Margaret Capani Williams

Meg Williams, also known as Margaret Carpani Williams, is Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s closest friend and the person who becomes his family in Geneva. An American colleague whose work helps the Spanish delegation resist the political claims of the rebels and monarchists, she shares with Manuel a singular intimacy: they become lovers without becoming a conventional couple, and their bond endures after circumstances force them apart.

Identity and Background

Through her collaboration with Manuel, Meg helps the Spanish delegation reject, protest against, and challenge envoys of the rebels and monarchists who seek a foothold at the League of Nations. Her contribution is practical and political, but her importance to Manuel extends well beyond their work. In Geneva she becomes both his best male friend and his best female friend, his one family there.

Manuel arrives at that friendship with little experience of women. His sister María tried to supply the affection and attention his mother withheld, and Leo was another close companion; when Manuel was seven and went to live with Don Marcos, he lost both girls at once. Later, his life in the sacristy, at school, and at university was largely among men. He admired women from a distance but felt they were inaccessible, and his one near-courtship after university ended after three months because his demanding academic schedule left too little time for attentive courtship. Occasional affairs and flirtations did not prepare him for Meg.

A Friendship Becomes Intimate

Meg and Manuel have known each other for exactly a year when she asks whether he likes her. They are at a small mountain hotel on the French side of the Jura, a place they have visited with their dogs for long walks by day and drinking beside the fireplace at night. For the New Year’s Eve of 1933, they return without the dogs because the hotel’s celebrated dinner requires formal dress. Meg’s direct question unsettles Manuel: he fears making a mistake and damaging the friendship, but also senses that, if their experiment goes badly, they can laugh about it and carry on. He tells her that he likes her, expecting a joke to follow.

Instead, with thirty-five minutes left in the year, Manuel gets up and offers Meg his hand. She laughs, takes it, and leaves the dining room with him. When the maître appears with a gong to mark the new year, the two are moving from the singular to the plural. Meg later explains that she needed to know whether the two of them could be together sexually. She is candid that men appeal to her only some of the time, and that Manuel is one of the men she likes on some of those days.

An Unconventional Couple

Neither Meg nor Manuel falls in love with the other, but they sleep together many times and, more often, do not. Sex makes them happier without souring their friendship. They relate as comrades in bed as well as in conversation and over drinks, and the intimacy strengthens a bond that flourishes in a space neither would have expected to exist. They suspect Meg is more attracted to women than to men; nevertheless, she is as feminine in bed as she likes her female partners to be. They never consider sharing a woman, and eventually stop trying to explain or analyze what they have made together.

Their ease includes teasing. In bars and at elegant cocktails, Manuel sometimes points out a woman he has slept with, prompting Meg to laugh and nudge him. At other times they say nothing, however attractive or near at hand the woman one of them has just won over. The silences remain unexplained, but they become part of the friendship rather than a problem to solve. Gradually the two become indispensable to one another—an authentic, eccentric couple, though neither fully recognizes it until separation makes the attachment plain.

Separation and Lasting Attachment

In the summer of 1936, Manuel announces that he is leaving for London. Meg cries through the night. The next morning she tells him she loves him; he answers that he loves her too. The declaration does not turn their relationship into a conventional romance. Instead, it gives words to the affection already sustaining their unusual friendship, at the moment they have to part.

When Manuel later leaves Madrid, the man who comes to the hospital to find him says that he has known Meg in Geneva. That connection serves as a credential: after hearing the password, Manuel removes his medical coat and accompanies the man home. He then embraces Amparo and says goodbye. The scene carries Meg’s importance forward beyond her own presence: her Geneva connection is part of the chain that enables Manuel’s departure. The earlier farewell from an airplane stairway had already made the distinction clear—his life with Meg was over, but their friendship would last until one of them died, and Manuel had no choice but to leave.

Narrative Significance

Meg and Manuel’s relationship gives the novel an alternative to the usual opposition between friendship and sexual love. Their physical intimacy neither cancels their comradeship nor resolves it into romantic possession; their bond is defined by flexibility, mutual ease, and the freedom not to demand a single explanation for what they are to each other. The New Year’s Eve scene makes that shift visible through a simple gesture: Manuel stands, offers his hand, and Meg takes it.

Their separation, rather than disproving the bond, reveals its depth. Meg’s night of crying and their morning exchange of affection make explicit what their shared silences and recurring companionship had left unnamed. Manuel’s departure is not a freely chosen rejection, and the final farewell preserves both truths at once: the shared life has ended, while the friendship remains. Her later role as the human link through which Manuel is located in Madrid also connects an intimate relationship to the political and clandestine circumstances of his escape.