Sant Cugat is the setting for Lola’s return to Oscar Amalfitano and Rosa, a short family reunion that brings affection, illness, and separation into the same domestic space. Lola finds them there while Amalfitano teaches nearby and Rosa attends the local public elementary school; after five days together, Lola sets out again, leaving behind both an intimate memory and an imagined image of departure along the road.

Setting and Return

At the time of Lola’s return, Amalfitano lives in Sant Cugat and teaches philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, not far away. Rosa goes to a public elementary school in town, leaving at eight-thirty in the morning and returning at five. These details establish a settled daily routine into which Lola re-enters after her travels. She finds Amalfitano sitting beneath a larch tree, smoking and looking absent. From a distance she notices that he has grown fatter and lost some of his hair, but when she approaches him, he recognizes her immediately. Their brief exchange acknowledges the changes time has brought without making recognition itself difficult; then Amalfitano stands, and they leave together.

Lola’s reunion with Rosa is immediate and emotionally intense. When she tells the girl that she is her mother, Rosa screams, embraces her, and almost at once runs to hide in her bedroom. The sequence holds recognition and retreat together: Rosa accepts Lola physically, yet needs distance almost immediately. That night, Lola sleeps on the sofa after showering and making up her bed there, sharing the household without reclaiming its former shape.

A Temporary Family Life

Lola explains that she is very sick and expects she may die; she says she wanted to see Rosa once more. When Amalfitano offers to take her to the hospital, Lola refuses and produces French papers stating that she has AIDS. The papers make the illness explicit, while Lola’s account of the visit gives it a particular purpose: she has come to see her daughter again. The exchange does not turn into a treatment or recovery story. Her stay is limited, and the family’s immediate task is to live together with the knowledge that she is ill.

The next day, Amalfitano sees Lola and Rosa walking hand in hand near the station. He follows them from a distance rather than interrupting them; later, he finds them together watching television at home. The quiet scenes give mother and daughter time together without making their reunion permanent. When Rosa is asleep, Amalfitano asks Lola about Benoit, her son. Lola recalls his intelligence and sensitivity and says he was the first to know she was going to die. She attributes this knowledge to the boy’s own perception. Amalfitano calls it terrible for a child to know his mother will die; Lola answers that lying to children is worse. Their disagreement turns on the responsibilities of adults toward children, and on the painful truth Lola believes Benoit recognized without being told.

Departure and Its Afterimage

On the fifth morning, with the medicine she brought from France nearly gone, Lola says she must leave to see Benoit. Her explanation is deliberately unsettled: he is little and needs her, she says, then qualifies that he does not need her, before admitting that she does not know who needs whom. What she does know is that she has to find out how he is. The wavering formulation does not weaken the decision; it shows the competing claims of the family she has briefly joined in Sant Cugat and the child she has left elsewhere.

Amalfitano leaves a note and an envelope containing a good part of his savings. When he returns from work, he expects Lola to have gone, but she is still at home, reading her book on Greece in front of a television turned on with its sound off. They eat together. Near midnight, after taking Rosa to bed and tucking her in, Amalfitano finds Lola in the living room with her suitcase packed. He asks her to stay the night, claiming that no more trains are running to Barcelona. Lola tells him she is not taking a train but hitchhiking. Amalfitano bows his head and lets her go when she chooses. Lola kisses him on the cheek and leaves.

The next morning, Amalfitano gets up at six and turns on the radio to check whether a hitchhiker on a nearby highway has been murdered or raped. He hears nothing of the kind. The absence of a report does not settle the fear that prompted him to listen; it only marks the limit of what he can know after Lola has left. In his mind, her departure continues for years as a vision rather than a witnessed scene: Lola walking along a nearly deserted road out of Sant Cugat, carrying her suitcase, while most traffic uses the newer toll highway. He remembers that he did not actually see her walk away. The image is instead a shadow cast by streetlights and a dream that supplies the departure he missed.

Narrative Significance

Sant Cugat becomes a place of return but not reconciliation in the sense of a permanent reunion. Lola is briefly a mother in Rosa’s home again, and Amalfitano provides money and a place to stay, yet neither gesture alters the fact that she leaves to seek Benoit. The town’s ordinary markers—school hours, the station, the home, the road—organize the visit, while Lola’s illness and the dwindling supply of medicine give it a clear limit.

The episode’s ending distinguishes the event from its later memory. Amalfitano has no direct view of Lola’s walk; what endures is an image constructed afterward, a woman and her suitcase on a road increasingly bypassed by faster traffic. Sant Cugat thus holds both the concrete reunion and its uncertain afterlife: a few days of shared domestic routine become, for Amalfitano, a long-lasting vision of a departure he never saw.