Lola returns to her family

Lola returns to her family after seven years away, only to discover that the people she has come to find have disappeared from their former addresses and built a life elsewhere. Her search eventually reunites her with Oscar Amalfitano and their daughter Rosa in Sant Cugat, but the reunion is brief: Lola discloses that she has AIDS and, after five days, leaves to return to Benoit, the young son she has in France. The episode makes homecoming an encounter with the consequences of absence rather than a restoration of the past.

The Search

Two years after sending Amalfitano her last letter, Lola returns to the city where she had left him and Rosa, seven years earlier. They are gone. For three weeks she asks at old addresses, meeting people who cannot place her, do not trust her, or have forgotten her. Others receive her but cannot help; she declines their offers of coffee or tea, intent on finding her family. The search is made difficult not by a single barrier but by accumulated estrangement: even Lola has forgotten some of the people she must now approach, and the changed city offers no clear explanation for where the years have gone.

At night she sleeps in a boardinghouse near Las Ramblas, among foreign workers in cramped rooms. By day she walks, rests on church steps, listens to passersby, and reads French books on Greece, witchcraft, and healthy living. Her shifting self-images give the search a mythic register without resolving its ordinary practical purpose. At times she imagines herself as Electra, wandering in disguise through Mycenae among people who do not understand the killer; at others she sees herself as a happy mother watching children play. She whispers the names Pylades and Orestes, which summon many men to mind, but not Amalfitano: he remains the particular person she is seeking.

A Temporary Refuge and Reunion

One night an ex-student of Amalfitano recognizes Lola and offers her a room. She stays with him, and their uneasy closeness becomes part of the search rather than its destination. During dinner he embraces her; she allows the embrace briefly, then whispers something that sends him to sit in a corner. They remain apart in the living room for hours, and Lola falls asleep while supposing that he is crying. In the days that follow, the two continue looking for Amalfitano.

When Lola finally sees him beneath a larch tree, smoking, she recognizes him from a distance, though she finds that he has changed: he is fatter and has lost some of his hair. Amalfitano recognizes her immediately. Their short exchange registers the unequal effect of time on their appearances, but gives no account of the years of separation. They leave together. At this point Amalfitano is living in Sant Cugat and teaching philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona; Rosa attends the local elementary school.

Lola tells Rosa that she is her mother. Rosa screams, embraces her, and almost at once runs to hide in her bedroom. The reaction contains both recognition and retreat: the return restores the fact of their relationship, but cannot make seven years of absence vanish. That night Lola tells Amalfitano that she is very sick and may die, and that she has come to see Rosa one last time. When he offers to take her to hospital, she refuses and shows him documents in French stating that she has AIDS.

Five Days Together

The next day Amalfitano sees Lola and Rosa walking hand in hand near the station. He follows at a distance rather than interrupting them; later, he finds them together watching television. Their renewed contact takes shape in small, unceremonious intervals, not in a dramatic settlement of the family’s past.

Amalfitano asks about Benoit, the son Lola has had in France. Lola pauses as she recalls him in detail, then describes him as intelligent and sensitive, and says he was the first to understand that she would die. She says he realized it by looking at her. Amalfitano says it is terrible for a child to know that his mother is going to die; Lola answers that lying to children is worse and that they should not be lied to. The exchange makes their different obligations plain: the reunion concerns Rosa, but Benoit’s understanding of his mother’s illness and his need for her remain present in the room.

On the fifth morning, as the medicine she brought from France is about to run out, Lola says she must leave. She insists that Benoit is little and that she needs to see how he is, then complicates the claim by admitting that he does not need her. Her final formulation leaves the direction of need unresolved, but not her decision: she has to go. Amalfitano leaves a note and an envelope containing a good part of his savings. When he returns from work, Lola is still there, reading a book on Greece with the television on and its sound off. They have dinner together before Rosa goes to bed near midnight.

Departure and Its Afterlife

After putting Rosa to bed, Amalfitano finds Lola waiting with her suitcase packed. He asks her to stay the night, claiming that no trains remain for Barcelona. Lola corrects him: she intends to hitchhike. He lowers his head and tells her she may leave whenever she wants. She kisses him on the cheek and goes. The choice to leave is not framed as a rejection of the reunion; it follows from her stated need to return to Benoit and from the limited time and medicine she has brought with her.

The next morning Amalfitano gets up at six and turns on the radio, checking whether a hitchhiker on a nearby highway has been murdered or raped. He hears nothing. The novel then separates the fact of Lola’s departure from the image that stays with him: for years he remembers her walking along a nearly deserted road out of Sant Cugat, carrying her suitcase. The image is explicitly described as a dream and a projection, not something he witnessed. In that distinction lies the episode’s closing unease: the family has seen Lola return and leave, but Amalfitano’s lasting picture of her is an imagined continuation of her journey, a memory formed from absence rather than observation.