Alicante is a point of separation in the novel’s account of the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War: Fernando is imprisoned there, too far from Navarra for María Eugenia León to visit, and later dies after transfer to Formentera. Its significance extends beyond that lost possibility of reunion. The city also lies within the history of Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s return to Spain, a journey shaped by exile, covert identities, and the pull of a home he had been denied for more than seven years.

The Prison and María Eugenia’s Separation

On 15 July, after Esteban returned from Paris, he asked María Eugenia to accompany him to Pamplona to see their children. His tenderness and silence about her having been alone in Madrid made the request both an announcement that her affair was over and a promise that he would not reproach her. She accepted the journey. Alicante’s distance from Navarra made it impossible for her to go and see Fernando in prison; by the time she returned to Madrid, he had been transferred to the penal detachment on Formentera.

Fernando did not survive long on the island. In the winter of 1941, aged thirty, he died of pneumonia amid hunger, forced labor, and the unsanitary conditions of the camp. His father asked for the body so it could be buried in the family tomb at Tudela, but the authorities replied that Fernando had already been buried on the island. María Eugenia, his lover, never managed to bring flowers to his grave. Alicante thus marks a missed chance to reach him, while the subsequent transfer makes that separation irreversible.

A City in the Geography of Exile

The book returns to Alicante’s wider significance through Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s clandestine journey into Spain on 10 September 1946. The French border was closed, and crossing the mountains with a guide risked a fall that could prematurely end his mission. He therefore entered through Gibraltar, traveling on a British military aircraft under the cover of an American citizen visiting his parents’ homeland for the first time.

From the aircraft steps, Manuel saw the Campo de Gibraltar and the laundry spread across rooftops in La Línea. The sight stirred an immediate, bodily sense of belonging: he felt as though he could smell an air that was his own, missing for more than seven years. The wind across the Strait moved him so strongly that he nearly stopped between steps and closed his eyes. He restrained himself because such an expression of attachment would have seemed strange to the British official greeting a supposed American newcomer. The contrast between his passport identity and his private recognition of home makes the return a passage through disguise as well as geography.

Distance, Home, and the Cost of Return

Manuel’s return is set against the loneliness of his earlier exile in Geneva. In the summer of 1939 he had gone back to a city where he had once been happy with Meg Williams, but Meg was gone; he missed her in the lakeside routines, familiar meeting places, and ordinary pleasures that had once made the city theirs. His work, arranged by Pablo de Azcárate through contacts in the League of Nations, was conducted under the assumed name Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez. He met neutral and Allied representatives in parks, plazas, and cafés, then sent reports to Taplow when a British military plane offered space. Although he was safe in neutral Switzerland, with residence permission and a comfortable room in a pension, he felt that his boredom was a privilege beside the hunger and distress of many exiles—and still would have traded it for a French camp.

That history clarifies the force of the later crossing. Spain is not simply a destination reached after a long absence: the closed frontier, the false American cover, and Manuel’s restrained response to the wind all show how political circumstances govern the form in which an exile can come home. Alicante’s prison-bound separation and the Gibraltar return belong to different lives and moments, but together they make distance consequential: it can prevent a visit, postpone return, and turn recognition of home into something that must be hidden.