AIDS

AIDS enters Lola’s story not through a medical scene but through a sequence of absences, letters, and reunions. The illness is first left unexplained, then named in French medical papers when Lola returns to see Amalfitano and Rosa. It gives urgency to her visit and defines its limit: Lola believes she is likely to die, but after five days she leaves again for Benoit, her son in France. The narrative’s attention stays on what illness makes visible in the family—love, estrangement, responsibility, and the impossibility of making a brief return into a permanent home.

A diagnosis approached through absence

After leaving Amalfitano and Rosa, Lola remains out of their lives for five years. When her letter arrives from Paris, she says she cleans large office buildings at night, from ten until four, five, or six in the morning, and rides the metro home while the city sleeps. She has another child, Benoit, and says she has been in the hospital. She gives no reason for the hospitalization and does not say whether she is still sick. AIDS is therefore not named at first: the letter gives the fact of illness only as a gap in an otherwise spare account of work, night travel, and life with her son.

The form of the letter makes this distance palpable. Amalfitano notices that it has been typed and imagines Lola writing it in one of the offices she cleans, between desks and cleaning equipment, in her worn blue smock. The image is his vision, not a report from Lola, and it cannot close the distance between them. Her illness is still undisclosed, while the letter itself becomes the only fragile connection between the absent mother and the family she left.

The diagnosis disclosed on her return

Two years after the Paris letter, Lola comes back to find Amalfitano and Rosa gone from their former home. After searching for three weeks, she eventually finds Amalfitano, who is living in Sant Cugat and teaching philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She sees Rosa again, tells her she is her mother, and is met first by a scream and embrace, then by the child’s retreat to her bedroom. Lola’s return is not an uncomplicated restoration: mother and daughter have to meet after years in which Lola has been absent from Rosa’s daily life.

That night, Lola tells Amalfitano she is very sick and will probably die, and explains that she wanted to see Rosa one last time. He offers to take her to the hospital the next day; she refuses, saying French doctors have always been better than Spanish doctors, and shows him papers written in French that state unequivocally that she has AIDS. This is the decisive disclosure. The previous letter’s unexplained hospitalization now has a name, and the reunion’s urgency is no longer merely a matter of time apart: Lola believes time may be running out.

A short return, with another child waiting

The illness does not erase Lola’s life beyond the family she has revisited. When Amalfitano asks about Benoit, she falls silent, recalling his body, gestures, and expressions, then describes him as intelligent and sensitive. He was the first to realize that his mother was going to die. Lola says he understood by looking; Amalfitano recognizes how terrible this knowledge must be for a child, while Lola insists that children should not be lied to. Their exchange makes the diagnosis more than a fact on a document: it has already entered a child’s understanding of his mother and governs what Lola believes she owes him in honesty.

On Lola’s fifth morning with Amalfitano and Rosa, the medicine she brought from France is about to run out, and she says she must leave to see Benoit. She immediately complicates the language of need: he is little and needs her, she says, but then admits that he does not need her; she cannot tell who needs whom, only that she must go and see how he is. The illness thus stands alongside, rather than replacing, her obligations as a mother. Lola’s decision is not presented as a cure, recovery, or final reconciliation. She has returned to see Rosa, but Benoit’s presence in France draws her away again.

What the illness changes—and what remains unresolved

Amalfitano leaves a note and an envelope containing much of his savings, expecting Lola to depart while he is at work. Instead, when he returns, she is still there, sitting before a television with the sound off and reading her book on Greece. They share dinner; after Rosa has gone to bed, Lola leaves with her suitcase. Amalfitano warns that there are no more trains to Barcelona, a lie meant to delay her, but she answers that she will hitchhike. He bows his head and lets her go. The next morning he turns on the radio, listening for news that a hitchhiker nearby has been murdered or raped. The narrative does not confirm such an outcome.

For years afterward, Amalfitano carries an image of Lola walking along a highway with her suitcase, although he acknowledges that he did not actually see her leave that way. It is a remembered vision, not evidence of her fate. AIDS gives the visit its stated deadline, and the dwindling medicine gives it a concrete final morning; beyond that, the story withholds the illness’s progression and Lola’s eventual outcome. What remains is a departure that cannot be converted into certainty: she has disclosed that she may die, gone back toward the son who knows it, and left Amalfitano with fear, money offered, and an imagined figure receding down the road.