South America functions in the novel as a destination promised by clandestine escape networks and as a continent reshaped by successive waves of political exile. Argentina, especially, draws Nazi fugitives seeking to evade international justice, but the later flight of Argentines to Spain reverses the route and turns refuge into a recurring, precarious condition.

An imagined destination for fugitives

In the postwar investigation, South America is described as the dreamed-of destination for Nazis trying to escape international courts. Manuel Arroyo Benítez has heard rumors of Reich submarines carrying gold, but Pablo de Azcárate dismisses that story and distinguishes it from what he calls the solid Argentine lead. The suspected route instead depends on the Stauffer network’s practical assistance: Clarita provides fugitives with Spanish documents, using birth records supplied by friendly priests and contacts in the state administration. The investigators believe Argentina is the final destination for those she shelters, though they admit they cannot yet prove the connection.

That uncertainty makes the continent more than a distant place-name: it is the objective that gives the investigation its direction. Arroyo immediately recognizes that proving the route will require an infiltrator. His assignment is to enter the network under the identity of a Spanish war criminal, gain Clarita’s confidence without approaching her residence directly, and, if the operation succeeds, follow the trail all the way to Buenos Aires. The route links Madrid’s protection system to Argentina, while the evidence needed to expose it must travel through the same transnational connections.

Exile and changing identities

The novel places this prospective journey against the earlier displacement of Spanish Republicans. In 1939 Arroyo returns to Geneva, where his life has become markedly different from the one he had known before the war. Meg Williams is gone, and the city’s sunlit days, lake, chocolates, meeting places, and diplomatic parties repeatedly recall their lost life together. He works under the assumed name Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez, meeting neutral and Allied representatives in parks, cafés, and public squares, then sending reports to Taplow when a British military aircraft offers a way to transmit them. His modest, lonely existence in Switzerland is safer than the hunger and distress endured by many exiles, yet he says he would exchange it for the exposure of a French camp.

Years later, his return to Spain is itself an exercise in concealment. On 10 September 1946 he enters through Gibraltar because the French border is closed and a clandestine mountain crossing would risk derailing his mission. Traveling on an American passport as a New Jersey-born visitor to his parents’ homeland, he recognizes home in the laundry on La Línea’s rooftops and in the wind through the Strait. The contrast between the cover identity and his response to the landscape makes return feel at once intimate and dangerous: he is back in Spain, but cannot arrive openly as himself.

The novel also gives exile a more intimate, urban scale. After the defeat in Madrid, Guillermo García Medina finds his house ransacked: his grandfather’s safe has been broken out of the study wall, Don Fermín’s gold is gone, and family papers lie trampled on the floor. He preserves the envelope Manuel had entrusted to him by keeping it in a locked desk drawer. For three days he remains inside with the blinds down and no lights on. The episode shows how political flight begins before a border is crossed: home, property, and family documents become vulnerable, while survival depends on guarding a small remnant of evidence.

Argentina as both refuge and trap

The Argentine route is not presented as a simple passage to safety. When the mission is eventually extended across the Atlantic, Arroyo’s companion Clara Stauffer arrives in Buenos Aires on 16 December 1948 and is greeted by a committee of six men and three women. Arroyo recognizes Walter Kutschmann, a former Gestapo officer he had encountered at Cercedilla. Clara moves through the reception as though she has arrived among established associates; Arroyo, by contrast, is already trying to distance himself from her. The scene gives the network a visible social presence in its South American destination, while the investigator’s unease registers the danger of being carried deeper into it.

The prospect of refuge also entails an erasure of identity. After Guillermo survives by adopting the name Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, he learns to live as an impostor. Each night he removes the crucifix above his bed and hides it beneath the bed, replacing it in the morning; each day he walks for hours, never stopping before crossing the Castellana, which comes to mark the boundary between his life as Guillermo and his life under the assumed name. The private rituals and repeated crossings make identity a matter of daily practice, not merely a document. In the novel’s wider geography, false papers and aliases are what allow people to move, but they also make safety inseparable from loss.

The reverse route: Argentine flight to Spain

The continent’s history of refuge changes sharply under Argentina’s military dictatorship. The novel traces its violence to a wider Cold War climate in which anti-communism legitimizes military rule and outside support. Before the 1976 coup, the government of María Estela Martínez de Perón had already divided the country into five military zones through Operation Independence, ostensibly aimed at guerrillas in Tucumán. In practice, the campaign widened repression to civilians, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures. The text presents it as a precursor to the dictatorship’s later system of state terror.

From the night of 24 March 1976, illegal arrests begin by the hundreds, and finding a way out becomes an urgent concern for thousands of Argentines. The dictatorship’s machinery includes secret detention, torture, executions, the disposal of bodies, clandestine maternity wards, and the theft and reassignment of children. Its death flights carry living prisoners, drugged and bound, out over the sea. These methods attack not only bodies but also the possibility of establishing what happened: disappearance and the destruction of identity are built into the operation of terror.

The destination pattern then reverses. Mexico receives the largest number of Argentine exiles, while Spain receives the second-largest population, even though Franco’s regime had once protected and then sheltered Juan Perón, a model invoked by later Latin American dictators. The novel draws a pointed historical parallel between the postwar theft of children in Spain and the later adoption of the same practice under Argentina’s dictatorship. Spanish Republicans who had built new lives across the ocean after fleeing in 1939 are, nearly forty years later, compelled to face another exile, returning to Spain as foreigners and empty-handed. South America thus remains a place of refuge, but never a final guarantee of safety: its routes carry fugitives outward and the persecuted onward, binding different generations through displacement.