Pepito Méndez

Pepito Méndez is a schoolteacher among the asylum’s patients whose exuberant talk, invented kinship ties, and sharply contrasting responses to the hospital and the outside world make him a distinctive presence in its community. Known as el Albaricoque and the Man of a Hundred Letters, he is remembered not simply by his labels but through moments that show the particular logic and emotional force of his life within the institution.

Identity and Names

The narrative identifies Pepito Méndez as a schoolteacher, known in the hospital as el Albaricoque. It also gives him the name the Man of a Hundred Letters, a second sobriquet that marks how patients are recognized and remembered through the nicknames circulating in their community. The evidence does not explain the origin of either name or describe his teaching career; it establishes his former occupation and the identities by which he is known in the asylum.

Those labels sit beside details that make him more than a name in a catalogue. He speaks with remarkable loquacity and moves through the world by assigning familiar relationships to people around him. His presence is conveyed through such particulars rather than through a narrated clinical history: the reader encounters a voice, a set of imagined connections, and the circumstances in which his mood changes.

Speech and Life in the Asylum

An early encounter shows Pepito emphatically insisting that Alice Gould is already a resident: he says her admission has just been given and urges someone to pick up an object that has fallen. The exchange is brief, but it places him within the hospital’s everyday social life, where patients make claims about who belongs and where Alice’s status is not yet settled for everyone around her. Pepito’s intervention treats her admission as an accomplished fact, giving his voice a part in the scene even though he is not its central figure.

His manner becomes more expansive during a later journey from the asylum toward a nearby village. On the way, he calls a woman he identifies as the Blonde beautiful and says she is his aunt; he also names Ignacio Urquieta as his uncle and tells Terrón that he is the Spanish National Railway Network. The sequence makes his imagined relationships concrete through the names he assigns to the people accompanying him. These statements are reported as part of his talk, not explained by the narrative as a deliberate joke or given a fuller diagnostic account.

The Village Journey and Its Reversal

Pepito travels from the asylum in the same van that is to leave him at a bus. Terrón accompanies the group, while Alice Gould and Ignacio Urquieta share the journey toward the village. Pepito is exceptionally talkative and happy because he believes he is going to see his aunt. His anticipation is thus attached to a particular destination and relationship, rather than described as a general response to being allowed outside.

That happiness has a limit the narrative makes explicit: he forgets that crossing the threshold of his home will make him ill, and that he will not recover until he returns to the asylum. The contrast turns the doorway into a consequential boundary. The outing carries him toward a homecoming he welcomes, yet the account also establishes that leaving the institution for that home will bring a reversal in his condition. His return to the asylum is the point at which recovery becomes possible again; the passage does not describe the precise events at the home or specify the nature or duration of the illness.

Memory and Narrative Role

Later, Alice is moved when she speaks of the patients and staff she has come to know. Pepito appears among the figures she remembers with tenderness, alongside the gardener, Rómulo, the Pendulum Girl, Ignacio Urquieta, and others. That recollection places him within a network of attachments formed in the hospital: he is not only the talkative traveler whose anticipated visit ends in illness, but also one of the residents whose particularity matters to Alice.

The narrative’s brief scenes hold together two views without resolving them into a single explanation. Pepito’s nicknames and eccentric declarations register how others identify him, while the journey gives his expectation, happiness, and vulnerability a specific setting and consequence. His home is the object of joyful anticipation and, at the same time, the threshold associated with falling ill; the asylum is both the place he leaves and the place where recovery follows. The Man of a Hundred Letters remains a secondary character, but these details give his presence a distinct shape within the hospital’s community and within Alice’s memory of it.