Ginebra, the novel’s name for Geneva, is where Manuel Arroyo’s work for the Spanish delegation and his intimate friendship with Meg Williams converge. It gives him a professional role in the Republic’s diplomatic resistance and a private home in the form of the person he comes to regard as his closest family; later, his departure for London makes the loss of that companionship part of the strain of his work.

Setting and Diplomatic Work

In Ginebra, Meg Williams helps the Spanish delegation repeatedly reject, protest against, and disavow envoys of the military rebels and monarchists seeking a foothold in the League of Nations. Her contribution matters as practical support for the delegation, but her importance to Manuel reaches beyond their shared political work: she becomes both his best male friend and his best female friend, and his only family in the city.

Manuel and Meg

The closeness is especially significant against Manuel’s limited experience of intimacy with women. As a boy he lost the company of his sister María and Leo when he went to live with Don Marcos at seven; afterward, his education and working life placed him among men. His brief relationship after graduating, occasional encounters with married women, and uncertain flirtations had not prepared him for Meg. Their friendship grows through shared weekends, long walks with their dogs, and nights drinking by a fireplace.

At the end of 1933, after exactly a year of knowing each other, they spend New Year’s Eve at a small mountain hotel on French territory in the foothills of the Jura massif. They have returned there on earlier weekends, but this time they leave the dogs behind because the hotel’s formal restaurant requires evening dress. Over dinner, Meg asks whether Manuel likes her. He initially takes the question as a teasing inquiry about whether other people might find her attractive; she clarifies that she wants to know whether he likes her as a woman and whether she appeals to him personally. The exchange makes explicit the difference between their affectionate camaraderie and the possibility of a romantic attachment.

Departure and Absence

When Manuel is sent to London, he misses Meg not only for herself but for the passion, complicity, and unconditional support that had made his work bearable. His diplomatic days there are full of courteous encounters with labor, socialist, and social-democratic figures who express sympathy but do nothing practical for the Republic. The contrast gives his memory of Ginebra particular force: in the city he left, political cooperation had been joined to personal loyalty.

Manuel and Meg exchange very long letters, but he cannot tell her anything important, and their correspondence offers little beyond trivial news. Meg writes that she has no friends in England who can keep him company and that he will have to get drunk alone. Her letter confirms the isolation he has already sensed in the American embassy, where verbal sympathy for the Republic produces no practical consequences. Ginebra therefore remains in the narrative as more than a former workplace: it marks the personal support Manuel has lost just as his diplomatic responsibilities become increasingly frustrating.