Spain

Spain functions in the novel as more than a destination: its museums, historic sites, and provincial landscapes connect the characters’ present-day journeys with stories that cross generations and media. The Prado offers Frank a route toward the mystery of Ana’s resemblance to Goya’s model; later, the tiles of Seville’s Plaza de España give the reunited characters a setting in which memory, partnership, and the book’s recurring number 52 converge.

The Prado and the search for a clue

After spending time in Madrid, Frank recognizes that the Prado is not simply a place to wander. Both the Englishman and José had pointed him toward the museum, and he understands their suggestions as clues to something specific. Crossing the Plaza de Cánovas del Castillo, also known as the Plaza de Neptuno, he passes the statue of Goya with the Ritz Hotel behind it and senses that he is approaching the solution to the mystery.

The museum’s paintings give that search a wider imaginative frame. Frank pauses before El jardín de las delicias, whose many human figures and vertebrate animals speak to his thoughts about humanity’s place among living creatures. His chain of associations runs from imagination to the painter, from the painter to the painting, and from the painting to fragility. The Prado thus holds more than a biographical clue: it joins the novel’s investigation of Ana’s identity to Frank’s meditations on life and vulnerability.

Spain in the story of the magical portrait

Spain is also the setting through which the characters discuss the legend of a dwarf carrying an impossibly lifelike portrait of a young woman. The miniature is said to have been made by an unknown technique: neither copper engraving nor oil painting, with a surface smooth as silk. Its extraordinary realism makes the story sound supernatural to those who encounter it, although the tale is older than photography. The novel places that legend beside a contemporary photograph, making the gap between what a period can explain and what it calls magic part of the mystery.

The account links the legend to Goya in Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the spring of 1797. According to José’s telling, Goya tries to take the small jester to his studio to paint him. The jester protests, but Goya cannot hear him; when the man produces the mysterious portrait of Ana María Maya, the painter releases him, struck by what he sees. Goya is completing La maja desnuda, and the story says he paints Ana’s face over the nude figure to conceal the model’s identity. The Spanish setting is therefore woven into an imagined history of art, concealment, and the danger a Roma woman might face for posing nude in Goya’s time.

Seville’s public map and private reunion

In Seville, the Plaza de España transforms the country into a walkable display. Its semicircular palace, canals, bridges, and arcades frame ceramic mosaics showing the provinces, with their maps and coats of arms. José explains that Spain has fifty provinces as well as the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Frank immediately connects the total of 52 with the number of constituencies in the Fijian Parliament. Their exchange turns a geographic fact into one of the novel’s recurring bridges between Spain and Fiji.

The mosaics also shape the pace and route of the group’s walk. Ana and José move along the arcades, and Ana begins reciting the provinces in alphabetical order, from Álava onward. Later, the friends pass each province slowly as Ana and José attach a short story, legend, or anecdote to its tile. What might have been a static national display becomes an itinerary of spoken memory: the country is encountered province by province, through both image and narration.

At the far end of the square, Frank and Vera are pushing the stroller together when José speaks of the basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza and its Goya frescoes. They pass the child back to Ana, take one another’s hands, and look into each other’s eyes. The completed semicircle of the plaza becomes an image of a reunion whose other half is Frank’s letter to Vera. The book makes the shape significant without pretending the two halves were designed to meet: their joining emerges from an unforeseen encounter and its consequences.

Spain as a frame for return and departure

The Plaza de España holds several strands of the characters’ past together. The letter to Vera is accompanied by fifty-two photographs of Taveuni, each bearing one of the aphorisms Ana had written on its back. As the group walks between Álava and Zaragoza, the narrator silently recalls the manifesto, assigning a maxim to each province. The Spanish sequence therefore carries the Pacific journey into the present: the photographs and words travel with Frank and Vera, while the provincial route gives their shared recollections a new structure.

The reunited group does not remain together indefinitely. Ana and José leave for home, while Frank and Vera say they need the rest of the weekend alone in Seville. The narrator is left by himself, then walks to the Guadalquivir and crosses the San Telmo Bridge before arriving at the Church of Santa Ana in Triana. There, a young woman’s funeral leads him to encounter the Alcázar dwarf, who gives him a photograph of the narrator seated in the Alcázar gardens. Spain’s historic settings thus connect the communal reunion to the novel’s final turn inward: the narrator recognizes that the story he has been writing concerns not only Frank and Vera or Ana and José, but Sheila and himself.

Spain’s narrative importance lies in these crossings. The Prado redirects Frank toward Ana’s likeness and Goya; Sanlúcar anchors a legend that makes an old portrait seem to anticipate photography; and Seville’s mosaics convert the country into a sequence of places, stories, and remembered connections. The number 52, linking Spanish provinces to Fiji, reinforces the larger pattern: Spain is not an isolated backdrop but one of the novel’s meeting points between geography, image, memory, and the relationships that endure beyond a journey.