Antonio el Sudamericano's Suicide

Antonio el Sudamericano’s suicide turns an imagined telephone exchange into a fatal crisis inside the hospital. Its immediate force lies in the gap between what Antonio believes he has heard and what the later events establish: he responds as though his father has died, but his father arrives alive to visit him that evening. The episode also leaves Alice Gould confronting a specific failure of response, as she wonders why she did not alert a member of the medical staff when she saw Antonio’s condition worsening.

The Crisis in the Hall

The scene begins in a room that is almost empty but not deserted. Its only occupants besides Alice are the Statue Man, a self-punishing woman, and Antonio; the first two keep their habitual silence, while Antonio is agitated and crying. Alice sits apart from them. The quiet arrangement is abruptly broken when Antonio seizes the door handle and behaves as though he is placing a telephone call, addressing an absent listener and asking why he has not come. No actual caller is present: Antonio moves his lips in time with words he imagines hearing.

His distress intensifies as he listens to that imagined reply. He cries out, his face changes, and he strikes himself repeatedly with his free hand. Still weeping, he appears to plead for reassurance that what he has heard is untrue. Then he withdraws from the supposed telephone, looks around the room, and runs to embrace the silent Statue Man. In that embrace, he announces that the old man has died. The sequence gives the news the emotional weight of an external event while showing that it reaches the reader through Antonio’s imagined conversation; the passage does not establish that his father has actually died.

Search and Death

By the time Alice and Samuel Alvar enter the Central Hall for the Forsaken, Antonio is gone. The hospital staff search the ground floor without success. The Iron Gate Called the Border is closed, making the offices inaccessible by that route, and he would have been seen if he had gone out into the park. Samuel Alvar hurries upstairs to the men’s unit. Alice, meanwhile, alerts Conrada Azpilicueta and joins her and Roberta in searching the women’s unit.

They find Antonio in the women’s showers, hanging by his own shirt from the shower sprinkler. The location completes the contrast between the room where he had acted out a call and the place where the search ends: first he performs contact with an absent person; then he is discovered alone, beyond the reach of the others’ intervention. The staff make every effort to revive him. Alice hears that his heart beats again, but only for a few seconds. The momentary return of a heartbeat does not change the outcome, and the account presents rescue as an attempted reversal that comes too late.

Aftermath and Meaning

The crisis leaves Alice dwelling on whether she could have acted sooner. She remembers a verse by Jorge Manrique about the folly of wanting to live when God wills death, then reshapes its thought into the conclusion that it is not sane to make someone live again when that person wants to die. In context, the reflection follows the brief return of Antonio’s heartbeat and the failed attempt to revive him. It registers the terrible limit of intervention without making the rescue attempt itself disappear: the staff did try, but the effort could not hold him in life.

The narration places Antonio among the hospital’s “twisted lines,” errors, and misspellings of the Creator, invoking the language associated with the author of the Theory of the Nine Universes. Its irony is pointed: that author does not know that he, too, is among the most crooked lines in the divine script. The episode thus frames suffering through a metaphor of imperfection, while Antonio’s imagined call and Alice’s retrospective self-blame keep the cost immediate and particular. The tragedy is not only that he dies, but that those around him encounter the crisis in fragments: Alice sees its worsening signs, the others discover his absence, and the search ends only when intervention can no longer save him.

At seven o’clock that same evening, Antonio’s father arrives at the hospital to visit his son for the first time. His arrival sharpens the earlier scene’s uncertainty: Antonio had reacted to an imagined voice as though the old man were dead, yet the account then shows his father coming to see him. It does not explain what Antonio believed he heard or resolve the content of the imagined exchange. For Alice, however, the timing becomes a source of guilt. She repeatedly blames herself for not calling a member of the medical staff when she first saw the crisis taking shape, leaving the episode to end not with certainty about Antonio’s vision but with the consequences of a warning she believes she failed to give.