Modena

Modena’s story turns on a painful contrast: others see his vulnerability and later his suffering, while he continues to believe that Ulla will return to him. His attachment to her, and the eventual reunion that vindicates his hope, make him a figure through whom the novel tests how far love can endure separation and damage.

Identity and First Appearance

Modena first appears at Leopold’s Beer Bar as a dark, brooding, undernourished young Spaniard. He is taciturn and does black-market business with French, Italian, and African tourists. When Didier reaches past Karla to slap him on the shoulder and call for another round, Modena flinches and scowls, but summons the waiter and orders drinks. The brief encounter establishes both his reserve and his position among the bar’s loosely connected expatriate and tourist circle.

Ulla is with him: a German sex worker who has, for some time, allowed him to describe himself as her lover. Their public ease is uncertain rather than secure. At Didier’s signal, Ulla gets up to leave, and Modena walks out without a word. Later, Karla describes him as someone who trusts her to a degree but cannot hold his ground when Maurizio tells him what to do. Modena’s quiet presence therefore conceals a consequential weakness: his choices can be redirected by Maurizio, even when those choices affect Ulla and the people around them.

Ulla, Maurizio, and the Failed Deal

Modena’s relationship with Ulla is bound up with a precarious mix of affection, dependency, and danger. Ulla had once been a wealthy young woman in Germany, but after developing a heroin habit her family cut her off. She came to India with a German partner who was also addicted and put her to work in a harsh environment; Karla recalls that Ulla loved him and would have done almost anything for him. That history frames the vulnerability Karla sees in Ulla’s later attachment to Modena, whom she allows to call himself her lover. Ulla herself says that he truly loves her, even as her life remains exposed to the choices made by men around her.

Maurizio’s influence makes that exposure immediate. Modena does black-market business, but Karla considers him unable to resist Maurizio’s direction: he trusts Maurizio only partly and loses his resolve when Maurizio tells him what to do. When Maurizio plans a fraudulent deal, Ulla becomes useful because the intended victims like and trust her. Modena and Maurizio change their plans and prevent her from meeting Lin at Leopold’s, although she had wanted Lin nearby because she did not trust them. The scheme goes wrong, leaving those who lost money unwilling to let the matter pass. Ulla later needs a thousand dollars and Lin’s company to retrieve her belongings from a hotel; she is frightened, while Modena and Maurizio’s failed business has made her a target. Lin helps her leave safely, but admits that he did not ask enough about the danger or its perpetrators because his attention was fixed on finding Karla.

The episode exposes the distance between Modena’s attachment to Ulla and his capacity to protect her from Maurizio’s schemes. It also gives their separation a practical cause: Ulla is not simply absent from Lin’s earlier appointment, but has been caught in a deal arranged around her and controlled by the two men. Later, when Lin finds Modena living apart from the places he and Ulla once shared, Modena explains that he is waiting for her return. He believes she will look for him through their old acquaintances, though the people around him regard that hope as delusional. His conviction persists even after Ulla has gone to Germany and he has endured a devastating assault. The narrative initially presents his certainty as painful misrecognition, then gives it a striking reversal when Ulla does come back.

Mutilation, Waiting, and Return

When Lin eventually finds Modena, their meeting is shaped by what Maurizio has done to him. Modena is living away from Leopold’s and the other places he once shared with Ulla. Lin approaches cautiously, offers him a beedie, and waits in the dark until Modena accepts it. The brief exchange gives way to the shock of seeing how badly Maurizio has disfigured him; injuries have also left Modena’s movements awkward. The encounter makes visible the suffering that had previously reached Lin and Lisa only through thought and report, and it shows how violence has narrowed Modena’s life without extinguishing his expectation that Ulla will return.

Modena explains that he stays apart from their old haunts because Ulla will not know where to find him. He expects her to seek him through Lin or their other acquaintances, and calmly imagines that they will be together again. Lin knows Ulla has gone to Germany and doubts she will return, but Modena’s certainty persists. What those around him take for delusion is also a form of fidelity: he continues to orient his future around a reunion despite separation, injury, and the apparent evidence against it.

The expectation is eventually fulfilled. Ulla inherits money after her father’s death and returns from Germany, where her family had cut her off during her drug dependence. She feels guilty and cannot live with that guilt without looking for Modena; when she finds him, he has been waiting. Lisa later tells Lin that she saw them together, with Modena resting across Ulla’s legs, a tableau she compares to Michelangelo’s Pietà. The resemblance turns their reunion into an image of care after suffering, while preserving its strangeness: the return is not a restoration of the life they had before, but a meeting in which Ulla faces the consequences of the violence done to him.

Modena’s fate also remains present in the people who hear about it. Lisa says she had searched the newspapers for news of him and could not stop thinking about his absence; the earlier violence and its consequences had left her distressed, while Modena’s uncertain whereabouts continued to trouble her. Lin admits that he, too, sees Modena’s face in his mind despite not having been present when Maurizio attacked him. The account makes the reunion more than a private resolution between Modena and Ulla: it answers an absence that has continued to haunt their circle, and confirms that Modena’s hope, however implausible it seemed, had not been misplaced.

Narrative Role and Significance

Modena’s story is first assembled from other people’s partial knowledge: Karla describes his susceptibility to Maurizio, Ulla speaks of his love, and Lin later encounters the consequences of their failed deal without having asked Ulla enough about the danger she faced. That distance makes Modena’s private conviction easy to dismiss. His eventual reunion with Ulla changes how the earlier scenes read: waiting, which had seemed like denial of an irreversible separation, proves to have been a future she also chose. Lisa’s and Lin’s continuing distress over Modena’s absence further shows how an offstage ordeal can persist in the minds of those who were not present. Through Modena, the novel leaves uncertainty intact while distinguishing an implausible hope from an empty one.