The García del Olmo Impostor Visits, and Alicia Denies His Identity

The García del Olmo impostor’s visit is a confrontation over identity and credibility staged as an inquiry into a death. The director presents the visitor as Dr. Raimundo García del Olmo, but Alice Gould refuses to recognize him and tells the police commissioner that she is being held against her will. The scene’s decisive turn is not an answer to the murder but Alice’s formal rejection of the man—and the institution’s immediate recasting of that rejection as evidence that she cannot be trusted.

The visit and its stated purpose

The director explains that Dr. García del Olmo has come to hear whatever Alice knows about his father’s death. The visitor is therefore introduced not merely as a guest but as the person whose family loss is under discussion. Alice responds by asking where he is, prompting surprise from those present. The serious-looking man then identifies himself as the doctor. The gap between the director’s introduction and Alice’s response abruptly changes the meeting: what was arranged as a conversation about the death becomes a test of whether the visitor is who he says he is.

The scene records Alice’s response through her expression and movement. Her face hardens; her eyes remain dry and her teeth are clenched. She watches the man incredulously and slowly shakes her head again and again, her movement recalling the Niña Oscilante. That comparison connects a highly controlled act of refusal to one of the asylum’s recognizable patient figures, while leaving Alice’s own certainty intact. The narration offers her visible reaction, not an independent verification of the visitor’s identity.

Alice’s formal refusal

When the commissioner asks whether she has anything to say, Alice addresses him directly. She formally declares that the man is not Dr. Raimundo García del Olmo and requests police protection from the kidnapping she says she is suffering. Her words perform two actions at once: they deny the visitor’s claimed identity and recast the meeting as an appeal against her confinement. The police commissioner, who might have served as an outside authority, is thus asked to judge a conflict that the asylum’s director has already framed as a matter of Alice’s reliability.

The formality matters. Alice does not leave her reaction at disbelief or personal protest; she makes a declaration and explicitly asks for protection. But the declaration does not settle the dispute. It sharpens it: the visitor’s identity, Alice’s account of her detention, and her mental condition become entangled in the same exchange. The scene shows the consequences of her speech without supplying an independent ruling on either the alleged kidnapping or the man’s identity.

Institutional counter-reading

The director answers by apologizing to the visitor. He says that he had already warned the commissioner that Alice was not reliable, and that he had objected to troubling the visitor and making him travel. He then describes an intelligent paranoiac as capable of misleading others. The response redirects attention from Alice’s specific denial to a clinical explanation for why her denial should not be accepted. Rather than investigate the contradiction in the room, the director invokes her diagnosis as a reason to discount it.

This exchange belongs to a continuing struggle over how Alice’s accounts are interpreted. Her regular interviews with César Arellano—three or four each week—have a psychotherapeutic purpose, and Arellano has asked her to distinguish what she knows about herself from what she would wish to be. Elsewhere, Alice says that explanations of neurosis and psychosis have left her confused. Such details do not establish whether her present accusation is true; they show why the encounter cannot be separated from the asylum’s ongoing effort to classify her and from her resistance to being defined by that classification.

Significance and unresolved truth

The visit joins an investigation into a father’s death to Alice’s own claim that she has been wrongfully confined. Its central irony is that the meeting intended to hear her knowledge instead tests whether she is entitled to be heard. The director’s warning offers a ready-made explanation for her refusal, while her appeal to the commissioner attempts to move judgment beyond the asylum’s authority. Neither side’s account is independently confirmed within the encounter, so the reader is left with a sharp contradiction rather than a resolution.

The novel later complicates any simple equation between clinical judgment and indifference: Enrique Donadío is described as believing Alice genuinely paranoid while also feeling deep pity that she was brought in forcibly, deceived, and against her will. That retrospective detail does not verify Alice’s claims about this visitor, but it underscores the broader tension exposed here. A person may be judged ill and still be subjected to coercion; likewise, a diagnosis may explain why officials distrust an account without proving that the account is false.