Vallecas is both a practical refuge and the setting of a continuing bond between the narrator and Experta. He stays at her home for three nights before she accompanies him to a boardinghouse, and later returns to Vallecas on Sundays to see her, turning the district into a place of shelter, obligation, and remembrance.

Refuge During the Return to Madrid

After three nights in Experta’s house, the narrator moves to a boardinghouse on the first stretch of Avenida de la Albufera. Experta has chosen it because she has known its owner all her life and trusts him as an exceptionally loyal local fascist. The two agree that it is safer to wait before seeking lodging closer to neighborhoods the narrator knows. Vallecas thus marks a cautious stage in his return: a trusted home and local connection make it possible to find somewhere to stay without immediately returning to familiar parts of the city.

The move also signals the narrator’s precarious adjustment to the changed city. The following morning, he changes five pounds into Republican pesetas and presents the identity card Manolo Arroyo gave him. The bank employee records its number and returns it without apparent interest. In a café, however, the narrator recognizes that his newly adopted mustache makes him look like a fascist to other customers. The lodging arranged through Experta has offered practical protection, but it cannot remove the exposure and unease of moving through Madrid under an assumed appearance.

Sunday Visits and an Unpayable Debt

The narrator later goes to see Experta in Vallecas on almost every Sunday at noon. He usually invites her to eat at a nearby roadside inn, sometimes joined by her daughters. These repeated visits give Vallecas a place in the ordinary rhythm of a life otherwise shaped by danger and concealment: the narrator returns, shares a meal, and maintains a relationship rooted in the help he received there.

Experta’s family circumstances give those visits a sharper meaning. She has no surviving son at home; her two sons who lived are serving their sentences in the same penal battalion, and visits to them sometimes prevent her from keeping her appointment with the narrator. He, by contrast, says he never misses their meeting. He believes he would have gone nowhere without Experta, and describes the money he can give her as only the cheapest means of easing a debt he can never settle. Vallecas is therefore not merely where he once found temporary shelter: it is where gratitude becomes a repeated act of presence, even as the narrator recognizes that no payment can equal what Experta did for him.