Verano

Verano is a season of recurrent illness and mounting pressure at the hospital. Rather than serving only as a calendar marker, it helps show how psychiatric crises return in cycles and strain the clinicians responsible for care.

Seasonal recurrence

Charito Pérez’s manic psychosis follows a marked seasonal pattern: spring and summer are difficult for her, and her illness reappears around this time each year. Her first psychotic episode came late, at sixty-one; four years passed before the second, then two before the next, and the intervals continued to shorten. Outside the recurring episodes, she is described as normal, quiet, and not given to disturbances. The contrast makes the season a specific clinical clue, while the increasingly frequent relapses suggest that recurrence does not mean the pattern remains stable.

Heat and hospital pressure

As the heat arrives, the hospital receives more new patients and its ordinary clinical workload intensifies. With César Arellano absent, the other clinicians cannot keep up: the seasonal increase includes schizophrenic episodes and mania, as well as heightened sexual disturbances, visions, obsessions, hallucinations, and delusions. Verano is therefore not simply a private difficulty for one patient; it coincides with a broader institutional surge that limits the staff’s capacity to respond.

A seasonal frame for the narrative

The season gives the account of illness a recurring rhythm. Charito’s annual relapses can be set against her quieter periods, while the wider influx of crises shows how heat affects the hospital as a whole. During this press of new cases, Alice Gould is preparing questions for Samuel Alvar and organizing the next steps in her investigation. The seasonal backdrop places that work within a period when clinical attention is especially stretched, without making the season itself an explanation for every patient’s condition.