The Margin

This is the story of Sigismond Pons, a Frenchman who leaves his young wife and son for a short business trip to Spain. Arriving in Barcelona, he finds a letter from home. Opening it, he glimpses, in frozen horror, a few words: "...threw herself off the tower...died instantly..." Emotionally unable to read on, he pockets the letter and, like a stunned sleepwalker, lives for three days in the notorious red-light district of Barcelona. Gradually his mind comes to crystallize around two images: that of love, in the form of a very young prostitute, and that of death in the shape of this caudillo-haunted city. At the end of the "margin" that he has left himself, he reads the letter in full, discovering that the horror is even more ultimate than that which stalked him these three days.