France is a recurring borderland in the novel: a country through which fugitives flee, a place where Spanish Republican exiles endure displacement, and a destination that later receives people escaping Argentina’s dictatorship. Its role is not simply that of refuge. Closed borders, clandestine crossings, prison networks, and the labor of exile communities make France part of an unstable geography in which safety depends on routes, documents, and human assistance.

Borders and Routes of Escape

For Manuel Arroyo Benítez, France was the route he would have preferred when he returned to Spain in 1946. Crossing from France, he thought, would attract less notice than entering through Gibraltar. But the frontier was closed, and an illegal mountain crossing with a guide risked a fall that could prematurely end his mission. He therefore entered through Gibraltar on 10 September, carrying an American identity as cover. The blocked French route made the choice of border a matter of operational safety, not convenience.

The novel also traces the reverse journey. Sole Ruiz learned that a fellow domestic worker had escaped Spain by way of Lérida and the mountains: after setting the table on Christmas Eve and saying goodbye to her employer until the twenty-sixth, she reached Toulouse, then crossed the Pyrenees during the night. By the time she should have returned to work, she was in France. From there she arranged to join her father in New York. Her account became one of the leads through which Manuel and his associates investigated the escape network operating around Clara Stauffer.

That testimony drew attention to the Spanish prison camp at Nanclares de Oca. Built by prisoners from the Republican side and used chiefly to confine International Brigaders, it later held German fugitives who crossed the Pyrenees after France’s liberation. At first these were often ordinary soldiers seeking to avoid reprisals from the Resistance; as Germany’s defeat approached, other kinds of arrivals followed. Some prominent collaborators entered Spain by air with official recommendations and did not pass through the camp, but many Nazi and collaborationist fugitives from across Europe did. France’s frontier thus appears as a threshold both for desperate individual escapes and for the larger postwar movement of people who sought shelter from accountability.

Exile, Return, and Reconstructed Identities

For Manuel, France was also the neighboring country from which a return to Spain had become impossible by ordinary means. His arrival after more than seven years away carried the force of homecoming, but his passage through Gibraltar was shaped by a false American identity and the need to avoid scrutiny. The difference between the country he missed and the route he could safely take captures the divided condition of exile: attachment to home did not make return straightforward.

France’s exile history is also present in Manuel’s earlier life. In the summer of 1939, he lived in Geneva, where he had once been known as Monsieur Agoyo. The city was not France, but his experience there belongs to the same European exile landscape: he had a modest, unofficial assignment from Pablo de Azcárate, worked under the name Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez, and sent reports to Taplow. His work took him from a small rented office to benches in squares, parks, and cafés, where he met representatives of neutral and Allied countries. Though safe in Switzerland and housed in a comfortable boarding house, he found the period lonely and would have exchanged its security for the exposure of a French camp. The comparison gives exile a material measure: a protected room could still feel like a worse fate than hardship among fellow refugees.

France also figures in the fabricated itinerary Manuel and Guillermo devise for the false Adrián Gallardo. Their story has Adrián and a German fugitive reaching France separately after years of aid from a Catholic priest in Bavaria. They then travel through Switzerland with homemade safe-conducts supplied by priests: the papers cannot secure legal border passage, but can win help, shelter, and transport from churches. In April 1947, the Spanish fugitive crosses the Pyrenees into Spain with a guide arranged by a priest near Perpignan and takes more than a month to reach Madrid. This invented route is designed for one listener, Clara Stauffer, yet it draws its plausibility from the real postwar role of religious networks in protecting fugitives. France becomes the hinge in an identity built from concealment, church assistance, and a clandestine crossing.

Refuge Networks and Political Memory

The inquiry into Stauffer’s organization presents France as both a source of evidence and a link in a wider network. Meg Williams checks Sole’s story with former International Brigaders who had encountered German deserters at Nanclares. They recall a woman who moved freely in and out of the camp as an interpreter, bringing prisoners food and clothing and handling their correspondence. The German detainees occupied separate barracks and lived in better conditions than other prisoners; the woman who visited them, the witnesses say, wielded considerable influence. In this account, assistance crosses the border in both directions: the camp receives men who have fled France, while a clandestine network helps them survive and continue onward.

That evidence matters politically because Manuel’s associates hope to show that the Franco regime protects war criminals and thereby provoke international pressure. They do not yet have enough to establish the whole escape route or prove the identities and destinations of its participants. France is therefore more than scenery in the investigation: testimony about crossings, prisoners, and post-liberation fugitives helps turn scattered suspicions into a possible account of an organized system. But the information remains incomplete, and the distinction between what the investigators know and what they believe is essential to the mission.

The novel widens the meaning of refuge again through the Republican exile community in Toulouse. In October 1944, Inés Ruiz Maldonado arrived there with the UNE army that had unsuccessfully invaded the Aran Valley and joined a small cooperative tavern run by women who shared work hours, wages, and profits. The enterprise grew into Casa Inés, eventually described by La Dépêche du Midi as the best Spanish restaurant in France and awarded its first Michelin star in 1966. Its success did not erase the defeat that had brought its founders into exile. Instead, the restaurant became a sanctuary of communist exile and a living memorial to the failed invasion: a gathering place for Republican soldiers and anti-fascist guerrillas, and a destination for younger Spaniards raised under the dictatorship. Visitors studied the photographs on its walls, identified themselves as members of the Party, and asked to be photographed with veterans. For Inés and her colleagues, this unexpected attention gradually made their old defeat feel capable of becoming a lasting, perhaps final, victory.

The community was sustained not only by political memory but by practical labor and mutual aid. Inés had entered the restaurant’s kitchen as a worker; years later, despite its growth, she still regarded the kitchen as her own and would not allow others to handle its utensils or make even minor decisions without her approval. Her intensity caused friction, particularly with her daughter, but the restaurant was also a family formed through shared work: the four women who ran it had become as close as relatives. When guerrillas from the Sierra Sur of Jaén escaped with their families and reached Toulouse in June 1949, Fernanda, formerly a butcher, joined the kitchen. Her arrival also answered Inés’s long-running worry over scarce, expensive olive oil: Rafael Cuesta had managed to send some from Spain only once, until Galán began supplying it from Zaragoza. In the kitchen as in the exile network, solidarity took concrete form in food, work, and the difficult logistics of staying alive.

Later Displacement and the Meaning of Home

France’s history as a place of refuge acquires a painful later echo when the novel turns to Argentina. After the military dictatorship began its terror on 24 March 1976, with hundreds of illegal arrests that very night, many Argentines sought a way to leave. Mexico received the largest number of exiles; Spain received the second-largest. The irony is sharpened by the timing: Franco had just died, and Spain had once sheltered Perón, whose example was later claimed by Latin American dictators. The novel links the regimes through practices of repression, including the theft of children from political prisoners.

France’s place in this later episode is part of a wider history of refuge and return. Spanish Republicans who had gone into exile in 1939 and made lives across the ocean were forced, almost forty years later, into another exile that brought them back to Spain as foreigners and empty-handed. Against that repeated displacement, France stands as one element in a continental and transatlantic map of flight rather than a permanent answer to it. Across the novel, crossing into France can mean escape from a prison, the beginning of an uncertain exile, or a stage in a longer journey. A border can open a route, but it cannot by itself restore a home or resolve the political danger that made flight necessary.