Lola and Imma's Friendship

Lola and Imma’s friendship is forged in motion, through a shared campaign to reach the poet in the Mondragón asylum and an escape plan that Imma helps devise. Their alliance combines practical resourcefulness with emotional loyalty: they travel together, persist through repeated refusals, and make a future for the poet that depends on both women. When their money runs out and Imma leaves to seek a loan, Lola’s vigil outside the asylum reveals how much she has come to rely on her friend.

A Partnership on the Road

Imma accompanies Lola to the asylum after they have traveled together through Spain. They stay in San Sebastián with Edurne, a former ETA commando who has left armed struggle behind, but her household offers little room for them: her husband is visibly uncomfortable with guests, and the two women leave the next day. They use a cheap boardinghouse Edurne recommended and hitchhike back to Mondragón. The first two attempts to see the poet fail, so they make do with watching the institution from outside, learning its roads, walls, grounds, and routines. Their quiet attention to the place is a shared form of preparation: denied entry, they continue to study the boundary that separates the poet from them.

On their third attempt, they change tactics. Imma calls ahead and presents herself as a reporter from a Barcelona newspaper, while Lola claims to be a poet; the assumed identities secure them a visit. Imma remains beside Lola when they meet the poet, handing him a cigarette and later standing with a book as Lola explains why she has come. She is not simply present as a witness. When Lola describes the plan to take the poet to France, she identifies it as Imma’s plan, worked out in detail. Their collaboration gives the scheme both its imaginative ambition and its practical frame.

The Escape Plan

Lola’s account of the proposed future makes Imma’s contribution concrete. The three would cross the mountains into France, reach Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and travel on to Paris by train. Lola and Imma would find work cleaning or caring for children in wealthy neighborhoods; the poet would write, and read his poems to them at night. Lola imagines becoming pregnant, then returning to Spain after six months by way of La Jonquera or Port Bou. The plan binds the women’s labor and travel to Lola’s hope of building a life with the poet, while giving Imma a defined role in the journey and in its day-to-day survival.

The poet asks what will happen to Imma, and Lola answers that Imma will help them because the plan was hers to begin with. The remark makes their partnership explicit in the middle of a visit ostensibly centered on Lola and the poet. Imma’s own attention remains measured: she reads rather than joining Lola’s declarations, and when the poet asks her to read a poem, she chooses one about a labyrinth, Ariadne, and a young Spaniard living in a Paris garret. The image of a route through a labyrinth resonates with the women’s effort to find a way past the asylum’s barriers, though the visit yields no actual escape.

Persistence and Separation

The next day, Lola and Imma return, only to learn that the poet is on bedrest; the same refusal is repeated over the following days. Their money eventually runs out. Imma decides to travel south to Madrid and ask her brother for a loan, while Lola says she lacks the strength to go with her. They agree that Lola will wait at the boardinghouse and that Imma will return in a week. The separation is therefore a practical response to dwindling resources, not a stated break in their relationship, but it puts their shared project on hold and leaves Lola alone near the institution.

Lola waits longer than the agreed week. In the meantime, she writes lengthy letters to Amalfitano about her life around the asylum and visits the fence every day, imagining that she can communicate with the poet. She also pictures Imma in detail: walking through a valley, passing trucks at a crossroads, and moving without looking back. The imagined journey does not establish where Imma is or what has happened to her; it shows Lola sustaining the absent friend in her mind while she remains behind.

On the ninth day, the boardinghouse owner evicts Lola. She sleeps in a railway station, an abandoned warehouse, or outdoors near the boundary between the asylum and the world beyond it. She eventually spends a night in an empty cemetery niche and decides to wait there for Imma, close to the asylum and with water nearby. This precarious vigil follows directly from the delay in Imma’s return and the loss of their lodging. The narrative leaves the outcome of the promised reunion unresolved in these scenes, but makes clear that Lola continues to organize her waiting around Imma’s expected return.

The Friendship’s Significance

The friendship is defined less by abstract declarations than by shared tasks: arranging a visit, studying the asylum from the roadside, devising a route into France, and dividing the work the escape would require. Imma’s practical agency complements Lola’s emotionally charged commitment to the poet. Together they make a plan where neither woman’s part is incidental, even though the plan’s stated purpose is to free him and begin a life with him.

Their alliance also gives the asylum narrative a second center of attachment. Lola’s pursuit of the poet might appear to be a solitary fixation, but Imma’s presence makes it collective: she supplies the strategy, accompanies the failed attempts, and is imagined by Lola as she travels away to seek money. When the pair are separated, the friendship persists as an expectation rather than a completed reunion. Its mixture of shared invention, material dependence, and uncertain waiting makes the bond durable without claiming an outcome the narrative has not yet supplied.