Lola’s plan to help the poet escape

Lola’s plan to help the poet escape from the Mondragón asylum is a carefully elaborated attempt to turn their reunion into a shared future beyond his confinement. With Imma’s help, Lola proposes a route through the mountains to France, work and shelter in Paris, and a return to Spain. The plan gives practical shape to her hope, but its imagined itinerary remains in tension with the asylum’s control of the poet and the repeated obstacles to seeing him.

Background and the First Attempts

Lola and Imma first travel to the asylum at Mondragón to visit the poet, who lives there in a disturbed and institutionalized state. The guards refuse them entry. In San Sebastián, their stay with Imma’s friend Edurne is brief: Edurne’s husband is uneasy around guests, and the women leave the following day. They take a cheap room Edurne recommended and hitchhike back toward the asylum, but are again refused access. From the outside, they study the gray walls, the dirt and gravel roads, the grounds and the movements of inmates and caretakers. The visit produces no meeting, only a sustained view of the boundary they cannot cross.

For a third attempt, the women arrange an appointment by adopting cover identities: Imma presents herself as a reporter for a Barcelona newspaper, while Lola says she is a poet. This time they are admitted. An attendant leads them down long blue-and-white corridors to a plain room, and Lola finds the poet older, with sunken eyes and thinning hair. The successful visit is therefore also a reminder of how little access they control: entry depends on the institution’s permission, and their meeting takes place within its managed spaces.

The Escape Proposal

When Lola and the poet are alone, she tells him she has missed him and explains that she kept watch over the philosopher’s apartment in the Ensanche, though she never saw him again. She says she did everything she could. The poet asks for a cigarette; Imma, standing beside the bench, silently gives him one. Lola then recounts their travels and the two earlier, fruitless visits, before stating the purpose of this one: she believes the poet is a prisoner who wants to escape, and proposes that he leave the asylum with her for France.

Lola presents the escape not as a vague wish but as a route and a program. Imma will help; Lola says the plan was hers originally. They will cross the mountains like pilgrims, reach Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and take a train to Paris through the countryside. They will live in hostels while Lola and Imma find work cleaning or caring for children in wealthy neighborhoods, leaving the poet time to write. At night, he will read his poems to them. The proposed journey gives the plan a sequence of crossings, destinations, and means of support, while the poet’s writing remains at its center.

A Future Imagined in Detail

Lola extends the itinerary into a projected family life. After three or four months in Paris, she expects to become pregnant, a prospect she presents as proof that the poet is not the last of his line. She says she will keep working for a while, after which Imma will have to work twice as hard. They will live like mendicants or child prophets, while the city’s fashion, films, games of chance, literature, food, economic activity, arms exports, and production of anesthetics form a distant backdrop to the child’s first months.

The imagined return is as specific as the departure. When Lola is six months pregnant, they will go back to Spain, this time crossing not at Irun but at La Jonquera or Port Bou, into Catalan territory. The itinerary makes escape more than flight: Lola pictures a life in which the poet can write, the women can earn a living, and the group can return with a child. Yet these projected stages depend on the poet leaving the asylum, a step the scene does not show him taking.

The Poet’s Response and the Plan’s Limits

The poet listens with interest and asks what will happen to Imma. Lola answers that Imma will help and has already devised the plan. Their conversation is interrupted by the poet’s requests and diversions: he demonstrates how he makes elaborate smoke rings, then asks Imma to read a poem. She reads one about a labyrinth, Ariadne, and a young Spaniard living in a Paris garret. The poem’s Paris setting echoes Lola’s proposed destination, but the visit does not become an escape. When the poet asks for chocolate, Lola and Imma realize they have brought none; they offer the cheese sandwiches in their bags, but he seems not to hear.

A doctor arrives before dusk, addresses the poet familiarly, checks on him, and speaks with Lola and Imma. His presence returns the meeting to the asylum’s ordinary supervision. The poet remains a patient there, and Lola and Imma leave by a different path from his. They return the next day, only to be told that he is on bedrest; the same thing happens on following days. The plan’s immediate consequence is thus not departure but further waiting, with access again controlled by the institution.

Separation and Narrative Significance

Eventually the women run out of money. Imma decides to travel south to Madrid to ask her brother for a loan, while Lola, too exhausted to travel, agrees to wait at the boardinghouse for her return. Imma expects to be gone a week. The practical pressures that the escape scheme had tried to solve—travel, lodging, and the need to support themselves—now divide its two organizers and leave Lola alone near the asylum.

The contrast between Lola’s detailed future and her constrained present gives the plan its force. She can name routes, work, cities, and a return crossing, but cannot determine when the poet will be available to see her or whether he will leave. The repeated journeys to the asylum and the return to the same barrier turn the proposal into an episode of hope held open by logistics, companionship, and imagination, rather than a completed escape.