Anti-Alvar operation

The Anti-Alvar operation is Alice Gould’s attempt to change the leadership of the hospital as a means of winning her freedom. Rather than accept escape as the only practical alternative to Samuel Alvar’s refusal to release her, she proposes removing Alvar from the directorship and finding a successor willing to let her go. The plan converts her confinement from a problem to be endured into an institutional contest to be organized.

The legal basis of the conflict

Alice’s campaign grows out of a dispute over how she was admitted. She says she entered the hospital voluntarily and identifies herself as a professional detective, but Alvar tells her that her file records an involuntary admission. A voluntary admission, he explains, would have required Alice’s own signed statement and a certificate from Teodoro Ruipérez, who received her. Instead, the file contains a certificate from E. Donadío stating that she was ill and needed hospitalization, along with an application from her husband, Heliodoro Almenara, as her relative. The distinction matters to the operation: Alice is not simply seeking an earlier discharge from treatment she acknowledges having requested; she contests the procedure that gives the institution authority to keep her.

That procedural dispute also explains why the question of who directs the hospital becomes central. Alice has already been told that legal avenues are limited, and Rosellini initially considers a plan that combines concealment with legal action. Until César Arellano returns, Alice would pretend to be treated directly by the unit head; meanwhile, a lawyer of her choice would be allowed discreetly into Rosellini’s office to pursue steps involving the location of Heliodoro under Article 27(b) of the 1931 decree. The plan does not rest on a single dramatic exit: it attempts to use the hospital’s own administrative and legal arrangements to create a route out.

Rosellini’s alliance

Rosellini’s participation gives the scheme both practical assistance and moral urgency. He tells Alice that organizing her escape would expose him to grave professional risk, but considers her confinement a crime without mitigating circumstances. His anger is visible even as he speaks quietly. His willingness to help establishes that Alice is not planning alone, while the risk he acknowledges makes clear that any assistance from inside the hospital could carry consequences for its staff.

The two consider what lawful means remain. Rosellini cannot identify an option beyond those already discussed with Arellano or escape. Alice rejects that narrow choice. Her response is not to disclose another legal provision, but to change the problem: if Alvar controls her freedom and opposes her release, then the director himself must be replaced. The turn makes Rosellini’s initial escape plan only one possible instrument in a wider effort. Instead of treating the hospital’s leadership as immovable, Alice makes it the target of her strategy.

From idea to operation

Alice names the campaign the Anti-Alvar operation. The label gives a concrete form to her proposed change of director, but the immediate work is organizational rather than a direct confrontation with Alvar. After her discussion with Rosellini, she seeks out the head nurse of the unit. She also arranges to receive people in an order chosen for tactical reasons, not according to rank or personal friendship. The operation therefore begins with the management of access and attention: whom Alice sees first is part of the plan.

Her first audience is Melitón Deza, a nurse who has been disciplined on the director’s orders. He is deeply grateful to Alice because she cleared him of serious suspicion in the killings of the ETA patients. The choice links the campaign to an earlier achievement of Alice’s: her investigation has already altered how a member of the staff is regarded. Deza’s gratitude gives Alice a reason to approach him early, although the scene establishes his admiration and the tactical order of the meetings, not a specific promise from him to act against Alvar.

Scope and significance

The operation marks a change in Alice’s method. When Rosellini sees no way out except the available legal channels or flight, she treats his list as incomplete and makes the directorship itself negotiable. Her plan combines a proposed legal process, discreet assistance from Rosellini, and a carefully arranged series of encounters. It is neither merely a jailbreak nor simply a formal appeal: its defining move is to make institutional power part of the problem to be changed.

The available account establishes the operation’s purpose and its opening tactics, but does not establish its eventual success. Its significance at this stage lies in the reversal it proposes. Alvar’s authority has made Alice’s confinement seem final; Alice answers by identifying that authority as contingent on the person who holds the office. The Anti-Alvar operation begins when she turns the question from how to get past the director into how to replace him.