Día de Reyes

Día de Reyes, the January 6 feast associated with the Magi, recurs as a day when expectation meets the limits of ordinary life. The novel places its ritual of gifts and family togetherness beside the precarious lives of people in hiding: for Manuel Arroyo, the holiday is a moment to make contact across borders without relinquishing his assumed identity; for Zacarías González Peña’s children, it is the first time the Magi have brought anything to their home. These scenes give the day a double charge of cautious hope and stark inequality.

A holiday within ordinary time

January 6 is not a day off for everyone in the novel’s world. In 1949 it is a working day in both the United Kingdom and Argentina, a detail that matters to Manuel as he weighs when and how to make a call to London. The holiday nevertheless carries personal meaning: he remembers his chief saying that the only monarchy he respected was that of the Magi of the East, and hopes that his opinion has not changed. The recollection turns a familiar seasonal observance into a discreet point of connection between two men separated by distance and circumstance.

The date also gives the novel a shared calendar for sharply different lives. In Buenos Aires, the day unfolds through a hotel room, a telephone booth, and the route between an assumed home and a place where Manuel can safely make contact. In Madrid the following year, it arrives through children’s gifts set on a kitchen table. The scenes are not a single celebration but parallel glimpses of how the same date can carry private, political, and material meanings.

Manuel’s cautious observance in Buenos Aires

On January 6, 1949, Manuel walks along Avenida Alvear toward Plaza San Martín with a briefcase he has guarded since his flight from Madrid. He is living in a furnished apartment at 1869 Avenida Callao, close enough to Walter’s home that avoiding chance meetings will be difficult. That proximity also helps him anticipate the schedules of neighbors and reduce the risk of unwanted encounters. The new apartment offers security, but not freedom from the careful calculations imposed by his concealed life.

That morning he uses the identity of Peter Louzán, an American, to check into the Crillon for one night. The apparently new suitcase he carries is empty; he bought it shortly beforehand so that arriving at a hotel without luggage would not look suspicious. He spends part of the afternoon reading in his room, then uses a telephone booth in the hotel lobby to call a London number. The number actually leads to an address in Taplow. The small hotel routine—asking about restaurants, taking a taxi, waiting, and requesting the booth—conceals the purpose of his visit beneath the manners of a traveler.

The holiday supplies a reason for the call as well as a remembered personal association. Manuel’s hope that his chief still honors the Magi’s monarchy lends the contact a warmth that his false identity cannot fully suppress. After the call, he takes nearly two minutes before leaving the booth, using the pause to stop being Manolo Arroyo and return to the role of Peter Louzán. He has paid for the call in dollars and goes upstairs to sleep, keeping the separation between his identities as deliberate as the separation between the hotel and his apartment.

That evening, Clara calls to reproach him for not yet inviting her to see his new home. Manuel, appearing as the false Adrián Gallardo, decides he has time to make amends and invites her to dinner. Clara instead sets a plan for Saturday: she will see the apartment, and they will go on to lunch with friends of Pierre at a house by the river. Her suggestion that Walter will join them the following day brings the crowded social world around Manuel back into view. Even the prospect of holiday hospitality has to be negotiated around the risks and obligations of his assumed identity.

Gifts from the dead

On January 6, 1950, the holiday takes a different form in Madrid. Zacarías González Peña returns early from taking his flock out, while his wife, Mari, keeps their children in bed until he comes home. The previous night, the couple had arranged the presents they could afford after selling a watch and a carpet inherited from the last man buried in Casa de Campo. The goods had brought different sums than they expected: less for the watch, more for the carpet. Their children’s small celebration is therefore tied directly to the possessions of a dead stranger.

The money buys two packets of sweets, a hair clip decorated with cloth flowers for the elder daughter, a rag doll for the younger one, and two tin cars that look almost new for the boys. The baby, still nursing, is considered happy enough without a separate present. Zacarías and Mari wake the children with news that the Magi have come. Their excitement turns the modest objects on the kitchen table into an event, though the children run in without knowing why and then stop, looking at the presents but not daring to touch them.

The moment is joyful, but its limits are part of its meaning. None of the children knows who the Magi are; until that morning, the visitors had never stopped at their house, and many years will pass before they do so again. The narrator thus makes the family’s first encounter with the holiday a tender scene shadowed by deprivation. The gifts are real and carefully chosen, yet the interval before another such visit shows how exceptional this welcome is.

A measure of hope and inequality

Across the two dates, Día de Reyes is neither simply a religious observance nor a universal promise of abundance. For Manuel, it offers a remembered point of contact and an opening for communication, but his movements remain governed by surveillance, aliases, and caution. For Zacarías’s family, the holiday briefly makes a handful of inexpensive objects into gifts, while the source of the money binds celebration to the belongings of someone already dead.

The contrast joins private hope to the novel’s larger concern with lives shaped by political displacement and scarcity. Manuel can afford a furnished apartment and a hotel room, yet cannot comfortably be himself; Zacarías and Mari can create a memorable morning for their children, yet the feast is so unfamiliar that the children hesitate before touching what they have received. The recurring date makes those different forms of insecurity visible without making them equivalent. Its promise arrives, but never apart from the circumstances that determine who can welcome it and how long the welcome lasts.