Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is the novel’s principal South American setting: an immigrant city that becomes a refuge and staging ground for Europeans escaping justice, a hub of political accommodation, and the setting for Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s long effort to investigate and evade the Nazi networks established there. The city is not merely a distant destination. Its neighborhoods, workplaces, and connections to Madrid and Washington shape who can hide, who can be found, and how long a life in exile can remain provisional.

An immigrant city and its contrasting neighborhoods

The city first enters through the childhood of Marijke de Wandaleer, born in a small interior room in La Boca. Her parents had left Antwerp in 1891 expecting to find space for their family, but their first apartment was shared with two large Italian Catholic families. The noise and crowding drove the austere, Protestant De Wandaleers to a tenement in San Telmo. They gained a home of their own, but still shared a courtyard with Italian and Spanish neighbors. Marijke’s upbringing in the commotion of Defensa Street makes Buenos Aires a lived-in immigrant environment, not simply a backdrop for the later political plot.

The city’s social geography becomes sharper in the lives of the Europeans who arrive decades later. Recoleta, described as one of the capital’s most expensive districts, offers Walter Kutschmann a three-room apartment on President Manuel Quintana Avenue and a well-paid executive post with the Argentine branch of the German lighting company Osram. His comfortable position contrasts with the crowded immigrant tenement in which Marijke grew up, and with the precarious circumstances of newly arrived exiles who depend on other people for a place to stay.

Manuel’s route through Buenos Aires is shaped by the need to keep clear of the wealthy residential districts where the Nazis he is trying to avoid have settled. Although the city seems to him to extend without end, he rejects jobs that would require him to travel around it. He wants a fixed post in a central, middle-class neighborhood, away from Recoleta and the Barrio Norte. The job advertisements he marks in the newspapers eventually lead him to the language school La Europea, whose first branch is on Lavalle Street. Years later, the school’s branch on Santa Fe Avenue, near the Palace of Justice, gives him a settled base in a city he once entered as a fugitive.

The city as a destination for escape

Buenos Aires is presented as part of a wider escape system linking postwar Europe, Spain, and South America. By 1945, Clara Stauffer’s house in Madrid has been altered to support an organized operation: rooms become offices, a new telephone line is installed, secretaries are hired, and wardrobes are stocked with men’s clothes and shoes in a range of sizes. The exhausted men arriving at the house include fugitives from European prisons and prisoners released from Nanclares. Their appearance and movement toward Spain connect the city to the first stages of a transnational route.

The investigators believe Buenos Aires is the intended destination for many of the people Stauffer shelters. Pablo de Azcárate explains that South America is the hoped-for refuge of Nazis seeking to evade international courts. The suspected route depends on more than a sea crossing: Stauffer’s contacts can secure Spanish documents through birth certificates supplied by friendly priests and connections in the state administration. The investigators consider cooperation between her network and Juan Perón’s government plausible, but acknowledge that they cannot yet prove it. The city therefore appears both as a destination and as an unresolved investigative question: the network’s suspected reach is substantial, but evidence of its structure and final routes remains incomplete.

One figure who connects the European operation directly to Buenos Aires is Horst Fuldner, born in the city and raised in Germany from the age of twelve. After joining the Nazi Party early, he was expelled in 1935 for keeping SS money. In 1941 he resurfaced in Spain as a volunteer interpreter for the Blue Division on the Russian front. Later, identified as a member of the SS intelligence organization, he is described as having been tasked by Walter Schellenberg with finding escape routes for Nazi Party leaders once Germany’s defeat seemed inevitable. He is the first of a group of fugitives to move from Madrid to his birth country, where he is living from February and where he attends a meeting with Perón.

Political protection and official channels

The novel depicts Buenos Aires not only as a place where fugitives can arrive, but also as a city connected to political decisions that can shelter them. Perón’s close associate Rodolfo Freude convenes a meeting involving the European group. Freude’s father, Ludwig, is described as the country’s most powerful German businessman and one of South America’s ten richest men. The Allies accuse him of acting as Hitler’s unofficial ambassador in Argentina and seek his extradition in 1945. When extradition appears imminent, Perón produces a false citizenship letter bearing a judge’s signature that allows Ludwig to remain. Ludwig later funds Perón’s 1946 election campaign, which brings the general to the Casa Rosada.

At the Buenos Aires meeting, the attendees agree on a plan too sensitive to settle in one audience. Perón receives the same group again the next day and takes a personal role in refining the arrangements. He suggests creating a secret official body to receive immigrants of this kind. The episode gives the city’s escape routes a political dimension: informal contacts and private wealth are joined by a proposed government mechanism for processing arrivals.

A letter dated 25 February 1948 shows the network’s work continuing beyond a single meeting. Pierre Daye tells Víctor de la Serna that his group’s contacts with the presidency have continued steadily and asks him to prepare lists of political refugees in Spain, organized by nationality and marking those most urgently in need of rescue. The refugees need not make their own applications; the group will handle the arrangements. From Buenos Aires, the promised process reaches back across the Atlantic to identify people in Spain and move them toward safety, while also raising the question of whose safety is being secured and from whom they are escaping.

Manuel’s work and the city’s divided social map

When Manuel arrives in Buenos Aires on 16 December 1948, Clara Stauffer’s companion treats him like another piece of luggage. At the airport, she makes a conspicuous entrance, embraces the six men and three women waiting for her, addresses them by name, asks after their families, and thanks them for coming. Manuel recognizes Walter Kutschmann, whom he had encountered in Cercedilla. About a year and a half later, he sees Kutschmann again in the circle around Stauffer. Buenos Aires thus brings into one place people whose connections had previously been formed across Europe.

Kutschmann’s hospitality is useful but also places Manuel close to the world he is investigating. Kutschmann lives alone in Recoleta, has a senior, well-paid Osram position, and offers new arrivals temporary accommodation and what he calls his Buenos Aires tour. His company is absorbing enough that Manuel briefly fears he has been assigned to watch him, though he settles on the simpler explanation that Kutschmann is bored and enjoys guiding newcomers. The episode captures the double meaning of hospitality in the city: it can be genuine assistance, but it can also keep an arrival within reach of people whose affiliations matter.

Manuel establishes another line of contact through Meg Williams and Fred Goodwin, Meg’s contact at the United States embassy in Argentina. Their first telephone conversation is marked by Goodwin’s Caribbean-sounding accent; his Dominican mother had always spoken Spanish to him. Later, Manuel finds that Goodwin looks sufficiently like an ordinary porteño in his new, popular neighborhood that his American identity is not immediately obvious. Manuel’s increasing meetings with him coincide with a practical effort to work near the Palace of Justice and at a distance from Kutschmann. The city’s neighborhoods become part of his counterintelligence practice: location can reduce unwanted proximity even when it cannot eliminate risk.

The dates that punctuate this Buenos Aires story mark successive stages rather than a single arrival. A section set on 2 October 1949 follows the later Argentine phase of the narrative; by 10 November 1950, Manuel has already secured a channel between Madrid and Burnham and made contact with Goodwin. That night, expecting his future to be bound up with Simona Gaitán, he enters a jazz bar where Goodwin has arranged to meet him. The city has become the setting for both clandestine work and the possibility of a personal future, without making either one secure.

A lasting home under renewed threat

By 1976 Manuel’s life in Buenos Aires has acquired the routines and institutions of a long residence. He directs the Santa Fe branch of La Europea, which his wife’s widowhood and investment have helped establish as a successful business. Its courses are adapted to the standard of living in Recoleta, and it has agreements with foreign institutions and universities. The school that began as a practical means of staying in a safe, central neighborhood has become a durable enterprise rooted in the city’s social and commercial life.

That durability is tested after the military coup. On 23 November 1976, Simona warns her father that she will never forgive him; her mother is preoccupied with Guillermo, who has said he will remain in Buenos Aires and gone to sleep at a friend’s home. Juan blames his sister for the situation until she cries. The family’s journey ends in a silence more overwhelming than their earlier arguments. Simona alone agrees to go for a walk with her husband, and neighbors learn that she is staying with the children, intends to sell the house, and that her husband must return to work in the capital. Political danger reaches into domestic decisions about residence, departure, and whether a family can remain together.

On 30 November, Manuel identifies himself to a secretary as a Spanish citizen seeking Spanish passports so that his family can leave the country with him. He tells her that he knows what a military coup and a civil war are because he has already lived through them. As he speaks, he is in the family home on General Las Heras Avenue, near Callao, six blocks from the La Europea branch he has directed for almost twenty years. The close geography makes the stakes concrete: the established home and the school that represent his life in Buenos Aires sit within a city where he is once again preparing an escape.

The connection back to Madrid remains alive. On 26 November, an unnamed caller says only that he is in Junín, Argentina. Manuel’s secretary asks whether the call can be put through; the listener initially does not recognize the place or the caller, but the unexplained message eventually brings Manuel to mind. The final reach of Buenos Aires is therefore not isolation but connection: even after decades, a call from elsewhere in Argentina can reactivate the old network of recognition and obligation. Across the novel, the city shelters fugitives and builds new homes, but it never entirely frees its inhabitants from the routes, loyalties, and dangers that brought them there.