Tegucigalpa

Tegucigalpa is the setting for a prolonged metro project undertaken by the wealthy Popescu at the suggestion of his wife, Asuncion Reyes. The plan links the city’s sharply divided social landscape to an unlikely infrastructure venture: Popescu promises to build a metro, makes money from the project, and becomes entangled with the president, government officials, and church leaders, while the project’s preliminaries continue for more than fifteen years.

A City Seen Through Popescu’s Gaze

Popescu visits Tegucigalpa with Asuncion Reyes during their second Christmas trip to Honduras. The city strikes him as divided into three broad groups: Indigenous people and the sick, who make up most of the population, and people described as white but identified by the narration as mestizos, who form the smaller group holding power. This is Popescu’s impression of the city, filtered through his fascination with contrasts and the bizarre, rather than a detailed account of its neighborhoods or inhabitants.

The Metro Proposal

After contacting ecclesiastical leaders, whom he trusts, Popescu considers where to invest his capital. He sees business opportunities, but judges that the country’s profitable sectors are already controlled by Americans. At a gathering hosted by the president and the president’s wife, Asuncion proposes that Tegucigalpa should have something like the Paris metro. Popescu accepts the idea and tells the president that he can build it. The proposal excites those present, and Popescu begins work on the venture.

Money, Power, and Delay

The project proves profitable for Popescu, and the president, ministers, secretaries, and church also benefit. Its progress is marked by opening ceremonies for cement factories and contracts with French and American companies, yet the preliminaries last for more than fifteen years. The narrative thus places the project’s infrastructure ambitions beside the profits and institutional interests that gather around it, without depicting a completed metro.

Popescu’s Departure and the City’s Afterlife in the Story

Tegucigalpa remains part of the account through the project’s duration and its personal consequences for Popescu. He finds happiness with Asuncion, but later loses it, and they divorce. The narrative then moves away from the city: Popescu forgets the metro project and dies asleep in a Paris hospital. Tegucigalpa is therefore not developed as a continuing setting, but as the site of a scheme whose long preliminaries outlast its place in Popescu’s memory.