Lola leaves Oscar Amalfitano to search for the poet she has made the center of an increasingly consuming fascination, taking her friend Inmaculada, whom she calls Imma, with her. The departure is both an intimate family rupture and the threshold of an unsettled journey: Lola promises she will return soon, but her letters from the road disclose a life shaped by unstable work, political histories, and repeated failure to reach the man she seeks. The poet remains behind the walls of the Mondragón asylum, while Lola’s account travels back to the husband and daughter she has left at home.

Background and Departure

Lola has carried a weapon since before Rosa was born: a stainless-steel, spring-loaded switchblade she never went anywhere without. Once, at an airport, an officer asked why she had it. Lola said it was for peeling fruit— oranges, apples, pears, kiwis—and the officer let her go after looking at her for a long time. A year and a few months later Rosa was born; two years after that, Lola left, still carrying the knife. The remembered details make the departure feel less like a sudden break than a life already equipped for movement, though the knife’s stated purpose remains an ordinary excuse rather than an explanation of what Lola intends to do.

Her stated reason for going is to visit her favorite poet, who lives in the asylum in Mondragón, near San Sebastián. Amalfitano listens through the night as she packs and promises that she will soon come back to him and Rosa. Lola claims she once met the poet at a wild party in Barcelona, where they supposedly slept together. Amalfitano knows this story is false: the poet is gay, and Lola first learned of him from one of Amalfitano’s books. Afterward she bought everything else the poet had written and gravitated toward friends who called him a genius, an alien, or God’s messenger—some of them recently released from the Sant Boi asylum or recovering from repeated stays in rehabilitation. Amalfitano expects that she will make her way to San Sebastián sooner or later, so he does not argue. He offers part of his savings, asks her to come back in a few months, and promises to care for Rosa.

The night before the journey is also a scene of failed communication. Lola makes coffee and waits silently for dawn while Amalfitano tries to find subjects that might interest her or help pass the time. At six-thirty the doorbell rings. Lola says that they have come for her, but does not get up; Amalfitano answers the intercom and hears a weak voice insist that it is there. When the visitor arrives, the small Inmaculada walks past him directly into the kitchen, as if she knows Lola’s habits better than he does. Lola does not wake Rosa to say goodbye, explaining that it is better not to disturb her. She kisses Amalfitano on both cheeks, and she and Imma leave.

The Journey in Lola’s Letters

A week later, Amalfitano receives Lola’s first letter, postmarked Pamplona. She says the trip has contained both pleasant and unpleasant experiences, then reflects that Imma has lived through the unpleasant kind already. The pair have worked for two days at a roadside restaurant in Lerida, whose owner also has an apple orchard. Green apples are already growing on the trees, and the owner asks them to stay until the harvest. While Lola reads one of the poet’s books beside their Canadian tent, pitched under the orchard’s only poplar near an unused garage, Imma goes to speak with the owner. She returns without explaining the arrangement he proposed. The next day, the two women leave for the highway and hitchhike away without saying goodbye to anyone.

In Zaragoza they stay with one of Imma’s old university friends. Lola, exhausted, goes to bed early and hears laughter, loud voices, and scolding in her dreams. Most of the conversation is Imma’s, with some from the friend; they speak of their youth, the struggle against Franco, and the women’s prison in Zaragoza. Their talk moves through images and histories that Lola relays without clarifying their connection: a deep pit from which oil or coal might be extracted, an underground jungle, and a female suicide commando. The letter abruptly turns from these remembered conversations to Lola’s insistence that she is not a lesbian and does not know why she is telling Amalfitano so. She describes homosexuality as violence imposed in adolescence, says Imma knows this, and then writes that Imma is a lesbian and can only help. Her account shifts between confession and disorientation; the recurring image of herds of cows being sacrificed and crossing a valley makes the letter’s emotional unease part of the journey rather than a settled explanation of it.

A later letter, sent from San Sebastián, brings the search directly to the asylum. Lola and Imma go to visit the poet, described as raving and demented, but the guards—whom Lola calls priests disguised as security guards—refuse to let them in. They plan to stay with Edurne, a Basque friend of Imma’s who had been an ETA commando and abandoned armed struggle when democracy came. Edurne allows them only one night because she has a great deal to do and her husband, Jon, dislikes unexpected guests. Lola describes Jon as visibly nervous: he shakes, turns red, sweats, moves constantly, and seems close to shouting, though he never speaks. Edurne, by contrast, is relaxed and works almost full-time as a street educator with families affected by addiction and homeless people who gather on the steps of San Sebastián’s cathedral. The couple’s little boy stays out of sight; Jon always finds a reason to keep Lola and Imma from entering his room.

The women leave the next day for a cheap boardinghouse Edurne has told them about, then hitchhike back to Mondragón. They still cannot enter the asylum. Instead, they study it from outside, memorizing the dirt and gravel roads, gray walls, rises and curves of the land, and the routes taken by inmates and caretakers. They watch curtains of trees appearing at intervals they cannot interpret and notice brush where they imagine inmates, or perhaps a worker, may urinate after dark. Afterward they sit by the roadside and eat cheese sandwiches brought from San Sebastián. The visit ends not in contact with the poet but in observation from a distance, as the asylum’s fractured shadows extend across its surroundings.

Family Separation and Narrative Form

Lola’s departure leaves Amalfitano responsible for Rosa, but it also reveals how the family’s separation has already been rehearsed in smaller scenes of movement. Rosa is Spanish, while Amalfitano is Chilean; in earlier travels, they have had to use different customs lines, one for European Union citizens and one for non-EU citizens. Once Rosa cried and refused to be separated from her father; on another trip, the lines moved at different speeds and she became lost, taking Amalfitano half an hour to find her. Against that history of a daughter who once resisted being parted from him, Lola’s decision not to wake Rosa for a goodbye becomes especially stark. The journey begins with a deliberate separation, not a departure witnessed by the child.

The narration gives the departure first through Amalfitano’s memory and then through letters written by Lola. The change in source does not resolve the gap between the two spouses. Amalfitano supplies what he believes about the poet, the invented Barcelona encounter, and the emotional distance in the kitchen; Lola’s letters supply the roadside restaurant, the conversations in Zaragoza, and the failed visits to the asylum. Neither account provides a complete explanation of her desire. Instead, the story makes the reader move between the husband left at home and the traveler whose written account is vivid but unsettled.

The Asylum as Destination and Barrier

The asylum is the journey’s fixed destination, but its gates make it a place the women can approach only from the outside. Lola’s stated aim is to see the poet she reveres; the first visit ends with the guards refusing entry, and the return trip brings no change. On the second attempt, the women turn their attention to roads, walls, paths, trees, and shadows, studying the institution’s perimeter in place of its inhabitants. The poet’s confinement therefore shapes the journey even though Lola and Imma never reach him: access is denied, and the search continues as an act of watching and remembering.

This blocked encounter also sets the journey beside the novel’s other spaces of confinement and unease. In Morini’s nightmare, a swimming pool becomes an immense dark expanse without Liz Norton; the Santa Teresa prison appears to Guadalupe Roncal like a living, mutilated woman containing its prisoners; and the lavish bathroom in Charly Cruz’s house unsettles Oscar Fate with objects that seem almost alive. These scenes are not episodes in Lola’s trip, but their shared attention to thresholds and spaces that resist ordinary use sharpens its spatial pattern: doors, rooms, walls, and boundaries determine who can enter, who must remain outside, and what can be known. Lola reaches the asylum twice, but the decisive encounter is with its perimeter.

Significance of the Departure

The departure opens a journey without a confirmed return in the evidence of these scenes. Lola promises to come home soon, and Amalfitano asks her to return in a few months, but her letters carry the narrative onward from Pamplona to Zaragoza and San Sebastián, then back to the asylum, without reporting a reunion. Her search combines an idealized attachment to a poet she has never truly met with the material facts of travel: borrowed hospitality, a roadside job, a tent beneath a lone poplar, hitchhiking, and the refusal of asylum guards to admit her.

The contrast between Lola’s declared destination and the experiences accumulated along the way gives the episode its unsettled force. She goes to find a writer who remains inaccessible, while her letters reveal the people, memories, and political histories accompanying her. At home, Amalfitano holds those letters and cares for Rosa; on the road, Lola moves with Imma through places where the past persists in conversations and the desired meeting remains just beyond reach. The departure is thus not simply a journey toward the poet, but a separation whose meaning keeps changing as Lola’s account continues and the distance between intention, memory, and arrival widens.