San Sebastián is both a destination and a threshold in the novel’s account of postwar flight: a city whose beach becomes the scene of Léon Degrelle’s emergency arrival in Spain, while the wider narrative associates the name with longing, return, and the precarious passage from one political life to another.

The emergency landing

On 8 May 1945, one day after the surrender of the Third Reich, a Heinkel 111 carrying four people ran out of fuel and made an emergency landing in the sea off La Concha Beach. The aircraft had taken off from Oslo hours earlier; among its passengers was Léon Degrelle, founder and commander of the Walloon Legion, a Waffen-SS formation. The plane stranded before the eyes of astonished beachgoers, turning a private flight from defeat into a public spectacle. Degrelle had not initially set out for Spain. As the Allied advance intensified, he went to Copenhagen hoping to secure a place aboard one of the submarines rumored to be prepared to carry Hitler’s inner circle to South America. No place was available. That refusal, which might have seemed a fatal setback, saved his life: after protesting, he obtained the aircraft associated with Albert Speer, the Reich’s minister of public works, who had remained in Germany. Degrelle chose Spain and never regretted the decision.

Refuge and impunity

The beach landing made Degrelle one of the Allied Control Council’s most sought-after fugitives in Spain. Its notoriety—the aircraft among the bathers, and Degrelle’s reputation as Hitler’s favored “adoptive son”—gave the city a conspicuous place in the diplomatic pursuit of people connected to Nazi and collaborationist activity. San Sebastián is therefore more than the setting for an extraordinary arrival: it marks the point where flight became a question of whether Spain would shelter or surrender those arriving from the defeated Axis world. The novel contrasts Degrelle’s fate with that of Pierre Laval, who reached Spain earlier, on 2 May 1945, and was handed over to the French authorities on 30 July. Laval was tried for treason, sentenced to death, and executed in October. Franco’s cooperation in that case began and ended there. Belgium continued to demand Degrelle’s extradition for fifteen years, but Franco refused; in 1954 the regime definitively protected him. He thereafter officially used the Spanish identity José León Ramírez Reina, under which he established a construction company that received abundant state contracts. The sequence gives San Sebastián’s beach landing a long political afterlife: the brief spectacle of a plane in the sea precedes decades of protected residence and official impunity.

A remembered homeland and other passages

Elsewhere, the novel makes the approach to Spain carry a more intimate weight. On 10 September 1946, Manuel Arroyo Benítez entered Spain through Gibraltar, travelling under the cover of an American visitor. From the aircraft steps he saw the Campo de Gibraltar and the laundry on rooftops in La Línea; the Strait’s wind moved him with the recognition of returning to a home he had been missing for more than seven years. His route was chosen under constraint: the French border was closed, while a clandestine mountain crossing risked a fall that could end his mission. This is not an arrival in San Sebastián, but it belongs to the novel’s broader geography of return, in which a Spanish landscape can signify home even when the traveller must conceal who he is. The city also belongs to a recurring map of displacement rather than to a single character’s itinerary. Guillermo’s survival under an assumed name is divided by the Castellana in Madrid, which he crosses each morning as though it marked the boundary between the life of Guillermo García Medina and that of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez. Manuel’s Geneva exile is shaped by the absence of Meg Williams, and in 1948 his arrival in Buenos Aires with Clara Stauffer places him amid an organized welcome for her network. Decades later, after the Argentine dictatorship’s terror begins on 24 March 1976, Spain becomes a destination for many exiles, including Republican Spaniards who had made new lives across the ocean and were forced to return as foreigners, with nothing. Against those repeated journeys, San Sebastián’s strand of the story concentrates a sharp contradiction: Spain can be experienced as home, a place of refuge, or a shelter whose protection is extended unequally.