Plaza de España in Seville is the setting for the decisive public gesture in Frank and Vera’s reunion: after circling its provincial mosaics with a stroller, they take each other’s hands in front of Zaragoza. The square’s semicircular form also gives the narrator a way to understand how their reunion completes a connection he had not expected to make.

A Circuit of Provinces

Ana and José lead the walk by pointing out the ceramic mosaics for Spain’s provinces, telling a brief story, legend, or anecdote for each one. The route turns the plaza into a sequence of local histories: the pair move slowly from province to province, while Frank and Vera take turns pushing the baby’s stroller behind them.

The narrator’s imagined counterfactual makes the stroller part of a much longer evolutionary perspective. Had a meteorite not struck Earth 65 million years earlier, he thinks, Frank and Vera might instead have been pushing an egg in a stroller, since even the saurioids would eventually have invented the wheel. The joke places this intimate family scene against the novel’s expansive account of life and evolution.

The Reunion at Zaragoza

The walk reaches its emotional turning point at Zaragoza, on the far side of the plaza. Frank and Vera are pushing the stroller together when José speaks of the beautiful Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar and its frescoes by Goya. As they hand the stroller to Ana, Frank and Vera gather their courage, clasp hands, and look steadily into each other’s eyes. Their reunion is expressed not through a speech but through a shared action and a sustained look.

The narrator describes this moment as the completion of a semicircle. The other half, he explains, was Frank’s letter to Vera. He had never planned for the two halves to join, because he had not expected to meet Frank at the Rotunda of the Hotel Palace. That unanticipated encounter caused him many headaches, but also gave him new impulses: the plaza’s reconciliation has become part of a story whose shape changed through an unforeseen meeting.

A Shared Manifesto and a Parting

The letter is accompanied by fifty-two photographs of Taveuni, each carrying on its reverse one of the maxims Ana had written down from the manifesto she and José recited to each other. As the group walks from Álava to Zaragoza, the narrator mentally recites what he remembers, assigning a maxim to each Spanish province. The text’s circulation—from the couple’s recitations to Ana’s notes on the photographs and then to the narrator’s memory—connects the Fiji episodes to this walk through Spain.

The narrator reflects that José should have made clear that the manifesto was written to be shared by a couple. Its perspective, he thinks, is difficult to bear for someone without a hand to hold. Frank is no longer as devastated as he was when the narrator spoke with him among the palms at Maravu Plantation Resort. The narrator imagines that Frank can now carry the burden of a lost eternity more easily because he is no longer alone before the encounter with the cosmic night. Frank remains a sorrowing angel, but sorrow, the narrator reflects, teaches one to love angels without wings.

The group parts in Plaza de España. Ana and José go home, while Frank and Vera acknowledge that they need the rest of the weekend alone together in Seville. The narrator is left by himself again, yet feels more closely joined to each of his young friends than any of them could understand. The plaza thus holds both a reunion and a separation: one couple leaves together, another departs together, and the narrator remains alone with the connections the walk has made visible.