Alicia’s Transfer to the “Lions’ Den” Ward is the moment when Alice Gould’s confinement becomes visible in its most coercive form: she wakes restrained in the women’s dementia unit, surrounded by patients who need constant care. The transfer sharply contradicts the asylum’s nominally open regime. It also forces a distinction between two competing forms of protection: the institution’s power to confine her and Dr. Rosellini’s effort to shelter her while working toward her legal freedom.

From an Open Regime to a Locked Ward

The contrast begins with the hospital’s recent change to an open regime. Montserrat Castell explains that residents may move with relative freedom through the building and park, gather in the bar, play cards, stroll in the garden, attend occupational therapy, or work in workshops. Some can even travel by bus to nearby villages. That freedom is qualified by many exceptions, however, and the hospital’s separate units make the limits tangible. The transfer into the women’s dementia ward is not simply a change of room: it removes Alice from the ordinary circulation she had come to associate with life in the hospital.

The institution has already treated her as a patient in practical ways. At admission, staff count her clothes and toiletries and seal the contents of her handbag and hand luggage. Yet Alice’s understanding of her status remains at odds with the paperwork: she insists that she entered voluntarily as a professional detective, while the director explains that the file follows the procedure for involuntary admission. It includes a medical certificate from E. Donadío and a request by her husband, Heliodoro Almenara. The later move into a more restrictive ward thus intensifies a conflict already embedded in her admission: Alice claims agency over why she is there, while institutional documents authorize others to decide where she must stay.

Waking Among the Patients

Alice wakes abruptly with pain in her back from a stone blow and realizes where she has been placed. The first sounds are short, piercing cries from an elderly naked woman sitting on the edge of the bed. Alice remembers hearing a similar shriek shortly after her arrival, but now the sound belongs to the room around her. Six other beds form a row with hers, with six more opposite; some are occupied and some empty. Other women, also naked, move between them.

She recognizes the Woman Gorilla and understands that she could not defend herself if attacked: her ankles, waist, and wrists are tied. Anger follows the realization, and she identifies the director as the person with authority to order the restraints. Nearby, a small, soaked woman is covered with a towel and dried by a nurse; once released, she lies on the floor pretending to be dead. Two nurses lead away the Woman Gorilla and the woman who has been crying. The scene presents a ward in which care and control occur side by side: attendants wash, cover, move, and manage patients, while Alice herself remains physically bound.

The ward’s name points to a broader routine of dependency rather than to Alice alone. The Dementia Ward Known as the Lion Cage contains patients whose needs may be so extensive that they must be dressed, fed, put to bed, and helped with toileting. Without that assistance, some cannot carry out those tasks; some smear themselves with their own waste or eat it. Against this background, Alice’s restraints are both a specific restriction imposed on her and part of a place organized around intensive supervision. Her awareness of the ward’s conditions does not make her one of its helpless patients, but being tied down makes the difference between observer and captive precarious.

Rosellini’s Intervention

Afterward, Alice is working at a cleaning task when Dr. Rosellini appears with an unusually grave expression and summons her to his office. He closes the door and tells her that he is willing, as a last resort, to organize her escape. He considers the treatment the director is preparing to impose a serious moral and clinical wrong. In his view, the case is especially troubling because Alice may be the victim of fraud, blackmail, or revenge, and because the director has chosen to begin a grave treatment while César Arellano, the doctor who has been attending her, is absent.

Rosellini does not present escape as his first course of action. He says he will initially try every available means to obtain Alice’s legal freedom and asks her to wait for Arellano’s return. He also warns that the director may be trying to drive her mad, though he tells her that this will not succeed. His response makes the ward a refuge as well as a site of confinement: he offers Alice books, magazines, and food, and urges her to regard the other patients as cases to be understood from outside rather than as companions whose condition she shares. But his protection has a limit. He refuses to let her leave his unit, arguing that she is safe there and that outside it he cannot answer for what might be done to her.

A Confinement Recast as a Plan

The change in Alice’s circumstances produces a change in strategy. For much of the afternoon, she and Rosellini discuss a plan that she later improves. At first, they intend to let others believe that the head of the unit is treating her directly until Arellano returns. Meanwhile, a lawyer chosen by Alice will be allowed to enter Rosellini’s office discreetly and pursue the legal steps needed to locate Heliodoro Almenara. The plan uses the very enclosure that restricts Alice: Rosellini’s unit becomes the protected space from which they can begin challenging the legal basis of her confinement.

The transfer therefore does not resolve the question of whether Alice belongs in the hospital; it sharpens it. Her admission papers frame her as involuntary, her restraints make that status bodily immediate, and Rosellini’s opposition exposes disagreement inside the medical staff about the director’s actions. The episode’s central reversal is that the ward’s walls are at once evidence of the institution’s power and, for the moment, the boundary of a doctor’s attempted protection. Alice remains unable to leave, but she is no longer merely enduring the transfer: she is helping turn confinement into a legal and practical problem to be solved.