Madness as contagion

“Madness is contagious” is a recurring idea that connects Lola’s precarious life near the Mondragón asylum with Oscar Amalfitano’s first experience of a voice addressing him. The phrase moves between fear and consolation: for Amalfitano, the prospect of madness does not extinguish his happiness; in Lola’s account, the recognition that madness may spread sits beside the relief of finding a friend when she is alone.

Lola, Larrazabal, and the asylum

Years before the events Amalfitano narrates, Lola described in a letter with no postmark her chance encounter with Larrazabal. She had been sleeping rough near the asylum after her landlady expelled her. She moved among the railway station, an abandoned warehouse, open country, and, one night, an empty cemetery niche. She chose the cemetery partly because it was near the asylum and seemed peaceful, and she decided to wait there for Imma, who had not returned.

At the Lagasca family mausoleum, Lola found Larrazabal with a prostitute. The encounter led to a long conversation and a connection shaped by their incompatible obsessions: he did not understand her devotion to the poet, just as she did not understand his desire to have sex in a cemetery. Neither judged the other for it. Before leaving, Larrazabal pressed money on her despite her resistance; in the recollection conveyed by the letter, he made her accept a loan of ten thousand pesetas and promised to return the next day. Lola slept in her niche, scrubbed and dressed herself the following morning, ate goat cheese and bread in town, and headed back toward the asylum. The letter’s assertion that friends are a blessing when one is alone makes the encounter’s modest kindness, rather than the money alone, the emotional counterweight to her exposure and isolation.

Amalfitano hears a voice

The same thought appears in a different register when Amalfitano sits on his porch beneath a suddenly overcast sky. He thinks that madness is contagious. The scene gives the notion a stark, inward setting: the moon, stars, and ghostly lights associated with northern Sonora and southern Arizona disappear, leaving him with his own apprehension.

The night before an excursion, Amalfitano hears a voice that seems unmistakably to address him by name and tell him not to be afraid. He first wonders whether he has gone crazy. Alarmed, he goes to Rosa’s room, checks the window latch, and wakes her. He says he heard a noise and regrets bringing her to the city, but conceals the voice’s direct address. After checking the yard and street, he finds no one. The geometry book and clothing remain on the clothesline; a dog heads toward Avenida Madero. He locks the doors and windows, takes a sturdy kitchen knife, and sets it beside a history of German and French philosophy.

Fear, happiness, and contagion

The following day, Amalfitano considers the possibility that he is losing his mind, but finds that it does not diminish his excitement or happiness. He imagines that his condition could worsen into pain and helplessness, especially if it made him a source of suffering for Rosa. He calculates that his savings could enable her to return to Barcelona, and pictures himself confined in an asylum while she builds a life there. The thought of madness therefore brings both a private exhilaration and a practical fear about his daughter’s future.

The phrase does not settle whether the voice is supernatural or a symptom of illness. Instead, the narrative keeps the experience within Amalfitano’s uncertainty: he is frightened enough to check the house and arm himself, yet later discovers that the possibility of going mad coexists with a new, intense sense of well-being. Lola’s letter supplies a human parallel, not a diagnosis. In her account, the language of contagion gives way to the recognition that friendship can sustain someone living at the edge of an institution and the outside world. Together, the episodes make madness a relational idea—something feared as transmissible, but encountered amid loneliness, care, and the need for another person.