Spain

I don’t know whether you’d come to Spain yet or whether you were in Italy or France or some filthy Latin American hole.

She tried to be a theater actress in New York, a movie actress in Los Angeles, tried to be a model in Paris, a photographer in London, a translator in Spain.

The baroness, meanwhile, as if to counterbalance Archimboldi’s forced travels, told him about her own journeys, all planned and desired and therefore happy, exotic trips to Bulgaria and Turkey and Montenegro and receptions at the German embassies of Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and she confessed that sometimes she tried to repent of the good times she’d had, but no matter how strongly she rejected her hedonistic behavior on an intellectual or perhaps more accurately a moral level, the truth was that when she thought back on those days she still felt a shiver of pleasure.

Before the baby was born they bought a car and for more than a week they vacationed in the south of France and in Spain and Portugal.

On her vacations, never longer than a week or a week and a half, she sought the warmth of Italy or Spain and sunned herself on the beach or read bestsellers.