Antonio el Sudamericano’s suicide in the women’s ward is the culmination of a breakdown witnessed by Alice Gould: believing his father dead, Antonio condemns himself as the cause, then disappears before staff can intervene. The discovery of his body in the women’s showers turns a crisis Alice had tried to report into a fatal loss, and the father’s first visit later that day gives the imagined death a devastating real-world counterpoint.

The imagined telephone call

The episode begins in a nearly empty room occupied by three patients: a silent, self-punishing woman, an enormous motionless man, and Antonio, who is agitated and crying. Alice sits apart from them. Without warning, Antonio grips the door handle and acts as if it were a telephone, trying to reach an old friend. His side of the exchange shifts from calling out to asking who is on the other end. The scene makes his isolation visible: the conversation is not with another person but with words he imagines hearing.

Antonio listens intently, moving his lips in time with the imagined replies. Then his expression changes; he cries out, clenches his free hand, and repeatedly strikes himself in the face. The action makes the crisis physical before it becomes an explicit accusation. When he turns from the supposed telephone, he looks around the room as if searching for someone who can receive his grief, then runs to the motionless man and clings to him, sobbing that his father is dead because Antonio could not study.

Guilt and the failure of contact

Antonio’s account makes academic failure the center of his imagined bereavement. He believes his father wanted him to study and that, because he could not do so, he had disappointed him to death. He calls himself his father’s killer, treating an inability to study as both the cause of the loss and proof of personal guilt. The narration stresses the mismatch between the certainty of this accusation and the death it describes: Antonio’s grief is overwhelming, but the father’s death exists only in his belief at this point in the scene.

The man Antonio embraces does not hear, understand, or see him. His stillness offers no answer to Antonio’s anguish; the narration observes that he might as well have embraced a tree or a piece of furniture. This contrast is central to the episode’s painful construction. Antonio reaches for another body, but the gesture produces no human response, leaving his imagined conversation and his grief enclosed within themselves.

Alice recognizes the danger in what she has witnessed. She goes to find a member of the medical staff, convinced Antonio should no longer be allowed to remain under the hospital’s open-regime policy and instead needs to be confined promptly. Samuel Alvar answers her sharply, telling her not to instruct him about what he should do. The disagreement leaves a consequential interval between Alice’s alarm and the search that follows; the account establishes her urgency and Alvar’s rebuke, but does not claim that this exchange alone explains Antonio’s suicide.

Search and discovery

When Alice and Samuel Alvar enter the Central Hall for the Forsaken, Antonio is already gone. They search the ground floor without finding him. The Iron Gate Called the Border is shut, making the offices inaccessible by that route; if Antonio had gone out into the park, he would have been seen. Alvar hurries upstairs toward the men’s unit, while Alice alerts Conrada Azpilicueta. Conrada, Roberta, and Alice search the women’s unit, extending the search across the hospital rather than assuming Antonio has remained where they last saw him.

They find him in the women’s showers, hanged with his own shirt from the shower fitting. Staff make every effort to revive him. Alice hears that his heart begins beating again, but only for a few seconds. The brief return of a heartbeat does not reverse the outcome; it makes the attempt at rescue another moment of hope cut short. The location and means of death also complete the episode’s abrupt change of scene: the room where Antonio had sought contact through an imagined call gives way to a shower room where the searchers find him alone.

Aftermath and tragic reversal

The narration sets Antonio’s death beside a verse associated with Jorge Manrique about the folly of trying to live when death is desired, then recasts the thought around the effort to revive someone who wants to die. This reflection follows the failed resuscitation rather than preceding it: its force comes from the seconds in which Antonio’s heart reportedly beats again, and from the immediate recognition that this return cannot hold. The episode does not present the maxim as a diagnosis of Antonio’s motives; it frames the limits of rescue after the event.

At seven that evening, Antonio’s father visits him in the hospital for the first time. The timing overturns the imagined loss that drove Antonio’s final crisis: the father he believed dead arrives only after his son has died. The visit confirms neither Antonio’s belief nor his accusation; instead, it places the actual father and the imagined bereavement on opposite sides of an irreversible delay.

Alice is deeply affected and repeatedly blames herself for not alerting a staff member sooner, when she first saw the crisis taking shape. Her response gives the episode a second aftermath alongside the death itself: the witnessed emergency becomes a lasting question of whether earlier intervention might have mattered. The account records her guilt without establishing that she could have prevented the suicide. Its tragedy rests in the gap between recognizing that Antonio was in danger and reaching him in time.