Plaza Mayor de Salamanca is a meeting place where music rekindles Ana’s connection to her former life as a dancer and where Ana and José later verify Vera’s identity. Its appearances link private memory and grief to the novel’s intersecting encounters.

Setting and First Encounter

During a visit to Salamanca with José’s family, Ana and José were living in Madrid. In a café on Plaza Mayor de Salamanca, flamenco music began playing; the group performing was one Ana had worked with in Seville years earlier. The music brought her desire to dance into view: she tapped rhythmically on the table, while José asked her to stop so she would not intensify her distress.

Ana then stood abruptly and said she wanted to return to her Seville. José feared he could not keep her away from dancing, and they went to Seville, where they spent a couple of days with her parents in Triana. The café scene thus leads directly from Salamanca to a return to the city and family from which Ana’s former dancing life had been part.

The Place They Avoided

During those days in Seville, Ana and José took long walks through María Luisa Park, Plaza de España, the Alcázar gardens, and the Santa Cruz district. José could not bring Ana to Plaza de Santa Cruz, where she had danced every night in recent years and from which she had been taken away by ambulance after her last performance.

Ana did not speak about the episode or her heart condition. Whenever they neared the square, marked by an old wrought-iron cross at the site of a former church, she took José’s arm and led him down another alley. The contrast is sharp: the music in Salamanca prompts her to express a wish to return to Seville, but in Seville she steers them away from the place most closely tied to her recent dancing and its consequences.

Later Meeting and Recognition

Plaza Mayor de Salamanca appears again as the site of a lunch shared by Frank and Vera. Ana and José had seen them there, and afterward went to their hotel to establish that Vera was indeed the woman they had seen. José recounts that this took place only days before Ana died; Frank says he keeps thinking about how close the encounter was to her death.

The square therefore connects two moments in Ana and José’s story: an earlier visit in which flamenco music turns her attention back toward Seville, and a later encounter that brings Frank and Vera into their orbit. Its significance lies in these linked returns, rather than in any description of the square apart from its café setting.