Spain is the setting of Lola’s attempted escape with the poet, her subsequent wandering, and her eventual return to Oscar Amalfitano and Rosa. The country first appears in her plan as a route to freedom and a future in France; later, its asylum, town streets, railway stations, and family home become distinct places in which that future breaks apart and Lola moves on.

A route imagined as escape

Lola’s proposed departure from the Mondragón asylum is mapped as a practical journey through Spain. With Imma’s help, she intends to cross the mountains as pilgrims, reach Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and take a train to Paris. They would live in hostels and work in wealthy neighborhoods, while the poet wrote. Lola imagines the journey not just as getting him out of the asylum but as the start of a shared domestic life, including a hoped-for child. Spain is thus a threshold in the plan: it is the country they must cross before reaching France, and the landscape through which a new life is supposed to begin.

The plan’s confidence is undercut by the conditions around it. The poet is confined in the asylum, and the proposed escape depends on Imma’s participation as well as Lola’s persistence. When Lola describes the route and future to him, she speaks as though its details might make the hoped-for outcome attainable. The promise of travel, work, poetry, and family life remains a projected future, however; the account does not show the three of them making the escape together.

The asylum and the retreat of hope

Spain’s institutional landscape centers on the Mondragón asylum, where Lola visits the poet and tries to persuade him to leave. At first she goes every day. Later, after settling in San Sebastián with Larrazabal, she visits only once every three days and looks through the fence without expecting to see him. The change in frequency registers a change in her relation to the proposed escape: the plan that once organized her visits gives way to a search for a sign she already believes she will not understand.

Larrazabal offers Lola a place to stay, drives her to the asylum, and helps her with money and daily needs. His kindness does not restore her earlier purpose. She sometimes disappears without telling him where she is going, and he searches for her at the asylum, in the boardinghouse, at the cemetery, and among the gathering places of transients. These movements make Spain a setting of uncertain lodging as well as attempted escape. Even when Lola has a safe place to return to, she continues to move between it and the locations associated with the poet and with people living at the margins.

Stations, illness, and wandering

After leaving Larrazabal, Lola scrapes together enough money for a train ticket and goes to France. Her route includes Bayonne, the Landes, Pau, and Lourdes, but Spain remains part of the broader geography of her travels: she had imagined crossing from it into France with the poet, and later her movements between the two countries form a life without the stable destination she had once proposed. In Lourdes, she helps direct sick and disabled travelers through the station, moving among first-aid spaces, resuscitation rooms, and an improvised morgue. At night she sometimes sleeps in a building’s trash compartments or stays at the station. The station is both a passageway and a place to remain when there is nowhere else to go.

Her sense of movement is marked by exhaustion and uncertainty. When she thinks she sees Imma arriving on a train, she does not call out; she waits for the woman to pass, then leaves the station and walks to the highway to seek a ride. The moment does not confirm a reunion. Instead, it shows how the possibility of meeting someone from her former plan can prompt another departure without resolving what has happened to that plan.

Return to family

Lola eventually sees Amalfitano again in Sant Cugat, where he is living and teaching philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She also meets Rosa, who is attending elementary school. Rosa recognizes Lola as her mother, embraces her, then retreats to her bedroom. Lola tells Amalfitano that she is seriously ill and shows him papers stating that she has AIDS. During the following days, she and Rosa spend time together, including a walk near the station and evenings at home. The return is brief but changes the emotional stakes of the journey: Lola has come not to resume her former life with Amalfitano, but because she wants to see Rosa again.

Lola says she must leave to see her son Benoit, even as she acknowledges that he may not need her. Amalfitano leaves money for her, but she remains with the family for dinner rather than departing immediately. Spain therefore gives her a temporary homecoming, not a settled return. The country’s significance lies in this contrast: the imagined passage toward a shared future with the poet gives way to solitary travel, while a later visit restores contact with her daughter without ending Lola’s movement or her obligations elsewhere.

Narrative significance

Spain connects the story’s spaces of confinement, transit, and kinship. The asylum holds the poet inside a controlled boundary; the roads and stations offer movement but not security or a durable destination; the home in Sant Cugat allows Lola and Rosa a short-lived reunion. These places do not combine into a straightforward journey from imprisonment to freedom. Instead, the intended escape dissolves into wandering, and the eventual return to Spain offers intimacy without permanence. The country’s role is therefore less that of a final destination than of a changing threshold between Lola’s imagined future, her displacement, and the family she briefly sees again.