Santiago de Compostela is the Galician city that surfaces in Oscar Amalfitano’s search for the origin of a geometry book he cannot remember buying or packing. A bookseller’s stamp connects the volume to the city, while Amalfitano’s insistence that he has never been there prevents that clue from becoming a memory. Santiago thus enters the novel as both a specific place and the limit of what a material trace can prove: a name printed in a book leads toward a biography and a geography, but not toward certainty about Amalfitano’s own past.

A city inferred from a stamp

The clue appears on the first page of Rafael Dieste’s Testamento geometrico, a book Amalfitano has found among the volumes shipped from Barcelona to Santa Teresa. The stamp names Libreria Follas Novas, gives its address on Montero Rios 37, and lists two telephone numbers; its final word, “Santiago,” initially leaves room for more than one city. Amalfitano rules out Santiago de Chile, which he can imagine as a place where he might have entered a bookstore in a catatonic state and left with an unfamiliar book. The address instead identifies Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia.

Identification settles the stamp’s geography but does not settle the book’s history. Amalfitano considers whether he bought it in Spain and whether a Barcelona bookseller might have acquired it from a shop closing or selling off its stock. He imagines that it could have been placed in his bag by mistake during a bookstore visit. Yet each explanation opens another gap: if the book had been in a package he brought home, why did he not notice it then? If some upsetting event distracted him, why can he not remember that event either? The stamp can locate a point in the book’s circulation, but it cannot tell him when the volume came into his possession or why it was packed for Santa Teresa.

A destination he has never visited

The discovery briefly suggests a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago, but Amalfitano immediately recognizes the image as a projection rather than recollection. He acknowledges that he has never been to Santiago de Compostela, “even in dreams.” The city is therefore not a remembered setting in his life; it is a destination conjured by the address and by the word “Santiago,” which had first suggested another place altogether.

That distinction matters because Amalfitano’s uncertainty is not simply a puzzle about a misplaced book. He cannot explain how an object entered his belongings, how he carried it across the Atlantic, or at what stage he ceased to remember it. The imagined pilgrimage offers a route where the evidence supplies none: a way of turning a disconnected clue into a personal story. But the city remains beyond the limits of that story. Amalfitano can name it and picture a journey toward it without having been there.

Dieste’s Galician life

The day after finding the book, Amalfitano searches the University of Santa Teresa library for information about Dieste. He learns that Dieste was born in Rianxo, La Coruna, in 1899; began writing in Galician; and later wrote in Castilian or in both languages. A man of theater as well as a poet and essayist, Dieste was anti-Fascist during the Spanish Civil War and went into exile after his side’s defeat, eventually publishing in Buenos Aires. He returned to Spain and Galicia, and died in Santiago de Compostela in 1981.

That biographical information gives the city a connection to the book’s author distinct from its connection to the bookseller’s stamp. The stamp suggests that the volume passed through a shop in Santiago; Dieste’s life ends there. Amalfitano’s search moves from a question about his own forgotten actions to a history that can be researched and partially verified. The city does not explain how the book reached his box, but it anchors the volume in the author’s Galician life and makes the mystery wider than a single missing memory.

Place, proof, and uncertainty

The geometry book arrives with its own invitation to think about space: its parts address Euclidean, Lobachevskian, and Riemannian geometry, motion, and proofs of the V Postulate. Amalfitano, who knows little about the subject and does not intend to study the postulate, instead reads the book’s surrounding details as clues. The store stamp, the publisher’s information, and the author’s biography seem to promise a chain of evidence capable of restoring a lost history. Yet the chain stops short of the moment he most wants to recover: his own acquisition and packing of the volume.

Santiago de Compostela consequently occupies two evidentiary positions. It is a real place named by the book’s retail mark and by the account of Dieste’s death, but it is also a place Amalfitano has never visited, available to him only through print, inference, and an imagined pilgrimage. The difference between knowing where a book was sold and remembering how it became one’s own gives the city its narrative force: geography can be confirmed even when personal history remains obscure.