The doctors’ meeting becomes both a clinical examination and Alice Gould’s attempt to make the asylum answer for her confinement. She acknowledges that she entered by pretending to be mentally ill, but insists that this deception served a practical purpose: it allowed her to investigate a case. As Samuel Alvar questions her account, she shifts the focus from whether she has lied to what the hospital has done with the power those lies helped place in its hands. Her detailed challenge to Alvar culminates in an accusation that he has sacrificed her liberty to protect his own position; his silence leaves the meeting’s central dispute unresolved in words, but charged with consequence.

The Terms of the Examination

Samuel Alvar opens by distinguishing the doctors’ questioning from an interrogation by a journalist, police officer, prosecutor, or judge. The physicians, he explains, are not trying to convict Alice. The distinction matters: the meeting is presented as a clinical inquiry, yet its conclusions bear directly on whether she remains confined. When César Arellano asks how many times she has lied since entering the hospital, Alice answers that the instances are beyond counting. Asked what she meant to achieve, she says that she simulated mental illness so that no one would obstruct her admission.

That admission confirms one part of the hospital’s suspicion while leaving another question open. Alice has not entered under the identity or circumstances she first presented; she has deliberately performed illness. But she frames that performance as a means of access, not as proof that the case she came to investigate was imaginary. The meeting therefore turns on competing interpretations of the same conduct: deceit can be treated as evidence against her credibility, while Alice treats it as the tactic that made her investigation possible.

Alvar states the institution’s position bluntly. Alice was admitted as a paranoid patient after, as he puts it, attempting three times to poison her husband, Heliodoro Almenara. Her husband requested the admission on a doctor’s recommendation, and the hospital accepted her on the undertaking that it would try to cure her. In this formulation, the doctors’ responsibility is not to accept Alice’s account simply because she offers it; it is to treat the person formally committed to their care. That commitment also exposes the difference between what Alice says she intended and the medical and legal status assigned to her.

The Admission and Its Consequences

Alice’s claim that she came voluntarily collides with the documents in her file. The asylum’s director explains that a voluntary admission would have required Alice’s own signed request for treatment and a certificate from Teodoro Ruipérez, who received her. Instead, the file follows the procedure for an involuntary commitment: a medical certificate from E. Donadío, registered in Madrid, stating that Alice was ill and needed admission, together with an application from her husband as her relative. The paperwork gives the hospital’s version an official shape, even as Alice contests the assumptions behind it.

For Alice, the distinction is not merely technical. She reasons that a voluntary patient could leave almost as easily as she had entered, whereas a patient committed at a relative’s request on a medical recommendation could not simply walk out when she chose. She compares that constraint to imprisonment, where departure depends on the end of a sentence. The analogy clarifies why the classification matters so intensely: the dispute over how she entered is also a dispute over who can determine when she leaves.

The scene also returns to the beginning of her story. Alice dates the start of events to February 29, her husband’s birthday, which he celebrates with a large party every leap year. She recalls that she told Heliodoro she would be going to Buenos Aires to investigate a possibly forged will. Now, she says, he does not know where she is; she cannot contact him, and her letters have not reached him. She fears that he may think she has abandoned him and may be searching for her in South America. Her appeal asks the doctors not only to assess her but to help restore contact with the person whose application helped place her there.

The Disputed Letter

A turning point comes when Alice identifies a false element in the account of her case: Samuel Alvar says that he never suggested that anyone write him the letter in question. Alice responds not by abandoning the letter, but by detailing its physical characteristics. It is folio-sized, has no letterhead, is dated March 21, and is typed on both sides on a Baby Olivetti matching the model used at the hospital by Montserrat Castell. A paragraph on the second page is underlined, and the closing expresses the writer’s affection for the Almenara couple.

The specificity turns the document into more than an allegation passed from person to person. Alice offers features that can be checked—the date, paper size, absence of a letterhead, typewriter model, two-sided typing, underlining, and wording of the farewell—while the meeting weighs Alvar’s denial that he commissioned it. Her case does not rest solely on a general assertion that someone has deceived her; she presents a chain of concrete details and asks the doctors to consider what they imply. Yet the letter’s significance remains entangled with the broader question of Alice’s reliability, since she has just admitted to lying repeatedly in order to secure admission.

The Accusation Against Alvar

Alice tells the doctors that her grave mistake was informing Heliodoro that she was going to Buenos Aires to investigate the potentially forged will. With her husband unable to find her and her letters failing to arrive, she pleads for the doctors to contact him. The appeal is personal, but it also sharpens the institutional stakes: the hospital’s handling of her case has cut off the very communication that might clarify what is happening outside its walls.

She then advances a more damaging explanation for Alvar’s conduct. In her account, a friend’s imprudence has put the director at risk of abrupt dismissal, a court of honor, and expulsion from his profession. She suggests that he chose to tell Raimundo García del Olmo that his detective had escaped, died, or been discharged, trading Alice’s freedom for the protection of his own honor and career. This is Alice’s accusation, not an independently confirmed account of Alvar’s motives. But when she asks whether that is how events occurred, Alvar looks directly at her and does not answer. His complexion changes from white to greenish. Alice treats the silence as confirmation and thanks him, then serves herself the whisky César Arellano had authorized.

The meeting’s tension lies in the way no single fact settles the matter. Alice concedes deliberate deception, while exposing the involuntary procedures that made her confinement difficult to end. Alvar maintains the hospital’s clinical obligation, but does not answer the final charge. During the discussion, Arellano privately counts five votes in Alice’s favor, one against, and one abstention from Ruipérez; the count registers a shift in the room without itself resolving the case. Alice’s statement thus functions as both testimony and counter-investigation: she is examined as a patient, but examines the documents, decisions, and silences that have made the asylum her unwilling setting.