Lanzarote is the setting of two sharply contrasting episodes in the Narrator’s relationship with her mother: the mother’s departure there for a meditation retreat when the Narrator was eighteen, and a later family visit that briefly offers the Narrator space to write. The island becomes both a place of escape and a landscape from which the unresolved claims of family, work, and responsibility return.

The Mother’s Departure

When the Narrator had just turned eighteen, her mother announced that she was leaving for Lanzarote. She planned to live and work at a meditation retreat center, where she hoped to grow as a person. The decision was real, not a joke: she left the Narrator the apartment until she finished her degree or found work, reasoning that her daughter was an adult and that the Narrator’s father would be nearby in an emergency.

The Narrator says she does not think she has forgiven her mother. Yet the old departure has not produced a simple wish for reunion: she also doubts that she would know what to do with her mother if she came back. Lanzarote thus enters the family history as the destination of a separation whose emotional consequences remain unsettled.

A Temporary Family Visit

Years later, the Narrator stays with her mother on Lanzarote with Niclas and Erik. The visit creates an unusual pocket of time: each morning, her mother takes Erik away in his car seat, and the child cheerfully waves goodbye to the Narrator. Erik is happy with the grandmother he has only recently come to know, and the mother appears happy too. Niclas leaves in a hurry to surf, so the Narrator is alone in the house for two or three hours.

That solitude is the visit’s immediate gift. The Narrator writes while the island’s temperature, smell, ocean murmur, and the quick, sensual rhythm of the keyboard fill her attention. Outside the house, Erik plays among volcanic stones; her mother watches him with fascination. Niclas returns from the surf sunburned and with his hair looking blonder. The details make the family’s brief arrangement tangible: the child is occupied, the mother is absorbed in her grandson, and the Narrator has a stretch of uninterrupted work.

The Island’s Brief Perfection

The Narrator calls the moment perfect while acknowledging that the perfection is not entirely real and has a fixed limit: it will end in six days. Then her mother will say goodbye with some relief and recover her solitude; the Narrator will check her bank balance and prepare to return to salaried work. The visit is therefore not a lasting escape from ordinary obligations, but a reprieve whose ending is already in view.

Lanzarote also frames the return of the manuscript the Narrator has been avoiding. Its pages contain Alice and the twins, the ghost of Sylvia Plath and the ghost of her son who died by suicide, Australia, Rhodesia, Gólgota, the wound of a woman who has just given birth, and a green plastic bathtub. Under the island’s sun, the Narrator imagines that the figures she had shaped may have begun to melt when she withdrew her attention from them. The imagined melting does not release her from their claims: she anticipates meeting again the dark side of her power and responsibility, and recognizes that she has sometimes tried to understand the mothers whose hands drowned children.

Narrative Significance

The two visits to Lanzarote place different kinds of departure beside one another. The mother once left her eighteen-year-old daughter to pursue a life of meditation and personal growth; later, she helps make possible the Narrator’s temporary withdrawal into writing by caring for Erik. The second episode offers a more tender form of maternal support, but does not erase the first separation or settle the Narrator’s unease about it.

Nor does the island’s temporary calm resolve the moral pressure of the book the Narrator is writing. The ocean, volcanic landscape, and hours alone provide favorable conditions for work, yet the manuscript’s dead and living figures wait for her when she returns to its pages. Lanzarote’s respite is therefore double-edged: it gives the Narrator room to create while making the short duration of that freedom, and the responsibility attached to her imaginative work, impossible to forget.