Reunion at Plaza de España in Seville is the scene in which Frank and Vera’s tentative closeness becomes a visible reunion: as Ana and José tell stories beside the province panels, Frank and Vera share the task of pushing a stroller and, at Zaragoza, finally take each other’s hands. The narrator sees the gesture as the completion of a circle assembled from the reunion itself and Frank’s letter to Vera.

The Province Panels and Ana and José’s Stories

Ana explains that she and José have often walked at the plaza on Sundays, inventing a small story for every province of Spain. When travelling, they try to recall the stories in their proper order or make up new ones. The ritual is both a shared pastime and a way of moving through a familiar landscape together.

On this walk, Ana and José point out the ceramic mosaics and tell a brief tale, legend, or anecdote for each province. They proceed slowly, turning the plaza into a sequence of stories. Their steady exchange also clarifies the couple’s persistent murmuring: the narrator had not understood what they said and had relied on Frank as interpreter and mediator, a role Frank himself did not know he had been playing.

Frank and Vera’s Gesture

As the four friends make their way along the panels, Frank and Vera take turns pushing the baby stroller. Their alternating care gives their renewed relationship a practical, shared presence before either makes a declaration. At Zamora, at the far end of the plaza, the two are pushing it together.

The decisive gesture comes at Zaragoza. José tells them about 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 courage, clasp hands, and look steadily into one another’s eyes. Their reunion is made legible through this quiet physical action, after the walk has brought them province by province to the point where they can face each other directly.

The Circle Completed

The narrator understands the handclasp as the completion of a semicircle. The other half had been Frank’s letter to Vera. The two halves had not been intended to meet: the narrator had not expected to encounter Frank at the Rotunda of the Hotel Palace. That unexpected meeting caused considerable trouble, but also gave the narrator new impetus. The plaza scene therefore resolves not only a movement between Frank and Vera, but an arrangement the narrator had not planned to bring together.

The letter is accompanied by fifty-two Taveuni photographs, each bearing on its reverse one of the maxims Ana had written from the manifesto she and José recited to one another. Walking from Álava to Zaragoza, the narrator mentally recalls the manifesto, assigning a maxim to each Spanish province. This pairing of remembered words with the plaza’s ordered panels echoes Ana and José’s own practice of attaching stories to provinces. The narrator also recognizes that the manifesto was written to be shared by a couple: its perspective is difficult to bear alone, without a hand to hold.

Parting and Aftermath

Frank is no longer as despondent as he was during the earlier conversation at the palm grove of Maravu Plantation Resort. The narrator imagines that the burden of a lost eternity may now be easier for him to carry, because he will not face the cosmic night alone. Frank remains a grieving angel, but grief is understood as something that can teach others to love angels without wings.

The group parts at Plaza de España. Ana and José go home, while Frank and Vera acknowledge that they need to spend the rest of the weekend alone together in Seville. The narrator is left alone again, yet feels more closely joined to each of the young friends than any of them could have understood. Before returning by high-speed train to Madrid and flying on to Gatwick, the narrator walks to the Guadalquivir, crosses the San Telmo Bridge, and finds the door of the Church of Santa Ana in Triana open. The sudden sense of having lived that moment before carries the reunion’s concern with recurrence beyond the plaza.