Señor Bustamente
The cinema owner who returns Geoffrey’s book to Laruelle and helps open the hidden record of Geoffrey’s plea to Yvonne.
To run his cinema, understand the people who pass through it, and return Geoffrey’s abandoned book to someone who knew him.
The book
At a glance
- Mexican
- Cinema manager
- Quauhnahuac
- Geoffrey’s book of Elizabethan plays
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeSeñor Bustamente manages the local cinema and its adjoining drinking space in Quauhnahuac. He knew Geoffrey mainly as the lonely former consul who often sat there drinking and whom the whole town recognized.
Bustamente has his own political memories and suspicions about what consuls do. He wonders whether Geoffrey might once have been a spy, but his curiosity is mixed with sympathy for a man clearly abandoned by his job, country, wife, and health.
In the 1939 opening, Bustamente returns an anthology of Elizabethan plays to Laruelle. Geoffrey’s unsent letter to Yvonne is hidden inside it. A practical act of returning property therefore releases the emotional evidence that frames the whole novel.
How the book draws them
- A cinema managerHe works amid projectors, crowds, film images, and the cantina attached to the theater.
- Attentive to town lifeBustamente remembers Geoffrey’s drinking, dress, loneliness, and public reputation.
- Politically alertHis family history and memories of the Díaz era shape his suspicions about diplomats and spies.
- Sympathetic without intimacyHe did not know Geoffrey deeply, but he sees a frightened and dispossessed man rather than only a drunk.
One year after the deaths, Bustamente brings Laruelle the book Geoffrey had left at the cinema. He identifies it as belonging to Laruelle’s old friend, the Consul.
Inside, Laruelle discovers Geoffrey’s unsent letter begging Yvonne to return. Bustamente does not know the full importance of what he has delivered, but his action uncovers the request whose tragic answer fills the rest of the novel.
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