Barcelona

Barcelona is both a place Lola leaves and the city through which she later tries to recover the family she left behind. Its parties, apartments, streets, and remembered addresses bind her pursuit of the poet to her separation from Oscar Amalfitano and Rosa; when she returns years later, the city is recognizable but changed, and the map of her former life no longer leads directly to them.

A Departure from Barcelona

Lola’s announced destination is the Mondragón asylum, where her favorite poet is confined. She has spent the night explaining the plan to Amalfitano while packing, promising that she will return soon to him and Rosa. Her account of how she knows the poet is already unstable: she claims they met at a party in Barcelona before Amalfitano entered her life and made love all night. Amalfitano knows this story cannot be true. The poet is gay, and Lola first learned of him from a book Amalfitano gave her. She then bought the rest of his work and gravitated toward people who regarded him as a genius, an alien, or God’s messenger.

The departure is not a solitary escape. At dawn Inmaculada arrives carrying a small knapsack, and Lola leaves with her. Inmaculada says they must go before there is no way out of Barcelona, speaking of the city as if it were a medieval place about to close its gates. Amalfitano watches the women fix their eyes on the Formica table, exchange looks he cannot interpret, and rise to go. His impression of Inmaculada’s nearly weightless bag—as small as a fetus—makes their preparations seem at once slight and momentous. Lola kisses him on both cheeks; neither she nor her companion wakes Rosa to say goodbye.

The Party and the Watchful Streets

In a letter to Amalfitano, Lola expands her invented or remembered history with the poet into a long account of Barcelona’s literary and social world. She describes the poet living with a gay philosopher, whose famous apartment parties took place weekly or every other week. The guests expected the poet to arrive and provoke a scene; instead, he greeted writer friends and joined the group around the philosopher. Lola remembers dancing alone until five in the morning, when the poet led her by the hand into a bedroom.

Her account makes the encounter both intimate and public. She says that she and the poet made love without undressing while three shadowy figures watched from a corner; one smoked, another whispered, and the third was the philosopher, whose bed they occupied. Lola recalls the poet’s gentleness and her own wish that she could have had his child. The detail of the watching figures does not resolve the scene so much as leave it suspended between private desire and an audience. Afterward she washed and combed her hair, then left with other partygoers for the Drugstore on Las Ramblas, one of the few places open at that hour.

At the Drugstore, a reporter for Ajoblanco asks whether Lola wants a change and suggests moving to Madrid. Lola replies that cities are more or less the same, but her attention remains on the poet. She decides that he has lost his way and that she could save him. For almost a month she watches outside the philosopher’s building, hoping to see the poet and be asked to make love again. She sees no sign of him. Instead, she observes the philosopher, whose face is bruised and whose black eye suggests that something has gone wrong, and watches the windows for shadows and figures looking out over Barcelona at dusk.

Lola is not the only person keeping watch. Across the street she spots a boy, perhaps eighteen or younger, who sits at an outdoor table with a can of Coca-Cola, reading books or writing in a school notebook. He is waiting for the poet to appear and hopes the poet will read his poems. Lola approaches him, tells him she is looking for the poet too, and learns that he writes poetry himself. When she reads his notebook, she identifies the problem: his poems imitate the poet. Their encounter turns the watch outside the apartment into a small gathering of people drawn to the same absent figure, each trying to approach him through a different version of literary devotion.

Return to the Asylum

Lola’s later journeys with Inmaculada take them away from Barcelona and toward the asylum near San Sebastián. On an early attempt, they cannot enter and instead study the institution from outside: its gray walls, dirt roads, grounds, inmates, and caretakers. On their third try they secure an appointment by presenting Inmaculada as a reporter from a Barcelona newspaper and Lola as a poet. An attendant leads them through long blue-and-white corridors to a plain room, where the poet waits. The institution’s staff know him and greet him as he moves toward the garden or his daily tranquilizers.

Lola tells the poet that she has missed him and had kept watch outside the philosopher’s apartment in Barcelona’s Ensanche, without ever seeing him again. She recounts their travels and their previous failed visits, then declares that he is a prisoner who wants to escape and that she has come to take him to France. Her proposed rescue carries Barcelona with it: the city is where she says their intimacy began and where she spent weeks waiting for him, even though Amalfitano believes her account of the affair is false. The asylum visit does not bring the escape she imagines. When the poet recalls his months in the philosopher’s apartment—playing jokes, throwing books out the window, taking occasional translation or reviewing work—Lola and Inmaculada cover their faces. Lola then tells him that the philosopher has died of AIDS. The poet answers with proverbs and asks for another cigarette; Lola and Inmaculada leave by a different path from the one he takes back into the asylum.

The City She Tries to Recover

Seven years after leaving Amalfitano and Rosa, Lola returns to look for them. She spends three weeks asking after her husband at old addresses, but some people do not recognize or remember her, others keep her at the threshold, and some turn out to have been given the wrong address. She sleeps in a boardinghouse near Las Ramblas among foreign workers crowded into small rooms. The city has changed, though she cannot say precisely how. Each day she walks, rests on church steps, and listens to people entering and leaving, mostly tourists. Her search is conducted through fragments: old contacts, streets she half remembers, and the possibility of recognition.

During this search Lola sometimes imagines herself as Electra wandering in disguise through Mycenae, unable to make the killer’s mind legible; at other times she pictures herself as a happy mother watching children play beneath the Mediterranean sky. The mythic identities do not restore the person she seeks. She whispers the names Pylades and Orestes, which summon the faces of many men, but not Amalfitano’s—the face she is actually trying to find. Barcelona thus becomes more than the setting of a return: it is a landscape in which memory offers substitutes and roles while withholding the particular people who would make the past present again.

A former student of Amalfitano eventually recognizes Lola and takes her in. After several days of renewed searching, she sees Amalfitano beneath a larch, smoking, and approaches him. She does not recognize him at first: he is heavier and has lost some of his hair. He recognizes her immediately. Their brief exchange registers the asymmetry of return—she sees how much he has changed, while he tells her that she has not—and they leave together.

Family, Distance, and Narrative Function

At the time of the reunion, Amalfitano lives in Sant Cugat and teaches philosophy at Barcelona’s Universidad Autonoma. Rosa attends a public elementary school and is away from home through most of the day. When Lola tells Rosa that she is her mother, Rosa screams, embraces her, and almost at once runs to hide in her bedroom. The city’s return does not erase the years of absence: the recognition is immediate, but the child also retreats, making reunion a beginning rather than a simple restoration of family life.

Lola tells Amalfitano that she is very sick and wants to see Rosa once more. She refuses his offer to take her to a hospital, saying French doctors have always been better than Spanish ones, and shows him papers in French stating that she has AIDS. During the next days Amalfitano sees Lola and Rosa walking hand in hand near the station, and follows them from a distance rather than interrupting. Lola has another child, Benoit, in Paris, and eventually says she must return to him. Her Barcelona reunion is consequently bounded by another attachment and by the illness she has disclosed; after five mornings with the family, she prepares to leave again.

Across Lola’s story, Barcelona is arranged through thresholds and acts of watching: the doorway through which Inmaculada enters, the apartment windows watched from the street, the asylum gates and corridors beyond the city, and the old addresses at which Lola is unable to find Amalfitano. The city holds her departure and her return, but not a stable home to which the family can simply be restored. Its narrative importance lies in this double movement: it is the remembered scene Lola uses to justify her pursuit of the poet, and the altered, partly inaccessible place where she must confront the consequences of having left.