Anna Chases the Jester and Collapses at the Alcázar

Anna Chases the Jester and Collapses at the Alcázar is the apparent turning point from Ana’s pursuit of the mysterious bell-ringing jester to her death. As José tells it, she races across the Alcázar gardens after seeing the figure photograph her, then collapses with her heart condition in the Poets’ Garden. The story makes this a near-fatal event, but later reverses its apparent ending: Ana’s death is reported, then the narrator finds her alive again.

The Alcázar as refuge

The episode begins with the Alcázar’s personal history for Ana and José. José had introduced Ana to the gardens, although she had grown up in Seville without ever visiting them. They became her refuge in the city, and in some periods the two returned at least twice a week. On the third day of their stay in Seville, they walk there as they had many times before. The enclosed grounds seem to them like a world apart, and they joke about shutting themselves in and living there for the rest of their lives. José’s anguished suggestion that they should not have said this gives the familiar outing the shape of a foreboding before anything happens.

They sit on a bench near the café when Ana first spots a small figure by the Puerta de Marchena, looking out from the Galería del Grutesco. She says that he has taken her photograph, treating the act as a mortal offense. Then both Ana and José see the figure watching them from a battlement on the long wall that divides the Alcázar’s old and new gardens. He photographs them again. Ana identifies him as the bell-ringing jester, a figure she has spoken of before.

The pursuit and collapse

Ana springs from the bench and runs after the jester when he appears again at the Puerta de Marchena. José first tries to restrain her, then follows: he has heard her talk about the jester since he has known her and wants to keep up. The pursuit cuts through a detailed map of the gardens. Ana passes through an iron gate, runs by the pond and its statue of Mercury, descends to the Garden of the Dance and the Garden of the Ladies, and goes by the Fountain of Neptune. She crosses a large gateway, circles the Carlos V pavilion, enters and exits the high-hedged Labyrinth, then races along the Galería del Grutesco, through the Puerta del Privilegio, and down to the Poets’ Garden. Both Ana and the jester outrun José; bystanders, seeing him chase a small man, misunderstand who is pursuing whom.

In the Poets’ Garden, beside the last pond and close to Plaza de Santa Cruz, Ana falls over a hedge. The place lies just beyond a high wall from Los Gallos, where she had long been a celebrated flamenco performer. A crowd gathers before José reaches her. Ana is conscious, but her face is nearly blue and she struggles to breathe. José puts her into the large marble fountain for a few minutes to cool her feverish body, shouts that she has a heart condition, and watches for the ambulance. His recollection stresses that he cannot judge the exact passage of time as events unfold; the urgency of the scene is experienced through crisis rather than measured chronology.

A chase charged with history

The narrator later points out the physical stakes of Ana’s decision: her heart condition means she cannot dance or have children, because she cannot endure great exertion. He asks whether the run through the gardens was as demanding as flamenco. José concedes that it may have been the dance of her death. Yet the chase is not presented as a simple, unmotivated impulse. Ana runs because the jester has photographed her, and José explains that this particular photograph has pursued her throughout her life: she grew up with it. Her pursuit is at once an attempt to settle an old story and an encounter with an image that has already occupied her past.

The jester’s disappearance leaves the encounter unresolved. After Ana collapses, he is nowhere to be seen, as if the earth had swallowed him. Later, José recounts that the same jester was reportedly seen in Seville in June 1946, running across Plaza de la Virgen de los Reyes amid the sound of bells. When asked whether this was the figure Ana chased, José does not affirm it as fact; he says Ana believed it. According to him, the first words she said when he caught up with her in the Poets’ Garden were that she had heard the bells, and she repeated the phrase many times before she died. The year of the Alcázar episode is 1998, exactly 52 years after the reported sighting. That interval connects the chase to the jester’s recurring legend without explaining away the uncertainty surrounding him.

Reported death and reversal

At the hospital, Ana receives several injections and improves somewhat during the first hours, but she does not get back to her feet. The doctors intend to operate once her pulse returns to normal; it never does. José tells the narrator that Ana died scarcely a week earlier and that her funeral will be held on Friday at the Church of Santa Ana in Triana. He invites the narrator to attend. At this point the account has moved from a public collapse to what seems to be its irreversible consequence.

That consequence is later overturned. At a gathering with Frank and Vera, the narrator remembers Ana’s earlier words about the possibility of meeting again elsewhere and recalling this life as a dream. He recognizes that the group is together again and that Ana did not die. The revelation changes the status of José’s account: the collapse, hospital treatment, and reported death remain part of the story, but the supposed ending was not the truth. The event’s lasting force lies in that double movement—from a race through a familiar refuge to an apparent death, and from apparent finality to Ana’s return—while the jester’s identity and the meaning of the photograph remain entangled with legend and memory.