Elvira Campos (704c25cc)

Elvira Campos is the director of Santa Teresa’s psychiatric hospital, a professional position that places her near the city’s accumulating accounts of violence without giving her power to resolve them. Through her response to televised activism, her conversations with Juan de Dios Martinez, and her fantasies of departure, the novel presents her as a perceptive but divided figure: she recognizes how the crisis distorts public and private life, yet imagines escape rather than a route to changing it.

Institutional Position and Public Crisis

Elvira’s work connects her to the city’s psychiatric system, but the evidence does not make her a police investigator or a public spokesperson. Her perspective instead enters the femicide crisis through television, conversation, and the emotional consequences of hearing about the crimes. That distance matters: she can see the strain spreading through Santa Teresa, while remaining unable to make the violence intelligible or bring it to an end.

A televised program featuring Florita Almada and women from WSDP reaches a broad audience. Elvira watches it and mentions it to Juan de Dios Martinez, who has not seen the broadcast. The program’s public visibility brings the killings into homes and private conversations, but does not settle what they mean. In the same account, Klaus Haas dismisses the women’s criticism from prison and insists that the killer continues to act while he remains confined. The contrast reveals how the crisis is argued over from different positions—activists’ public denunciation, a detained suspect’s self-defense, and Elvira’s unsettled attention—without yielding a shared or conclusive account.

Witness to Activism and Its Divisions

Elvira also sees a separate television appearance by Women in Action, a Mexico City feminist group that condemns the continuing deaths and calls for investigators from the capital to be sent to Santa Teresa. The group argues that local police are incapable of handling the situation, or may be complicit, and challenges the program’s host to produce evidence against Haas, whom they regard as a likely scapegoat. Its criticism extends to the regional broadcast with WSDP and the seer from Hermosillo, whom the Mexico City activists suspect of exploiting the crimes.

Watching the broadcast, Elvira recognizes one of the activists as Dr. Gonzalez Leon, an old college friend. The recognition unsettles her because the woman looks much older than Elvira remembers, yet remains the same person. That moment of recognition makes public activism personally legible: the televised conflict is not simply a clash between unfamiliar groups but a view of time, change, and old affiliations from Elvira’s own life. She wonders whether her friend still practices medicine and why she now expresses such scorn for the seer. The questions remain private; the evidence does not show Elvira contacting her or taking a public side.

Juan de Dios Martinez and the Limits of Intimacy

Elvira’s private relationship with Juan de Dios Martinez brings the crimes closer to her than television does. She would like to ask him more about the murders, but anticipates that doing so would deepen their relationship and lead them together into a locked room to which, in her image, she alone holds the key. The metaphor binds intimacy to control and confinement: knowledge of the crimes is not a neutral subject between them, but something that could intensify a relationship she already understands as difficult to contain.

At another point, Juan de Dios tells Elvira what is happening to him. She listens in silence. Their conversation then turns to her own imagined escape: she describes dreaming of selling her properties, car, and jewelry, flying to Paris, renting a small studio, and undergoing cosmetic surgery so that she would return to the world as someone unrecognizable. The vision is painstakingly constructed, down to the imagined bandages, museum visits, bookstores, and French lessons. It offers an imagined new life, but its details also show how far that life remains from her actual circumstances; it exists as a dream told to Juan de Dios, not as a departure she carries out.

Patients, Diagnosis, and Private Doubt

Elvira’s professional role also appears in her discussion of Perla Beatriz Ochoterena, a teacher who died by suicide. Elvira considers the possibility that Perla was depressed and nearing a breakdown, while describing her as lonely and hypersensitive. When Juan de Dios reads out the titles of Perla’s books, Elvira says they are good books and notes that some are hard to find in Santa Teresa; he tells her they were sent from Mexico City. Her response places the dead woman within an intellectual life and a local scarcity of books, rather than reducing her entirely to a psychiatric explanation. At the same time, the passage does not establish a formal diagnosis or provide evidence that Elvira treated Perla.

The scene resonates with Elvira’s uncertainty about Santa Teresa more broadly. In a private reflection, she suspects that the whole of Mexico may have gone crazy; she contemplates leaving the country or killing herself before reaching fifty-five, perhaps fifty-six. These are reported thoughts, not actions or a clinical conclusion. Their proximity to her work as an asylum director sharpens the distinction between institutional language about distress and her own figurative, despairing account of life in a city where the killings continue.

Escape as an Uncompleted Future

Elvira’s fantasy of Paris is a detailed rehearsal of becoming someone else. In it, she sells nearly everything she owns, changes her face, learns French, and imagines entering public places as a stranger whose bandages invite speculation. The fantasy’s sequence—dispossession, surgery, concealment, unveiling, and a return to the streets—gives her imagined renewal a ritual shape, but no corresponding change occurs in the plot. She does not leave for Paris in the supplied evidence.

Her conversations with Juan de Dios likewise remain suspended between attachment and retreat. He tells her that he likes and loves her as she is; she answers by imagining a life without Mexico, Mexicans, or Mexican patients. His affection offers recognition, while her dream proposes radical distance from the world that has formed her professional and personal life. The novel gives no final resolution to this tension. Elvira remains the director of Santa Teresa’s psychiatric hospital, attentive to the crisis and its human consequences, yet drawn toward an escape that exists only in her private imagining.