South Pole

The South Pole is the remote destination of the Ice Man and his wife’s delayed honeymoon, but it becomes much more than a place to visit: its emptiness, inaccessibility, and prolonged winter shape the couple’s separation and the wife’s sense that their future has been sealed away. She chooses it imagining auroras and penguins; instead, she finds a featureless settlement surrounded by ice, while her husband grows increasingly absorbed in the place. The journey ends not with a return home but with the prospect of a family bound to the South Pole indefinitely.

The destination imagined

The wife proposes a trip because she is bored and wants to see somewhere unfamiliar. They have never taken a honeymoon, she notes, and have enough savings and vacation time for a leisurely journey. When her husband asks where she wants to go, she suggests the South Pole partly because she thinks it will interest him, and partly because she has always wanted to see it. Her imagined visit is vivid but uncomplicated: beneath the aurora, in a hooded parka, playing with penguins.

The choice carries a consequence she does not foresee. As the departure approaches, she begins to regret raising the idea. The Ice Man seems to change after hearing the destination: his gaze grows more piercing, his breath whiter, and frost gathers more heavily on his fingers. He becomes quieter and more stubborn, and stops eating. Five days before they are due to leave, she proposes changing the plan for an ordinary holiday in Europe or Spain, with wine, paella, and bullfights. Her husband refuses. He has already bought their tickets and bought her a fur coat and fur-lined boots, and insists that they cannot let the preparations go to waste.

Arrival in an emptied landscape

The flight offers none of the anticipation the wife expects from setting out on a trip. The pilots and stewardesses say almost nothing, thick clouds conceal the view, and ice coats the windows. Her husband reads quietly. She experiences the journey less as the beginning of an adventure than as the completion of something already decided.

On first setting foot at the South Pole, the Ice Man trembles briefly, a reaction so slight that no one else notices. He looks at the sky and then his hands before breathing out and smiling. His wife recognizes the moment as an intense response to their arrival, though its meaning is not explained. When he asks whether this is where she wanted to come, she confirms that it is.

The place itself defeats her expectations. There is one small, featureless town and one similarly featureless hotel, with hardly anyone living there. There are no penguins and no aurora. When she asks passersby about the penguins, they cannot understand her; she sketches one on paper, but receives only a silent shake of the head. Beyond the town stretches ice without trees, flowers, rivers, or ponds. The South Pole is not the picturesque destination of her imagining but a frozen, nearly empty landscape.

A widening divide

The same surroundings affect the couple differently. The Ice Man strides tirelessly around the settlement, learns the local language, and speaks with the people there in hard, icy tones. Their conversations last for hours, but his wife cannot understand them. His fascination with the place makes her feel left behind and abandoned, even though she describes him as still thoughtful and sincere in what he says to her.

Her isolation deepens as she stays in the hotel, looking out at gray skies that do not clear for months and struggling to learn a grammar she believes she will never master. The South Pole’s inhabitants like her husband, while they cannot understand her. Eventually, she loses not only her ability to feel upset but also her sense of direction, time, and self. She cannot identify when this change begins or ends; she only knows that she has become numb and alone in the endless winter. She feels that the husband beside her is no longer the Ice Man she met at a ski resort, though she cannot specify how he has changed.

The loss of transport makes this separation concrete. After their plane leaves, no more aircraft land, and no ships arrive. The runway becomes buried beneath hard ice. The Ice Man tells her that winter has come, that it will be long, and that everything is frozen; they can only wait for spring. The seasonal shutdown closes off an ordinary route back, as the surrounding ice mirrors her sense of emotional enclosure.

Pregnancy and the prospect of permanence

Three months after their arrival, the wife realizes that she is pregnant. She imagines the unborn child as a tiny Ice Man, with the father’s icicle eyes and frost-covered fingers, and feels that her womb has frozen over. She concludes that the new family will never leave the South Pole: in her understanding, the weight of the past has taken hold and will not let them go. The prediction is presented through her perception rather than as a confirmed account of what happens afterward; the evidence ends with the couple still at the Pole.

Her remaining warmth seems to recede, and she sometimes forgets that it ever existed. Yet the relationship is not described as loveless. She knows the Ice Man loves her, and when she cries he kisses her cheeks and removes the tears that have frozen there. His expressions of love are sincere to her, but the wind carries his words farther into the past. The South Pole thus becomes both their shared home and the place where intimacy persists within a profound division: he belongs to the frozen world, while she experiences it as a loss of self, connection, and future.

The South Pole as an image of time

The setting links physical winter to the story’s contrast between past and future. Before the journey, the wife fears a recurring dream in which she falls into a hole, freezes, and remains conscious while becoming part of an accumulating past. The Ice Man tells her that dreams come from the past, not the future, and should not control her. Once at the South Pole, however, the language of a future overtaken by the past returns in her conviction that the family cannot escape.

The South Pole’s ice is therefore not merely a harsh backdrop. It determines whether the couple can travel, shapes the wife’s experience of isolation, and gives form to her fear that change has become irreversible. Her imagined holiday promises novelty; the actual destination offers no aurora, no penguins, and no easy departure, only a long winter whose end remains beyond the account.