published by a Barcelona house the following year. He becomes a regular at German-literature conferences and roundtables, speaks German, English, and French, and secures a respected academic post and substantial income. Unlike his friends, he never translates Archimboldi or another German author.

Longing and the scholars’ friendship

Madrid also receives Espinoza after a return from Avignon that leaves him newly conscious of his attachment to Norton. His realization begins before he reaches his apartment: during the flight to Spain he decides that she is the woman he has always hoped to find and suffers from the force of that conviction. His imagined version of her includes more sexual scenes than Pelletier’s does. The parallel is revealing, but it does not dissolve the differences between the men’s feelings. Across their separate journeys home, the four scholars’ friendship remains intact, while personal desires are pushed into the background.

Espinoza makes his own desire concrete by inviting Norton to Madrid on a Saturday. He praises the city at that time of year and mentions a Bacon retrospective; her immediate agreement to arrive the next day surprises him, since he had intended the invitation more as an expression of hope than as a real expectation. Excitement gives way to insecurity, but they spend a happy Sunday together and go to bed that night. Espinoza has many questions and asks none. Norton tells him, in deliberately ambiguous terms, that she and Pelletier are lovers, or that they have been seeing one another. Madrid therefore becomes the setting not only for Espinoza’s pursuit of intimacy but also for the disclosure of a relationship that complicates it.

Encounters, memory, and the city’s streets

A different, more anonymous pattern of intimacy appears in Espinoza’s encounters with women in Madrid. He never sees the same woman twice and keeps the encounters separate from their names: faces and bodies remain on one side, while names seem to pass by without attaching to them. He presents himself as a quiet, well-dressed client who makes his wishes known and leaves afterward. The women he encounters come from several countries and regions; one night he is with a Mexican woman, and that meeting becomes the one he cannot simply file away.

The following morning the woman is gone. Espinoza sits for a long time trying to retrieve a vague memory, then notices a mark on his inner thigh and initially supposes it came from her. His available recollection does not establish what happened or what either of them said. For several days he thinks he has forgotten her, but then searches for her in Madrid’s streets where sex workers gather and in Casa de Campo. He once follows a woman and touches her shoulder, only to find that she is Spanish and does not resemble the Mexican woman.

The attempt to remember continues in a dream. Espinoza understands that he is dreaming and fears he will lose the woman’s words when he wakes. In the dream he tries to force himself awake, but cannot make the lights work or produce a shout; afterward, he remembers no words. What remains is an image of the Mexican woman in a dim hallway, reading writing on a wall while he watches unseen. He searches for a few more days, then stops and returns to other encounters. The episode makes Madrid’s streets a space of pursuit but not recovery: the city offers places to look, while the memory that motivates the search remains inaccessible.

A city connected by journeys and thresholds

The novel’s other glimpses of Madrid place it within a wider geography of travel and literary exchange. The scholars return to their separate homes by plane and train after Avignon; Morini travels by train to Turin and reads the cultural supplement of Il Manifesto, while Pelletier and Espinoza resume their lives in Paris and Madrid. Madrid is thus one point in a network shaped by universities, publications, conferences, and the continuing friendship of the Archimboldians, rather than an isolated setting.

That network becomes emotionally visible when Espinoza’s return to Madrid is followed by a minor breakdown. In a taxi on the way home, he cries discreetly and covers his eyes with his hand. The driver notices and asks whether he is ill; Espinoza answers that he feels all right and is only on edge. Elsewhere, the scholars’ journeys carry them from Madrid toward Santa Teresa: after meeting El Cerdo, they fly to Hermosillo, rent a car, and drive toward the border. Their rooms at the Hotel Mexico are distinguished by specific details—the desert painting in Espinoza’s room, the facing mirrors in Norton’s, and the damaged toilet in Pelletier’s. Against those unsettling rooms and the unfamiliar city, Madrid remains the place from which Espinoza’s academic life and private attachments repeatedly depart and to which his distress returns.

Narrative significance

Madrid’s significance emerges through contrast rather than a comprehensive description of the city. It supports the ordinary routines of study and professional advancement, yet it also becomes the terrain of loneliness, uncertain memory, and desire that cannot be made reciprocal simply by declaring it. Espinoza’s movement between the desk, the apartment, the taxi, and the streets gives the city a shifting function: a place of disciplined self-fashioning, a destination for an invitation, and a landscape in which the person he seeks cannot be recovered.

The episodes also set scholarly recognition against the limits of personal knowledge. Espinoza can master two literary fields, publish on Werther, and establish himself as an Archimboldi specialist, but the woman who leaves his hotel room becomes difficult to remember, and Norton’s disclosure cannot be reduced to a simple resolution of his longing. Madrid gathers these distinctions without reconciling them: professional identity becomes legible through degrees and publications, while private experience remains fragmentary, embodied, and sometimes inaccessible.