Paseo del Borne is the site where Pedro Sanmartí Monegal’s body is discovered on a bench facing the Basilica of Santa Maria del Mar. Its place in the narrative is brief but decisive: the street becomes the setting where an intimate encounter with Julián Carax gives way, almost unnoticed at first, to news of a killing.

Setting and Discovery

After spending the night in an apartment on Ronda de San Antonio, the narrator later hears a radio report about a body found on Paseo del Borne. The dead man is sitting with his hands crossed over his lap and staring toward the basilica. Pigeons pecking at his eyes draw the attention of a local resident, who alerts the police; the corpse’s neck has been broken.

The dead man is identified as Pedro Sanmartí Monegal by his wife, Señora Sanmartí. When the news reaches the deceased’s father-in-law at a nursing home in Banyoles, he gives thanks and tells himself he can now die in peace. The report thus links the street’s public scene of death to a family’s private response.

Narrative Context

The discovery follows a night in which the narrator returns to the apartment and finds Julián waiting in darkness. Julián says he has written a poem for the narrator, the first thing he has written in nine years. Instead of reading it, the narrator breaks down and tells him everything; Julián listens silently, holds the narrator, and strokes their hair. The narrator feels able to lean on him for the first time in years, but the wish to kiss him meets the impossibility of Julián’s having lips or skin to offer.

The narrator falls asleep curled in Julián’s arms on the child’s bunk in his room. On waking, the narrator finds him gone, hears his footsteps on the roof terrace at dawn, and pretends to remain asleep. The radio then reports the death on Paseo del Borne, but the narrator hears it without understanding its significance. This delayed recognition places the street’s announcement against the earlier closeness: the emotional meaning of the night is unsettled by what the narrator cannot yet connect to it.

Significance

Paseo del Borne becomes a point of convergence between a starkly visible death and a truth the narrator has been resisting. The corpse’s formal stillness—hands crossed, gaze fixed on the basilica—is disrupted by the pigeons that expose it to public notice. The radio carries the report into the narrator’s private world, but the news initially remains only sound, its significance arriving later.

The subsequent reflection invokes Julián’s idea that coincidences are scars of fate and rejects the comfort of coincidence: people are described as puppets of subconscious desire, willing to believe almost anything rather than face the truth. The discovery on Paseo del Borne therefore gains its force not only from the murder but from its position in the narrative’s movement from concealed desire and denial toward recognition.