Mondragón asylum

Mondragón asylum is the psychiatric institution near San Sebastián where Lola’s favorite poet is confined. For Lola and her companion Imma, it is both the destination of a journey and a barred threshold: they cannot reach the poet inside, so their search becomes an act of watching the walls, roads, grounds, and people moving beyond them.

Setting and the Poet’s Confinement

Lola announces that she intends to visit the poet at the asylum, describing him as a favorite and claiming at times that she already knows him. Her account of a past encounter with him at a party is not true: Amalfitano knows that the poet is gay and that Lola first learned of his existence from a book he gave her. Her attachment has since grown into an absorbing pursuit, as she buys the poet’s other works and chooses friends who regard him as a genius, an alien, or God’s messenger. The asylum is therefore not an incidental stop in her travels; it is the place where the person around whom she has organized this devotion is actually held.

In a letter from San Sebastián, Lola reports that she and Imma went to the asylum but were not permitted to see the poet, whom she describes as raving and demented. She characterizes the guards as priests disguised as security guards, making the institution’s boundary seem at once administrative and religious. The poet remains inside, while the visitors are turned away: their knowledge of him and their desire to meet him do not give them access to his confined life.

The Visits and the Perimeter

The first refusal does not end the attempt. After staying with Imma’s friend Edurne for one night, Lola and Imma leave and find a cheap boardinghouse Edurne has recommended. They then hitchhike back to Mondragón. The asylum again refuses them entry, and the women settle for studying it from outside rather than abandoning the search.

From the roadside, they memorize what can be seen: dirt and gravel roads, gray walls, the rises and curves of the land, and the walks taken by inmates and caretakers. They notice curtains of trees appearing at irregular intervals or in a pattern they cannot decipher, and brush where they think they see flies, which leads them to infer that inmates—and perhaps a worker—urinate there after dark or as night falls. The account keeps the distinction between observation and knowledge clear: they can record the institution’s visible edges and movements, but they cannot verify what happens beyond the walls.

After watching, Lola and Imma sit beside the road and eat cheese sandwiches brought from San Sebastián. They do not speak, or else muse to themselves about the fractured shadows the asylum casts over its surroundings. Their return ends not with contact with the poet but with a shared, silent vigil at the institution’s margins.

Boundaries and Narrative Significance

The asylum is defined in these episodes by controlled access. Its roads, walls, grounds, and guarded entrance organize the visitors’ movement: Lola and Imma can travel to Mondragón twice, approach the institution, and watch its inmates and caretakers, yet they cannot cross into the space where the poet lives. The failed visits turn the exterior into the only available scene of encounter, and the surrounding landscape becomes something the women study in place of the person they came to see.

That limit also shapes what the narrative can reveal. Lola’s report conveys the poet’s confinement and the women’s attempts to reach him, but the asylum remains inaccessible to them and to the reader as a directly entered interior. Its fractured shadows offer an image of an institution extending into its surroundings without making its inner life legible. The place thus holds together Lola’s intimate, partly invented story about the poet and the concrete fact of his separation from her behind institutional walls.