Zaragoza is a geographic marker in the concluding walk through Seville’s Plaza de España and, more importantly, the place-name at which Frank and Vera’s divided halves meet. As José invokes the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar and its Goya frescoes, the couple pass their child’s stroller to Ana and take each other’s hands, completing the circle that the narrator had not expected to close.

Setting and Appearance

Zaragoza appears not as a visited city but as one of the Spanish provinces represented by a ceramic-tile panel in the Plaza de España. The narrator and companions move slowly past the provinces, while Ana and José point out the mosaics and tell a brief story, legend, or anecdote associated with each. Later, the narrator mentally assigns a remembered aphorism from the manifesto to each province while walking between the panels for Álava and Zaragoza.

The Turning Point at Zaragoza

At the far end of the plaza, Frank and Vera are pushing the stroller together. When the group reaches the Zaragoza panel, José describes the beautiful Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar and its Goya frescoes. Frank and Vera then gather the courage to hand the stroller to Ana. With their hands free, they clasp hands and look steadily into each other’s eyes. Zaragoza thus marks a quiet but decisive change: after separation and grief, the couple make their reunion visible through a shared gesture rather than an explanation.

The Circle and the Letter

The narrator interprets the moment through the image of two semicircles. Frank and Vera’s joined hands complete one; the other is Frank’s letter to Vera. The narrator had never intended the two halves to become one, because the plan had not accounted for encountering Frank at the Rotunda of the Palace Hotel. That unexpected meeting had caused the narrator considerable difficulty, but had also supplied new impetus. Zaragoza consequently holds both the emotional resolution between Frank and Vera and the structural surprise that redirected the narrator’s own work.

The Provinces and the Manifesto

The walk gives Zaragoza a second function in the novel’s pattern of shared memory. Frank’s letter is accompanied by fifty-two photographs of Taveuni, each bearing on its reverse an aphorism from the manifesto that Ana had written down. As the narrator crosses the plaza, the provinces become prompts for recalling the manifesto’s maxims, one assigned in thought to each province. The narrator recognizes that the text was intended for a couple to share: its perspective is difficult to endure for someone without a hand to hold.

The scene’s geography therefore joins public markers to intimate acts. Zaragoza is one panel in a sequence of provincial mosaics, but at that panel Frank and Vera’s hands meet, while the remembered manifesto turns the walk into an act of recollection. The place-name helps make the novel’s closing reunion concrete without turning it into a claim that grief or the long journey has ended; the narrator still imagines Frank carrying the burden of a lost eternity, now less alone.