The poet

The poet is an unnamed Spanish poet and patient at the Mondragón asylum, where Lola repeatedly seeks him out and eventually proposes an escape to France. His scenes are shaped by the gap between confinement and imagined freedom: he takes sixteen pills a day and records visions, yet still writes poems, makes elaborate smoke rings, and moves among other patients on terms Lola cannot fully interpret. He is at once the object of her rescue plan and a person who resists being reduced to it, while his memories and jokes unsettle the story Lola wants to tell about their past.

Identity and Confinement

The poet is already interned when Lola and Imma travel to Mondragón. During their first unsuccessful attempts, they are not permitted to see him; on a later visit, they study the asylum from outside, memorizing its gray walls, dirt and gravel roads, the routes taken by inmates and caretakers, and the surrounding land. The boundary is not incidental: Lola can approach the institution, watch its routines, and imagine contact, but the asylum controls whether she can meet him.

On their third attempt, Imma presents herself as a reporter from a Barcelona newspaper, while Lola claims to be a poet. The disguise secures an appointment. A doctor or priest escorts them through long blue-and-white corridors to a plain room, and Lola observes that the staff seem proud to have the poet as a patient. They know him and greet him as he goes to the garden or receives his daily tranquilizers. His place within the institution is thus both restrictive and socially legible: he is not an unknown captive, but a familiar figure whose routine belongs to the asylum.

Lola finds him older than she remembers, with sunken eyes and thinning hair. He asks for a cigarette, listens as she explains that she missed him and had watched the philosopher’s apartment in the Ensanche, and seizes on the word perseverance when she insists she did everything she could. His brief response leaves the meeting open: he acknowledges her account without confirming the meaning she gives their separation.

Lola’s Rescue Plan and the Poet’s Response

Lola tells the poet that she believes he is not gay, that he is a prisoner who wants to escape, and that love still leaves room for hope. She makes escape the practical form of that hope. The plan, she says, was Imma’s: the three of them would cross the mountains into France like pilgrims, reach Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and take a train to Paris. Lola and Imma would find work cleaning or caring for children in wealthy neighborhoods while the poet wrote; Lola imagines reading his poems at night, becoming pregnant after several months, and eventually returning to Spain by a different route.

The proposal is detailed enough to become a life story in miniature, complete with work, travel, a child, and a timetable. Yet it remains Lola’s construction, not a plan the poet agrees to. He asks what will happen to Imma, then listens as Lola explains that Imma devised the scheme. Rather than answer the promised future, he asks the women to read him a poem. Imma reads one about a labyrinth, Ariadne, and a young Spaniard living in a Paris garret. When the poet asks for chocolate, Lola and Imma offer the cheese sandwiches they brought, but he seems not to hear them. Their practical preparations and his unexpected requests pass beside one another without settling into a shared purpose.

His daily treatment also complicates Lola’s image of a lover waiting to be rescued. He takes sixteen pills and records his visions; the account offers those facts without resolving how he understands his condition or whether he wants the future she has planned for him. His response is neither a clear acceptance nor a simple refusal. Instead, the conversation moves among his questions, Imma’s reading, Lola’s promise, and the ordinary details of cigarettes and food.

Performance, Memory, and Uncertainty

The poet’s smoke rings become an act of precision inside the controlled setting. He produces rings that Lola imagines as bluish nimbuses or gray cumulonimbuses, which dissolve in the breeze or drift toward the dark forest at the asylum’s edge. Asked how he makes them, he describes changing the shape of his mouth and tongue, comparing the gestures to several unlike actions. The answer is playful and bodily, but it does not explain him; it adds another performance whose meaning remains unsettled.

A doctor named Gorka approaches, calls the poet by his first name, checks his forehead and pulse, and asks how he feels. The poet answers that he is a little tired. Gorka’s familiarity and cheer contrast with the formal corridors and medication routine, while the poet’s easy exchange with him contrasts with Lola’s emotionally charged attempt to recover their past. When Gorka says he is writing a biography and collecting dates and stories, he describes the poet as a chaotic center who presents an ordered self verbally, perhaps concealing a disorder whose purpose remains mysterious. The remark makes the problem of knowing the poet explicit: even a biographical account may encounter a crafted arrangement rather than a transparent inner life.

The poet’s memories of Barcelona sharpen that uncertainty. He recalls staying in the philosopher’s apartment, living there without a job, playing pranks, throwing books out the window for the philosopher to retrieve, playing loud music, sleeping very little, laughing, and occasionally taking translation or reviewing assignments. Lola and Imma cover their faces when he brings the past back into the conversation. Lola then tells Gorka that the philosopher recently died of AIDS. The poet answers with familiar sayings about who laughs last and the early bird, and tells Lola he loves her. His abrupt movement from remembered mischief to aphorism and declaration gives Lola no stable account of what he remembers or what his love means now.

The Asylum Seen from Outside

When Lola returns the next day, the poet is on bedrest; the same refusal recurs over the following days. With their money gone, Imma leaves for Madrid to ask her brother for a loan, while Lola stays behind. Alone, she writes long letters to Amalfitano about her life near the asylum and visits the grounds daily, clinging to the fence as if she could establish telepathic contact. Her access to the poet becomes increasingly indirect: she can watch, imagine, and report, but cannot speak with him.

From the fence she sees him in a tight white T-shirt among other patients. She waves and traces patterns in the cold air, trying to send him an urgent message. The scene does not confirm that he sees or understands her signals. Instead, she watches a disturbance on a bench: another inmate kicks the poet in the legs; the poet kicks back, knocking the man down, and a second inmate chases and strikes him before returning to his seat. The poet then approaches the two men. Lola thinks she hears an ironic laugh, but admits in her letter that perhaps it is her own madness laughing.

The poet looks from one companion to the other as if searching for a sign that it is safe to sit. He raises his hand in a gesture that Lola reads as truce or surrender, like a tattered flag, and takes a seat between them. Then, while the three men smoke and his familiar spirals rise from his mouth and nose, he puts his left hand inside the robe of the inmate who had been masturbating. Lola sees the action but cannot hear what the poet says. The encounter resists a clean interpretation as either reconciliation, threat, or rescue: it is a sequence of gestures whose significance remains beyond Lola’s reach.

Narrative Role and Limits of Rescue

The poet’s role in Lola’s story is inseparable from distance. She remembers their earlier intimacy, travels to see him, and develops a detailed escape plan, but the narrative repeatedly separates intention from access: appointments are denied, a meeting ends, bedrest prevents further visits, and the fence turns communication into watching and imagined telepathy. The asylum is not merely scenery around the relationship; its corridors, gates, routines, and boundaries determine what Lola can know and do.

Nor does the poet become the uncomplicated object of a rescue romance. He asks questions, reads the women’s plans in his own way, summons them to read poetry, recalls a disordered Barcelona life, and forms an ambiguous place among his fellow patients. Lola’s conviction that he wants freedom remains hers; the evidence does not establish that he consents to her plan. His character is consequently defined not by a final revelation but by the mismatch between the stories told about him and the partial actions others can actually witness: the cigarettes, poems, pills, smoke rings, memories, and unreadable signals across the asylum grounds.