France occupies two linked places in Lola’s story: it is the imagined destination of a carefully plotted escape with the poet, and later the country through which she moves after that plan fails. The contrast is decisive. The promised journey begins as a shared future with work, poetry, and family in view; what follows is years of unstable travel, isolation, and labor, before Lola eventually returns to find her former home empty.

France as the Destination of an Escape Plan

Lola presents France as the goal of a plan to take the poet out of the Mondragón asylum. During a visit, she tells him that she and Imma will help him escape and cross the mountains into France, traveling as pilgrims to Saint-Jean-de-Luz and then taking a train to Paris. The itinerary gives the proposed flight a practical shape: they would live in hostels, Lola and Imma would find work cleaning or caring for children in wealthy neighborhoods, and the poet would write. At night, in the future Lola imagines, he would read them his poems.

The plan extends beyond immediate escape. Lola imagines becoming pregnant after several months, then returning to Spain when she is six months along, this time crossing at La Jonquera or Port Bou into Catalan country. France is thus a temporary home in a projected cycle of departure and return, and a setting in which the three might make a life outside the asylum’s control. But the plan remains Lola’s proposal, not an accomplished escape: the evidence does not show the poet leaving the institution with her.

From the Plan to Lola’s Departure

Lola’s later account, sent in a final letter to Amalfitano from France, describes a different kind of movement. In San Sebastián, Larrazabal gives her a place to stay, takes her to the asylum, and offers her money. Although he proposes marriage, Lola remains intent on leaving. When she asks him for train fare, he says he cannot give her money to go away and never see her again. She eventually scrapes together enough for a ticket and leaves for France at noon.

Her route does not lead directly to a lasting home. She spends time in Bayonne, leaves for Landes, returns to Bayonne, and goes to Pau and Lourdes. In this sequence, France is rendered as a chain of stops rather than a completed destination. Lola’s movement contrasts sharply with the earlier plan’s ordered itinerary: there is no settled household, shared work arrangement, or confirmed reunion with the poet.

Lourdes and a Life in Transit

At a railway station in Lourdes, Lola begins helping sick and disabled travelers as they arrive and depart. The station’s rooms have been converted into first-aid and resuscitation posts, with another room serving as an improvised morgue. Lola moves through these spaces, assisting people as they board buses or wait in lines; at night she sleeps in the trash compartments of a large modern building, or stays at the station when the trains quiet down. The station becomes not a home but a place where she can remain, work, and encounter other people in motion.

The episode gives her French wandering a concrete social setting. Trains bring travelers from Italy and northern France, while Lola’s own life is organized around temporary shelter and the repeated passage of strangers. Once she thinks she sees Imma arriving from Madrid, she does not call out. Instead, she leaves the station and the town, walks to the highway, and tries to hitch a ride. France offers neither the reunion she might have sought nor a stable end to her journey.

Paris and the Long Aftermath

Five years after Lola leaves, Amalfitano receives a short letter from Paris. Lola says she works nights cleaning large office buildings, starting at ten and finishing sometime between four and six in the morning. She describes the city as beautiful when its inhabitants are asleep and the metro at that hour as deeply sad. She also says she has a son, Benoit, with whom she lives, and that she has been in the hospital; she gives no explanation of the hospitalization and says nothing about a man or about Rosa.

The letter makes Paris a place of precarious but more settled existence than the stations and towns of Lola’s earlier travels. She has a job and a home with her son, yet the night shift and solitary journey back on the metro shape the life she reports. Amalfitano, holding the letter, imagines her writing it in one of the offices she cleans, surrounded by cleaning equipment and desks. That image is his own act of visualization, not information Lola explicitly supplies, and it underscores the distance between her brief account and the life he cannot see directly.

Two years later, seven years after Lola left Amalfitano and Rosa, she returns and discovers that they are gone. France is therefore not the end of her separation from her family: even after establishing a life in Paris, Lola eventually turns back, only to find that the people she hopes to reach have disappeared from their old addresses. Across these episodes, France remains a real setting and an imagined promise, but never a guaranteed refuge or a simple route home.