Alice Gould’s first encounters at the asylum turn an assumed patient identity into an investigative method. Moving cautiously among residents, she studies the hospital’s habits and its people while seeking a man who might have written the criminal letters sent to her client, Raimundo García del Olmo. Her first suspect is Carolo Bocanegra, whose silent manner proves less straightforward than it appears; the search soon expands from suspicious handwriting to the hospital’s routines, records, and deaths.

Admission into a borrowed identity

Alice’s arrival requires her to perform the role she has adopted. When Montserrat Castell objects that she is not yet a resident, Alice insists that her admission has just been issued. She bends down, retrieves a lighter from the floor with a trembling hand, and returns it to the person asking for it. The small act makes her new status visible: she is not merely visiting the institution but has entered its daily life as one of its patients.

The disguise has a practical purpose. Alice has accepted García del Olmo’s commission to investigate the criminal letters directed at him. He has given her an advance check and promised an equal sum if she completes the work successfully; the scale of the fee, which first seemed excessive, now feels proportionate to the difficulty and strangeness of her assignment. The asylum is both the setting of the investigation and the environment she must learn to navigate without exposing why she is there.

At first Alice tries to speak as little as possible, so that she will not betray the symptoms of the illness she is feigning. In the Central Hall for the Forsaken, women and men enter through separate doors, residents notice the newcomer, and she keeps her eyes lowered rather than inviting conversation. Her caution is deliberate, but it also makes observation her first instrument: she watches before she joins in.

Learning the ward and its residents

Montserrat explains that the hospital has had an open-regime policy for only a few years. Residents can move with relative freedom through the buildings and grounds; some gather at the bar for dominoes, brisca, or parchis, while others walk in the garden, explore the extensive wooded area, attend occupational therapy, or work in workshops that function like small industries. The objects produced there are sold, and residents receive wages that vary with their abilities and output. Some can even take a bus to nearby towns, especially for local festivities, although Montserrat cautions that exceptions to this general freedom are numerous.

This arrangement gives Alice room to observe, but not the security of a simple, uniformly open institution. The most severely impaired residents are kept in the Dementia Ward Known as the Lion Cage, where they may need staff to dress them, feed them, put them to bed, and help them maintain basic routines. The contrast between movement through much of the hospital and intensive dependence in that ward makes clear that residents’ access and treatment differ sharply. Alice’s search must therefore account not just for individual personalities but for a complicated landscape of permissions and restrictions.

In the hall, a resident nicknamed the Elephant Man is nearly struck by a fool who has been reprimanded for tormenting others. The Elephant Man remains standing and does not defend himself. Alice recognizes him from the previous evening’s dinner, and a recently arrived man explains that the resident who struck him is unlikely to repeat the act if punished. He then asks to sit beside her and introduces himself as Ignacio Urquieta. Their exchange quickly unsettles the categories Alice has brought with her: Ignacio describes himself as a particularly peculiar patient because he recognizes and admits that he is mad, then suggests that Alice herself is not ill. She confirms that she is not.

Observation turns into suspicion

Alice’s search begins with a profile rather than a name. Among the hospital’s population, she is looking for a man around fifty, athletically built, and able and willing to write. That combination narrows her attention toward someone whose outward capabilities might be obscured by the institution’s labels. Her encounter with Carolo Bocanegra makes the problem of interpreting appearances especially concrete.

When Alice asks whether Carolo can speak, Ignacio answers that a mutist is someone who does not talk. Carolo takes out the oilcloth notebook he carries in his pocket and writes, in broad strokes with an orange marker, that he can speak but does not feel like doing so. Alice is startled, though she suppresses both laughter and comment. The notebook does not prove that Carolo wrote the letters, but it shows that he can communicate in writing and keeps a distinctive record of some kind.

At the meal, Alice continues to observe residents’ behavior, including the contrast between those who refuse food from lack of appetite and those who resist swallowing until staff patiently persuade them. The variety of her impressions does not distract her from the different-colored notes covering Carolo Bocanegra’s Oilcloth Notebook. She gives Carolo the private investigative nickname the False Mutist and places him on her first list of suspects as a possible author of the criminal letters to García del Olmo. Her inference rests on a suggestive conjunction—his concealed ability to write and his multicolored notes—not on proof. The distinction matters: Alice has identified a plausible lead, not established guilt.

An investigation widened by the hospital

As the inquiry develops, Alice’s method moves beyond first impressions. She asks the director for the records of selected residents because she needs to know which had permission to leave the hospital on the dates when García del Olmo was murdered. She sees only one of the files she wants before the police commissioner later asks for it to be brought to the office. The records offer a way to test opportunity against movement outside the grounds, turning the hospital’s open-regime rules into evidence rather than mere background.

Her later reasoning about other deaths also shows how the initial practice of close observation becomes a broader investigation. She notes that two victims were killed by having their throats cut, then infers that someone stopped them while they were escaping, spoke Basque, and offered help. The killer led them into the basement labyrinth with the plausible story of a secret passage left by the old friars, promised to fetch a lantern, and returned with a knife. When Alice recognizes that another dead man is Remo, she says that she suspected the killer from that moment. In the questioning that follows, she explains the Elephant Man’s crushing attack as repeated falls of his 160-kilogram body onto the victim, like the action of an actual elephant. The hospital encounters that began as a search for a letter-writer have become a way to connect behavior, physical evidence, and access to place.

The conditions of Alice’s own admission ultimately complicate the agency she thought she had secured. When she insists that she entered voluntarily as a professional detective, the director points out that her file does not contain the procedure for voluntary treatment. Instead, it records a medical certificate from E. Donadío stating that she was ill and needed admission, together with an application from her husband, Heliodoro Almenara, as her relative. The discrepancy reveals that the institution has formally classified her as an involuntary patient, despite the investigative purpose she asserts. Her first encounters thus begin with a carefully managed disguise, but the search takes place inside a system that can reinterpret her presence and constrain her freedom.