Real Alcázar of Seville

The Real Alcázar of Seville is a real garden setting whose enclosed paths become inseparable from Ana and José’s life together and from the story’s uncanny recurrence of the bell-ringing dwarf. First a refuge where the couple repeatedly walked, it becomes the place of Ana’s collapse after she pursues the figure through the gardens; later, José’s visit there with Frank makes its landscape a point of return between memory, beauty, and the unresolved legend.

Setting and refuge

José first took Ana to the gardens of the Real Alcázar of Seville. Although she had grown up in Seville, she had never visited them before he brought her. The place soon became her refuge in the city, and at certain periods the two walked there at least twice a week. Their attachment rests not only on the gardens’ beauty but on the sense of separation they provide: the enclosed grounds seem to them like a world apart.

On the third day of their later stay in Seville, they return to walk there as they had so many times before. They joke about shutting themselves inside the gardens and living there for the rest of their lives. In retrospect, José’s emphatic regret that they voiced the idea gives their carefree remark a foreboding edge: the refuge they imagine as a permanent retreat will shortly become the scene of a crisis.

The dwarf and the pursuit

While sitting on a bench near the café, Ana spots a dwarf near the Puerta de Marchena, apparently looking out from the Galería del Grutesco. She says he has taken her photograph, treating the act as a grave offense. The couple then see the small figure watching them from a battlement on the long wall dividing the old and new gardens. He takes another photograph. Ana identifies him as the bell-ringing dwarf, a figure she has spoken of before, and abruptly leaves the bench to chase him.

José thinks he may first have tried to hold her back, but follows when she runs after the dwarf again through the Puerta de Marchena. The pursuit carries them across a sharply defined sequence of garden landmarks: past the iron gate and the pond with the statue of Mercury, down through the Jardín de la Danza and the Jardín de las Damas, by the Fountain of Neptune, through the great gate, around the Carlos V pavilion, into and out of the high-hedged Labyrinth, and along the Galería del Grutesco. Ana then turns through the Puerta del Privilegio and runs down toward the Jardín de los Poetas. The route makes the Alcázar’s ordered, enclosed beauty the setting for a frantic chase whose purpose, as José understands it, is to put an end to the story she has pursued for so long.

The scene also turns on a reversal of appearances. Onlookers see Ana and José apparently chasing a helpless dwarf, when in fact Ana is pursuing him. The dwarf and Ana both run faster than José, and he has to endure the shouts of people who misunderstand what is happening. The gardens’ winding paths and gates allow the pursuit to unfold as a passage through successive spaces, while the narrator’s account preserves José’s effort to keep up and the confusion his pursuit creates for witnesses.

Ana’s collapse in the Jardín de los Poetas

In the Jardín de los Poetas, Ana collapses onto a hedge beside the last pond, close to the Plaza de Santa Cruz. Only a high wall separates the spot from Los Gallos, the flamenco venue where she had long been a celebrated performer. The proximity joins the gardens to a second place central to her history in Seville, though the immediate scene is no performance: a crowd gathers around her before José can reach her.

Ana has not lost consciousness, but her face is almost blue and she struggles to breathe. José lifts her and places her in the large marble fountain for a few minutes to cool her feverish body. He calls out that she has a heart condition, and an ambulance soon arrives with a stretcher. José’s account does not give a precise measure of how long events take, an uncertainty he explicitly acknowledges; it does establish the sudden bodily emergency that interrupts the chase. The gardens that had served as Ana’s refuge have become the site of her collapse.

Repetition, memory, and return

José tells the episode retrospectively while speaking with Frank in the Botanical Garden in Madrid. The account therefore brings the Alcázar into the present as a remembered place, and its significance expands beyond the single collapse. José says the dwarf has appeared across the story’s chronology: he reached Marseille in 1842, met Manuel in Triana in 1894, crossed the Plaza de la Virgen de los Reyes in 1946, and, according to Ana, was the same figure seen in the Alcázar gardens in 1998. José confirms that this is what the story claims, leaving the continuity as a legend rather than offering an independent explanation.

Later, José takes Frank through Seville. After visiting the cathedral and climbing La Giralda, they cross the Plaza de la Virgen de los Reyes and enter the Alcázar’s gardens, among their ponds, fountains, and palms. The palm grove recalls Taveuni to José, giving the Seville landscape an echo of an earlier place in the narrative. They pass through the older gardens and the Puerta del Privilegio into the Jardín de los Poetas, with its two ponds ringed by tall hedges. Frank stops, startled by its beauty. This return retraces the ground of Ana’s pursuit and collapse, but now José and Frank encounter it in quiet wonder. The Alcázar thus holds two sharply contrasting moments: a remembered emergency and a later act of shared attention to the place itself.