Morocco enters the novel as a destination attached to an uncertain trace of Benno von Archimboldi. A Serbian critic’s painstaking reconstruction of travel records ends at a Palermo travel agency, where it appears Archimboldi had arranged a flight there. The distinction between a documented reservation and an actual journey makes Morocco less a confirmed setting than a charged possibility: the place toward which the evidence seems to point, and beyond which the evidence fails.

The Palermo Trace

The Serbian critic’s article follows Archimboldi across Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy, then back through Italy to Palermo. Its method is deliberately material and cumulative, assembling traces rather than offering a broad interpretation. The critic identifies an old German traveler and treats the apparent Morocco booking as the investigation’s culminating clue. In this account, the destination gives the scattered itinerary a direction, but the article’s authority rests on documents and particulars, not on access to Archimboldi himself.

The article’s small, tangible details make its conclusion feel at once persuasive and precarious. It includes a plane reservation in the name of Benno von Archimboldi, apparently made a week before the scheduled Italian departure for Rabat. Liz Norton regards that ticket as the one worthwhile part of the paper and says she had expected Archimboldi to turn up somewhere in the Maghreb. Her imagined continuation places him lost in an Atlas Mountains cave, but this is speculation, not a reported sighting or established outcome. Morocco thus draws together the critics’ appetite for a destination and the limits of what their research can establish.

Reservation and Uncertainty

The narrative subsequently qualifies the apparent discovery. A reservation did exist under Archimboldi’s pen name, but it was never confirmed, and no one by that name appeared at the airport when the flight was due to leave. The Serbian critic takes the reservation as evidence that Archimboldi intended to travel. The narration, however, offers several possibilities: he may have booked under his literary name by mistake and later purchased a ticket in his legal name; he may have changed his mind or chosen another destination; or the whole matter may have originated in a joke or misunderstanding. The proposed correction of the booking is itself conjectural, not a verified account of what happened.

The distinction is consequential. A ticket points toward Morocco, but it cannot prove that Archimboldi boarded a flight to Rabat—or that he went to North Africa at all. By making the apparent lead visible and then exposing its unresolved alternatives, the novel preserves the gap between reconstructing a writer’s movements and finding the writer. Morocco remains a credible possibility within the investigation, not a location the narrative confirms he reached.

A Destination as Vanishing Point

For Pelletier, the Serbian critic’s account summons an image not of arrival but of solitary old age and movement without a secure destination. He imagines Archimboldi as one among countless aging bachelors crossing an amniotic sea toward Africa or America, with airports and high-speed travel taking on the aspect of vast cemeteries. This meditation belongs to Pelletier’s response to the conjectural itinerary, not to a factual description of Morocco. The geographic destination becomes part of a more unsettling picture of disappearance: a possible next point on a map that does not restore the absent person to view.

The novel therefore uses Morocco as a boundary of knowledge. The Palermo reservation gives the critics something concrete to follow; its unconfirmed status prevents that trace from becoming resolution. The destination concentrates the tension between archival precision and narrative uncertainty: evidence can establish that a name was placed on a reservation, while leaving the journey, its purpose, and its outcome unknown.