Nothing unpleasant that happens to us can take us by surprise

Lola’s sentence, “Nothing unpleasant that happens to us can take us by surprise,” is a maxim she attributes to Imma in a letter describing their journey through Spain. It gives a calm, almost practical shape to the unpleasantness they have encountered, yet Lola’s letter makes that composure unstable: its account of shared travel turns abruptly into a confused attempt to explain her relationship with Imma, leaving Oscar Amalfitano holding words he cannot understand.

The maxim in the letter

A week after Lola and Imma leave, Amalfitano receives Lola’s letter, postmarked Pamplona. Lola says their experiences so far have been mostly pleasant, while hesitating over whether the unpleasant ones should even be called experiences. She then invokes Imma’s conviction that nothing unpleasant can take them by surprise because Imma has already lived through all of it. The line therefore belongs to Lola’s report of Imma’s outlook, not to a detached narrator’s judgment: it is a piece of advice or belief carried into the story through one person’s account of another.

The sentence’s confident structure contrasts with the uncertainty surrounding it. Lola presents Imma as someone for whom adversity is familiar in advance, but the letter does not explain exactly what Imma has endured or what Lola means by saying she has lived through “all of this.” The maxim offers a compressed principle where the narrative withholds a full history. Its force comes partly from that gap: the reader hears a firm claim about unpleasantness while remaining unable to measure the experience behind it.

The road and what cannot be anticipated

Lola gives the maxim a concrete setting in the journey. She and Imma spend two days working at a roadside restaurant in Lerida for a man who also owns an apple orchard. Green apples are already on the trees, and the owner asks them to stay until the harvest. Imma goes to speak with him while Lola reads a book by the Mondragon poet beside the Canadian tent where they sleep, pitched beneath the orchard’s only poplar and next to an unused garage. Imma returns unwilling to explain the arrangement the owner has offered. The next day the two women hitchhike away without saying goodbye.

That episode makes the maxim more unsettling than a simple expression of resilience. Lola reports a possible offer, Imma’s refusal to discuss it, and their sudden departure, but does not identify what was proposed or why they left. The unexplained deal sits beside the claim that nothing unpleasant can surprise them: the letter makes foreknowledge sound like protection, even as its omissions leave the reader uncertain about what the women may be avoiding. In Zaragoza, Lola stays with an old university friend of Imma’s and, exhausted, goes to bed early. In her dreams she hears laughter, raised voices, and scolding as Imma and her friend recall the struggle against Franco, the women’s prison in Zaragoza, a deep pit from which oil or coal might be extracted, an underground jungle, and a commando team of female suicide bombers. The remembered fragments widen the suggestion of a difficult past without turning the maxim into a complete explanation of it.

A claim that breaks open

After those fragments, Lola’s letter changes direction. She insists that she is not a lesbian, wonders why she is telling Amalfitano this, and describes her own explanation of homosexuality as a lie and an act of violence committed against women in adolescence. She says Imma knows this, repeats that Imma knows, and calls her too clear-sighted not to know, yet adds that all Imma can do is help. The assertion about anticipating unpleasantness thus leads into an intimate and unsettled account of what Lola believes about Imma, herself, and the meaning of their companionship. The passage does not resolve the tension between Lola’s emphatic claims and her evident difficulty in explaining them.

Lola’s letter closes its abrupt movement through an image of herds of herbivores crossing a valley, slowly but quickly enough to make her sick, followed by an urgent appeal to Amalfitano to understand. He does not: he holds the letter in both hands like a life raft made of reeds and grasses while steadily rocking his daughter’s seat with his foot. The sentence’s promise that unpleasantness cannot surprise becomes, in this ending, no promise of comprehension or rescue. It is a line transmitted through a letter whose writer cannot make herself fully understood and whose reader can only hold on to it.