Madrid is a city of repeated looking and delayed understanding in the novel. Its Prado galleries, gardens, Retiro Park, and hotels connect Frank’s present encounters with Ana and José to the memories he turns into a letter to Vera—and later to the narrator’s effort to discover what happened next.

Museums and the image of Ana

At the Prado, Frank returns to the Goya collection after meeting José. He approaches the two paintings one last time and looks Ana in the eyes, recognizing in her painted gaze the sidelong look and tightly closed mouth he remembers from Taveuni. The museum is therefore more than a repository of Goya’s work: it places the woman Frank knew beside the images that have made her identity impossible for him to regard as ordinary.

The Prado remains a point of return the following Wednesday. Frank arrives shortly after the museum opens, hoping to see José again, though they have arranged no meeting place. He pauses in the room containing El jardín de las delicias, where he and José had met the day before, then goes upstairs to stand before the two majas. After looking at Ana’s eyes for a long time, he finds it unsettling that the image seems to look back; he thinks he would scarcely be surprised if she winked.

Gardens and ordinary life

After leaving the museum, Frank walks up busy Alfonso XII Street and enters Retiro Park. Yellow, white, and red daisies—Bellis perennis—are abundant in its meadows. He watches schoolchildren in uniform, student couples, retirees, and grandparents with grandchildren, sometimes carrying food for the squirrels. The everyday scene leads him to contrast how wonderful life actually is with how commonplace it seems to those living it.

That contrast recalls Ana and José’s words in Taveuni about elves belonging to a tale while also representing what language cannot express, and about whether a story could remain a story if it could see itself. Madrid’s park gives Frank a concrete setting in which to feel the force of that thought: daily life is visible all around him, yet its wonder is not necessarily apparent to the people taking part in it.

The city as the place where memory becomes a letter

Madrid also frames Frank’s act of turning experience into a narrative for Vera. After returning to the Prado to study again what Ana María Maya looked like when she chased a dwarf through the Alcázar gardens, Frank goes back to his hotel. From his window he looks across Neptune Square toward the Ritz and the Prado, where two paintings of Ana hang. He decides to do everything he can to bring Vera with him to Seville and recognizes that doing so requires telling her the long story that has occupied his memory for two days and nights.

On 5 May 1998, he sits at the desk, switches on his laptop, records the date, and begins composing the letter paragraph by paragraph. He starts with what he has seen and experienced in Oceania from November through January, including the flight from Nadi to Matei, Taveuni, Maravu Plantation Resort, and his first meeting with Ana and José. The letter begins in Madrid before Frank sees José again in Retiro Park and before he recounts the older histories connected with El Planeta in Marseille and the Cádiz wharf in 1790.

Hotels and the narrator’s later return

The letter ends with its email dispatch to Vera on the night of Thursday, 7 May 1998. The narrator says that a year would pass before he obtained a copy. In the summer, seated at home in Croydon with Frank’s long letter before him, he looks back to a meeting with Frank at the Palace Hotel in Madrid the previous November, about half a year after Frank had written to Vera there. The narrator remembers Frank’s anxiety about seeing Vera again in Salamanca, but at the time of their November meeting he does not know whether the reunion has taken place or how it went; he has had no contact with Frank since they parted in Fiji.

That uncertainty makes the Madrid hotel a second kind of threshold. The narrator wonders whether Frank and Vera are together again or whether Frank is merely passing through Madrid. He is sitting beneath the hotel dome, drinking tea and pastries and listening to a harpist play a nostalgic version of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, when he suddenly sees Frank enter the Rotunda. The narrator is startled by the coincidence of encountering him at the Palace, far from Fiji and London. Madrid thus links Frank’s private act of narration with the later, chance encounter that allows the narrator to resume the story.