Lola and Inmaculada's Traveling Companionship

Lola and Inmaculada's Traveling Companionship is a relationship formed through shared travel and practical interdependence, but its meaning reaches beyond companionship on the road. Inmaculada joins Lola as she leaves her family to seek a poet in the Mondragón asylum; during their journey, her past and judgment shape their choices, while Lola’s letters to Oscar Amalfitano show her trying to interpret their intimacy in language of her own.

Departure and Meeting

Lola’s departure is presented as a plan to visit the poet, whom she says she knew before her life with Amalfitano. He doubts her account: she first learned of the poet from him, and the poet is gay. Still, Amalfitano expects that she will eventually make her way to San Sebastián. He offers her some of his savings, asks her to return in a few months, and promises to care for their daughter, Rosa. Lola does not respond to his efforts to persuade her to stay, and waits through the night for the morning.

At six-thirty, someone rings the doorbell. The faint voice at the intercom insists that it is there for Lola, but does not give a name; when the visitor arrives, she passes Amalfitano and goes straight to the kitchen. The woman is Inmaculada, whom Lola calls Imma. Her arrival turns Lola’s intended solo departure into a shared journey. Amalfitano recognizes her from earlier visits and notes that Lola’s friend knows her habits well enough to move directly through the apartment to the kitchen.

Their names also register a small negotiation over familiarity and identity. Inmaculada explains that Imma is short for Immaculada in Catalan, though she is not Catalan and her name is Inmaculada. Amalfitano prefers Inma for phonetic reasons; Lola corrects him when he uses it, and he eventually avoids calling her anything. The difference is modest but telling: Lola’s chosen name for her companion marks a closeness that Amalfitano does not share.

Leaving Together

In the kitchen, the two women look toward the Formica table and intermittently at each other with an intensity Amalfitano finds unfamiliar. Inmaculada says they must leave soon, warning that before long there will be no way out of Barcelona. Amalfitano hears this as an exaggerated description of the city, but the warning is enough to set the departure in motion. Lola and Inmaculada stand, Lola kisses Amalfitano on both cheeks, and the two leave without waking Rosa.

The contrast between their bags gives the departure a practical dimension. Inmaculada’s knapsack is smaller than Lola’s and so light that Amalfitano imagines it contains only a couple of shirts and another pair of trousers. His impression underscores how differently prepared the travelers appear, though both go together. Lola has books by the poet in her own backpack; her companion supplies the urgency and direction that turn her plan into travel.

Roadside Work and Shared History

A week later, Lola’s letter, postmarked Pamplona, describes a journey made up of pleasant and unpleasant experiences. She says that unpleasant events cannot surprise them because Inmaculada has already lived through what they encounter. The statement gives the companionship an asymmetry: Inmaculada’s prior experience becomes a resource Lola relies on, even when Lola cannot explain what that experience consists of.

In Lérida, they work for two days at a roadside restaurant owned by a man who also has an apple orchard. The trees already bear green apples, and the owner asks them to stay until the harvest. While Lola reads one of the Mondragón poet’s books beside their Canadian tent, pitched under the orchard’s only poplar near an unused garage, Inmaculada goes to speak with the owner. She returns unwilling to explain what he offered. The following day, the women go back to the highway and hitchhike away without saying goodbye to anyone. Inmaculada thus handles an encounter that Lola does not witness, and the decision to move on belongs to them both even though its immediate circumstances remain obscure.

In Zaragoza, they stay with an old university friend of Inmaculada’s. Lola goes to bed tired and hears the others talking about their earlier lives: the struggle against Franco, the women’s prison in Zaragoza, and images of a deep pit, an underground jungle, and a women’s commando team. These fragments place Inmaculada within a past political and social world that Lola is entering by traveling beside her. The letter reports the conversation as Lola hears it while resting, not as a full account of Inmaculada’s history.

Intimacy and Self-Definition

In the same letter, Lola insists that she is not a lesbian and says she does not know why she is telling Amalfitano this. She describes homosexuality as an act of violence imposed in adolescence, and says that Inmaculada knows this, although she can only help. These statements do not settle what the women’s relationship is; rather, they show Lola trying to name it while resisting a label. Her categorical denial sits beside her closeness to Inmaculada and her conviction that her companion understands something she herself cannot resolve.

Lola’s account also turns abruptly from their shared travel to a story about the poet. She describes attending a party in Barcelona before she knew Amalfitano, at which she saw the philosopher associated with the poet and waited with the other guests for the poet to arrive. This recollection explains the imaginative history Lola attaches to her journey, but it does not establish that she and the poet had the relationship she claims. The contrast between the poet she pursues and Inmaculada who actually accompanies her keeps the journey’s two attachments distinct: one is organized around an idealized, disputed past; the other is enacted through shared decisions, work, and movement.

Narrative Significance

The companionship is known chiefly through Amalfitano’s observations at the departure and Lola’s letter from the road. That change of perspective matters: at home, Inmaculada appears through the details Amalfitano notices—her arrival, name, knapsack, and familiarity with Lola’s habits—whereas the letter gives Lola space to describe the journey and to make claims about desire and identity. Her account remains unsettled, but it prevents the relationship from being reduced to Amalfitano’s view of it.

The women’s movement through apartments, a roadside workplace, an orchard, a tent, and a friend’s home makes companionship concrete as a way of navigating unstable circumstances. They leave Barcelona before Lola says there will be no way out, accept temporary work, depart without notice, and continue by hitchhiking. Inmaculada’s experience helps guide those shifts, while Lola’s writing gives their shared passage an emotional and interpretive dimension. The evidence establishes their closeness and their journey together, while leaving the full nature of their bond open.