Barcelona

Barcelona is the city Zoë is expected to return to after her summer with the narrator. Though the supplied scenes do not take place in the city, it shapes the relationship’s timing: her departure is anticipated from the start, then becomes an immediate separation before she later reappears.

Connection to Zoë

The narrator describes Zoë as a girl from Barcelona when recounting how he fell in love with her. Their relationship becomes entangled with his marriage to Emily after Roy tells Emily that the narrator invited Zoë to eat pancakes. The narrator’s account complicates that report: he had invited several people, mostly men, and the invitation was not simply a private meeting with Zoë. Barcelona thus enters the narrative through Zoë’s identity and through the conflict her presence exposes.

Departure and Distance

Zoë is due to fly back to Barcelona at the end of August, a plan that was already in place when the narrator first met her. He had known she would leave but had not thought he would live long enough to see the date arrive. Before departing, she gives him a letter asking him to wait. She waits two days; he waits three. The city is not shown as a setting so much as the destination that makes their separation concrete, while the letter leaves the interval between them unresolved.

Return and Narrative Significance

Later, Zoë is back, and the narrator asks what she is doing there. The brief announcement of her return reverses the departure that had seemed inevitable, without the available passage explaining how or why she came back. Barcelona therefore marks both the expected end of their time together and the distance against which her reappearance registers: the relationship’s course is shaped by movement away and back, rather than by a settled life in the city.