Lola leaves home to visit the poet in Mondragón

Lola leaves home to visit the poet in Mondragón, turning a declared literary pilgrimage into a departure from her husband, Oscar Amalfitano, and their young daughter, Rosa. The poet’s confinement gives Lola’s journey a destination, but the account makes clear that the departure also draws on a private history of obsession, unstable attachments, and a desire for movement that Amalfitano cannot share or redirect.

The departure from Barcelona

Lola’s explanation is that she plans to visit her favorite poet, who lives in the asylum in Mondragón, near San Sebastián. She packs through the night while Amalfitano listens. Toward the end of their life together, she has claimed that she met the poet at a party in Barcelona, slept with him, and spent the night making love; Amalfitano knows this story is untrue. The poet is gay, and Lola first learned of him from Amalfitano, who had given her one of his books. Afterward, she bought the poet’s other works and chose friends who regarded him as a genius, an alien, or God’s messenger, including people recently released from the Sant Boi asylum or emerging from repeated stays in rehabilitation.

The contrast between the invented encounter and the real chain of events gives Lola’s devotion its unsettled character. The poet is at once a person she intends to visit and the center of a story she has built around herself. Amalfitano expects that she will eventually go to San Sebastián, so he does not argue. He offers part of his savings, asks her to return within a few months, and promises to care for Rosa. Lola appears not to hear him. Her silence is not a negotiated departure: the practical appeals of money, time, and parental responsibility fail to alter the course she has chosen.

The departure carries an earlier image of Lola with it: her stainless-steel, spring-loaded switchblade, which she takes everywhere. Before Rosa was born, an airport officer stopped her over the knife. Lola said it was for peeling fruit—apples, oranges, pears, kiwis—and the officer let her pass. A year and a few months later Rosa was born; two years after that, Lola left, still carrying the blade. The small, ordinary excuse and the weapon’s continued presence make departure seem less like a sudden break than a disposition that has already traveled with Lola through family life.

Imma arrives; Rosa stays asleep

At six-thirty in the morning, the doorbell rings. Lola jumps and says, “They’ve come for me,” but remains at the kitchen table. Amalfitano answers the intercom and hears a faint voice insist that it is there. When the visitor arrives, a small woman with a miniature knapsack passes him and goes straight to the kitchen, as if she knows Lola’s habits better than he does. This is Inmaculada, whom Lola calls Imma. Amalfitano knows her from earlier visits and dislikes the name Lola uses, but has stopped trying to correct it.

The scene gives the journey a companion and a pace. Imma says they need to leave before there is no way out of Barcelona. Lola and Imma look at one another with an intensity unfamiliar to Amalfitano; Imma refuses more coffee and presses for movement. Amalfitano has to shift her light backpack to reach the refrigerator. It seems to contain almost nothing—perhaps two shirts and another pair of black pants—and he thinks of it as a fetus. Lola kisses him on both cheeks. She does not wake Rosa, telling Amalfitano it is better not to. The child remains in her seat as Lola walks out with Imma, a separation enacted through ordinary gestures rather than a farewell between mother and daughter.

The household’s thresholds underscore what the departure leaves behind. The night’s talk takes place in the kitchen; morning brings an intercom voice, an elevator, and a stranger crossing directly into the room. Amalfitano watches from the kitchen door, calmer than he expected, while the two women fix their eyes on the Formica table and then on one another. The scene gives him no shared plan to hold on to: the women are already oriented toward the road, and his attempt to make conversation has not interrupted their departure.

Letters from the road

A week later, Lola writes from Pamplona. She calls the trip so far mostly pleasant, though the unpleasant parts cannot quite be called experiences. Her explanation is that Imma has lived through all of it already. The letter begins to disclose the practical texture of their travels: in Lerida, the two women work for two days in a roadside restaurant owned by a man who also has an apple orchard. He asks them to stay for the harvest, but they leave the following day without saying goodbye. Lola has been reading one of the Mondragón poet’s books beside their Canadian tent, pitched under the orchard’s only poplar and next to an unused garage.

In Zaragoza they stay with an old university friend of Imma’s. Lola goes to bed early, exhausted, while the others talk about the struggle against Franco and the women’s prison in Zaragoza. Her account, overheard in dreams, also gathers stark and disjointed images: a deep pit for extracting oil or coal, an underground jungle, and a commando team of female suicide bombers. The letter’s movement from the orchard and temporary work to these political memories makes the journey more than a direct trip to an asylum. Lola and Imma pass through other people’s histories, though Lola does not claim them as her own.

Lola then writes that she is not a lesbian, says she does not know why she is telling Amalfitano, and describes homosexuality as a lie and violence done to people in adolescence. She insists that Imma knows this, even though she identifies Imma as a lesbian. The claims sit uneasily beside the intimacy of the women’s departure and the intensity with which they looked at each other in the kitchen. Lola’s letter does not resolve that contradiction; it records it, turning a message home into an argument whose assertions seem unable to contain the relationship it is trying to describe.

The asylum and the limits of access

In her next letter, posted from San Sebastián, Lola reports that she and Imma have gone to the Mondragón asylum to visit the poet, who lives there raving and demented. The guards, whom Lola describes as priests disguised as security guards, will not let them enter. The announced purpose of the journey therefore meets a firm institutional boundary: they have reached the place where the poet is confined, but cannot reach him.

They stay briefly with Edurne, a Basque friend of Imma’s who had been an ETA commando and left the armed struggle when democracy came. Edurne does not want the visitors to stay more than one night; her husband, Jon, is nervous around guests, shaking, flushing, sweating, and constantly moving without speaking. Edurne works almost full-time as a street educator with families affected by addiction and people sleeping on the cathedral steps. Lola and Imma leave the next day for a cheap boardinghouse and hitchhike back to Mondragón.

They are refused entry to the asylum again. Their visit becomes observation from outside: they study the gray walls, the dirt and gravel roads, the rises and curves of the land, and the walks taken by inmates and caretakers. They try to memorize the grounds and notice the curtains of trees and brush where they think people may urinate after dark. Then they eat cheese sandwiches by the roadside without speaking, contemplating the fractured shadows cast by the asylum. The poet remains inaccessible; the women’s attention shifts to the institution’s perimeter and the landscape around it. Lola’s departure ends not with a meeting or a return home, but with the pair sitting outside the place they came to enter.