Antonio el Sudamericano

Antonio el Sudamericano is a patient whose small, repetitive successes at workshop labor give way to a desperate final crisis. The novel first makes him visible through the care with which he attempts a simple task; later, his frantic search among the men and his suicide reveal how little that routine can explain or contain his distress.

Identity and Place in the Asylum

Antonio works outside the main production chain, at a task also assigned to Rómulo: fitting nuts onto a rod. The arrangement keeps his pronounced clumsiness from slowing the other workers, while still giving him a place in the institution’s work routine. The narration even notes the institutional economy behind the arrangement: employing him separately saves the costs associated with payroll, premises, and social security.

His task is physically simple but, for him, persistently difficult. He may prepare to place a nut on the rod only to realize that he has not picked up the rod; then he returns the nut to its basket and begins again. Of ten attempts, nine nuts fall to the floor. The careful sequence of picking up, aligning, and releasing each nut makes his labor a measure not of productivity but of effort and repeated frustration.

Work and Moments of Recognition

The rare successful attempt changes the scene. When a nut happens to fit correctly, Antonio bursts into jubilant laughter and looks to his companions for acknowledgment. That response sets his work apart from the efficient assembly line: the same task that is routine for others becomes, for him, an occasion for unmistakable triumph. The episode presents his difficulty concretely, through repeated gestures and outcomes, rather than reducing him to a diagnosis.

In another scene in the park, Antonio runs from one group of men to another, looking directly at their faces without finding the person he is seeking. The account leaves the object of his search unresolved. Its movement nonetheless contrasts sharply with the measured repetition of his workshop task: here he is not carefully repeating a procedure but urgently scanning the people around him.

Final Crisis and Death

Later, Antonio moves away from what he takes to be a telephone, looks around the room with a vacant expression, and runs to embrace the patient known as the Statue Man, sobbing as he announces that the old man has died. The episode records his grief and disorientation without clarifying the circumstances behind the announcement.

When the staff and patients enter the Central Hall for the Forsaken, Antonio is gone. The Iron Gate called the Border is closed, making the offices an unlikely place to search; he would have been seen had he gone out into the park. Samuel Alvar hurries upstairs to the men’s unit, while Alice alerts Conrada the Old, and they search the women’s unit together. They find Antonio in its showers, hanged with his own shirt from the sprinkler of the artificial rain.

The attempts to revive him are extensive. Alice hears that his heart begins beating again, but only for a few seconds. She recalls a verse by Jorge Manrique and reshapes its thought into the conviction that it is not sane to make someone live again when he wishes to die. The scene closes Antonio’s story not with a recovery but with a brief, failing return of the body, leaving the effort to save him in painful tension with the question of what his death expressed.