Alice Gould Returns to Fuentecilla After Leaving

Alice Gould’s return to Fuentecilla reverses her departure from the hospital and reveals how deeply her sense of home has shifted. On the road away, the prospect of life beyond its walls overwhelms her; once the car turns back, her physical distress recedes. Approaching the hospital, she no longer thinks chiefly of the deception that brought her there. Her attention turns instead to the residents and workers she loves, and to a future she imagines building inside the institution.

Departure and the problem of admission

The return acquires an added irony from the way Alice first entered the hospital. On arrival, she insisted that she was a professional detective and had come of her own free will. The director, however, explained that her file recorded an involuntary admission: a medical certificate from E. Donadío declaring that she was ill and needed to be confined, together with a request from her husband, Heliodoro Almenara. Her later return is therefore not a simple resumption of a freely chosen stay. It follows an admission whose official paperwork contradicted the account Alice gave of herself, and a departure that exposes how little she can bear the life outside.

The hospital has also become familiar through its open regime. Montserrat Castell described how residents could move around the building and grounds, spend time in the bar, play games, join occupational therapy, work in workshops for wages, or sometimes travel by bus to nearby villages. This limited freedom helps explain the force of Alice’s attachment: Fuentecilla is an institution, but within it she has found routines, work, companionship, and a community. Her return is not simply a retreat into locked confinement; it is a choice to return to the world in which her relationships and purposes have taken shape.

The road back

The taxi driver repeatedly checks whether Alice is well. As the car travels away from Fuentecilla, the landscape opens toward the mountains visible from Villacastín, and beyond them toward Madrid. Instead of offering relief, the view intensifies her dread. She imagines the distant city and the empty home waiting there, along with a future of social visits and tea gatherings among women living alone or abandoned by their husbands. The prospect makes her nauseated; she touches her face and hands and finds that she has a high fever.

Alice asks the driver to stop. Although he urges her to see a doctor, she insists that they turn around and go back to where they started. The change in direction brings an immediate bodily reversal. As the car heads toward La Fuentecilla, the weight troubling her eases, her nausea disappears, and her fever falls until it is gone. The narration connects this response to Mal yatrógeno, the hospital-dependence condition César Arellano had explained to her, and places her alongside Cosme el Hortelano and el Albaricoque, who also suffer from a fear of distance or pathological dependence on the hospital. The return is thus both a deliberate decision and an episode in which emotional attachment registers physically.

What she finds at Fuentecilla

As the hospital comes into view, Alice looks at its immense walls and complicated architecture, a mixture of styles. She briefly wonders who devised the scheme that had got her confined and how much Heliodoro paid the elegant rogue who acted in it. She is certain that Heliodoro lacks the ingenuity to have planned the deception himself. Yet the suspicion no longer governs her sense of where she belongs. Heliodoro feels emotionally more distant than the miles separating them, while the people inside the hospital are close to her sight and heart.

Her thoughts move through a particular circle of residents. She wants to teach the little Rómulo a trade and hopes to communicate with the Niña Péndulo and make her smile. She has visited Teresiña Carballeira’s embroidery workshop. Cosme el Hortelano binds her through gratitude and shared hopes; Alice is considering following his example by leaving all her property to the hospital. She also thinks of residents who deserve care or comfort, including Luis Ortiz, and of Candelas, whose longstanding punishment she believes ought to end. Her attention to these distinct people makes her imagined home concrete: it consists not of a general feeling of belonging but of relationships, work, and responsibilities.

A chosen future, not a completed arrival

Alice imagines staying at Fuentecilla and working there for the rest of her life. If César Arellano allows it, she will study medicine. The ambition follows her encounters with the hospital’s patients and with the people who work to relieve their suffering. It also resonates with Arellano’s defense of reform: he recognizes the value of criticism of old hospital systems and of removing oppressive bars, while warning that reform requires an adequate infrastructure. Alice’s imagined future belongs to this lived institution, not to an abstract promise that simply removing its boundaries would solve everything.

For a moment, she lets the fantasy carry her as far as becoming director of the hospital, then recognizes that she is being swept up in reverie. She tells Terencio to complete the journey and closes her eyes. The sound of the tires changes as the car passes from paved road onto unpaved ground; outside, the silence is immense, while her attention settles on the road’s sounds and the eager beat of her heart. The ending holds a small but decisive tension: she has chosen the return and can picture a life there, yet the scene closes while the journey is still under way. Fuentecilla has become the destination of her desire before the narrative confirms her arrival inside it.