Alice Gould de Almenara

Alice Gould de Almenara is both the wife named in an involuntary-admission file and a woman who identifies herself as a professional detective admitted by choice. That conflict between her account and the paperwork shapes her life in the asylum: even as she moves among its residents and tries to understand its practices, the possibility that she is being held against her will remains impossible to dismiss.

Identity and Admission

When Montserrat Castell suggests that Alice is not yet a resident, Alice insists that her admission has just been granted. The dispute is immediate and practical: she bends down with a trembling hand to retrieve a lighter and passes it to the person who asked for it. Her insistence establishes how she understands her status, while the tremor and the small, ordinary gesture place that claim within the unsettled routine of the institution.

Alice later tells the director that she is Alice Gould de Almenara, and that her name should mean something to him. She also states that she is not his patient, that she came of her own will, and that she is a professional detective. The director answers by distinguishing the paperwork for voluntary treatment from the papers actually in her file. Voluntary admission, he explains, would have required Alice’s signed declaration and a certificate from Teodoro Ruipérez. Instead, her file follows the involuntary procedure: E. Donadío certified illness and the need for confinement, and her husband, Heliodoro Almenara, applied as her relative. The discrepancy turns her identity into a question with institutional consequences: her own account says she chose to enter, but the documents authorize others to define her as a patient held for treatment.

Life in the Open Institution

In a walk with Alice, Montserrat Castell explains that the hospital has had an open regime for only a few years. Residents can move with relative freedom through the building and grounds. They may gather in the bar for dominoes, brisca, or parchís; talk in the garden; explore the extensive wooded area; attend occupational therapy; or work in workshops that operate like small industries. The goods are sold, and patients receive wages that vary with their abilities and work. Some residents may even leave by bus for nearby towns, especially for local festivities. Montserrat stresses that these freedoms are the general rule, not a guarantee: there are many exceptions.

That qualification matters in a hospital whose forms of care differ sharply. The Dementia Ward Known as the Lion Cage houses residents described as needing help with basic daily activities, from dressing and eating to getting into bed and using the toilet. The contrast between the open grounds and such intensive custodial care gives Alice’s surroundings more than one face. Relative freedom exists within an institution that can also impose close supervision and confinement.

Encounters and Observations

Alice’s first exchanges with Montserrat Castell are guarded. Asked about their connection, Montserrat vaguely replies that they have mutual friends; she then takes Alice by the arm and walks with her, answering Alice’s insistent questions about the hospital. The movement from evasiveness to explanation makes Montserrat an important guide to the rules Alice is trying to learn, without establishing more about their relationship than the scene supports.

Alice also responds to another female resident with an intensity that exceeds detached observation. She says that watching the woman causes her deep sadness, remarks on her beauty, and describes feeling not only pity but something like maternal attraction. Her attention joins aesthetic admiration to a protective impulse: she registers the woman as a person whose appearance and condition provoke feeling, not simply as an object of clinical discussion.

In a separate inward reflection, Alice turns to the possibility of healthy parents having children with profound impairments. She compares Heliodoro’s handsome appearance to the delicacy of a butterfly and considers that outward beauty cannot determine what children a couple might have. The passage presents this as Alice’s disturbing, private thought, not as evidence that the couple has children. In the same train of thought she recognizes that she was very tactless not to tell Heliodoro the truth about her intended trip to Buenos Aires.

Detention, Doubt, and Escape

The director’s account of the admission file sharpens Alice’s uncertainty about who is acting in good faith. She wonders whether Raimundo García del Olmo is responsible for her predicament, involved as an accomplice, a front for someone else, or deceived himself. She also cannot settle whether Samuel Alvar is sincere but mistaken or insincere and deliberately misleading her. Her suspicion remains an open set of possibilities rather than a conclusion.

On a visiting day, Alice crosses the Central Hall for the Forsaken and goes into the park, where residents are walking with relatives and friends. The scene offers a concrete image of the hospital’s openness, but it does not resolve her confinement. The idea of escape returns intermittently and persistently; she does not reject it, but judges that this is not the right moment to act. Her plans remain contingent, sustained by the prospect of finding another opportunity.

Clinical Debate and Narrative Significance

César Arellano cautions Alice against judging anti-psychiatry unfairly. He credits its criticism of older hospital systems with helping bring about admirable reforms, while arguing that anti-psychiatrists can act more like sociologists than physicians and overlook the infrastructure needed to realize their theories. In particular, removing bars can be an excellent measure against the oppressive feeling of confinement, but only if the necessary conditions are created first. The exchange frames Alice’s institutional world through a debate about reform: freedom is not merely a matter of taking away barriers, and the humane promise of an open regime coexists with the practical demands of care.

Across these scenes, Alice is presented neither only as an investigator nor only as a patient. She asserts professional purpose and personal choice, notices suffering in others, and tests the accounts offered by people around her. Yet her admission file and her recurring thoughts of flight place limits on that independence. The tension between her stated identity and the institution’s official description of her remains unresolved in these episodes, giving her movements through the hospital both the appearance of freedom and the pressure of confinement.