Formentera is where Fernando’s imprisonment ends in death: transferred there from Alicante, he dies in the winter of 1941, aged thirty, after hunger, forced labor, and the camp’s insanitary conditions leave him with pneumonia. The island becomes the distance that separates his family and lover from his grave, making his death not only a consequence of confinement but also a final deprivation of mourning.

From Alicante to Formentera

After returning to Madrid on 15 July, María Eugenia learns that Fernando has been moved from Alicante prison to a penal detachment on Formentera. His transfer places him beyond the reach of her attempted visits: Alicante had already been too far from Navarre for her to go to him, and his subsequent removal further forecloses contact. The change of location is presented not as a new beginning in captivity but as the last stage of a separation that she cannot alter.

Death in the penal detachment

Fernando does not remain on Formentera long. In the winter of 1941, he dies of pneumonia, which the narrative connects to hunger, forced labor, and the unhealthy conditions of the camp. He is thirty years old. The account specifies the bodily and institutional circumstances of his death rather than treating it as an abstract wartime loss: deprivation and labor have helped make illness fatal.

Burial and the impossibility of mourning

Fernando’s father asks for his body so that he can be buried in the family mausoleum in Tudela. The authorities answer that he has already been buried on the island. The passage gives no further account of the grave or of any effort to recover the body; that absence itself marks the family’s inability to decide where or how he will be laid to rest. María Eugenia, his lover, never gets to bring flowers to his grave.

Narrative significance

Formentera functions as the endpoint of Fernando’s imprisonment and as a barrier to the gestures through which the living might acknowledge the dead. The island’s distance from María Eugenia’s home and the authorities’ assertion that burial has already taken place turn physical separation into a lasting emotional consequence. Her loss is followed by a life of public appearances and inwardly sustained thoughts of revenge, while the inaccessible grave stands for what the regime’s custody of Fernando has denied her: the chance to visit and mourn him.