Cosme el Hortelano

Cosme el Hortelano is a patient at Fuentecilla who tends its plants and offers Alice Gould both practical help and friendship. His significance grows from a contrast: he is a generous presence in the hospital’s everyday life, yet, like Alice, he is bound to the institution by a pathological fear of leaving it. When Alice faces suspicion after a patient’s death, Cosme’s loyalty becomes more than kind conversation: he gives false testimony to protect her. Later, his attachment to the hospital becomes part of the emotional logic of Alice’s return.

Identity and Daily Life

Cosme first appears in the grounds watering plants. He is described as an old man wearing corduroy trousers, a beret pulled down over his ears, and large rubber boots. His strong regional accent is associated with Asturias or Santander. The details establish a distinctive figure at work outdoors, not an employee introduced through a formal role: he is a patient who has taken up gardening and who speaks to Alice with easy cordiality.

When Alice asks whether he is the gardener, he identifies himself as Cosme, el Hortelano. He says that he is everyone’s friend and encourages her not to be discouraged because she knows few people. The offer is immediate and practical as well as social. When Alice admits that flowers she plants never grow, Cosme laughs, showing the two teeth remaining in his gums, and promises to teach her when to sow each seed, how much to water it, and how long it should stay in sun or shade. His knowledge is grounded in the patient work of tending living things: timing, water, exposure, and care.

The scene gives gardening a relational dimension. Cosme does not merely offer Alice advice at some later, unspecified time; he invites her to regard the grounds as a place where she already has a friend. The narration marks his assurance as prophetic. That qualification gives the encounter weight beyond a pleasant first meeting, while keeping its meaning open until later events show how much Alice will come to depend on the people she has met inside the hospital.

Friendship with Alice Gould

Cosme’s welcome matters because Alice is new and has few acquaintances. His manner does not require her to explain herself or earn her place among the residents. He offers companionship before knowing much about her, and gardening provides a concrete subject through which that companionship can continue. Their connection is therefore made of modest gestures and promises, rather than a dramatic declaration: a greeting, a conversation about flowers, and an offer to teach.

The novel later associates Cosme with care that is imperfectly separated from the institution that contains him. Alice comes to see him not only as someone to whom she owes gratitude, but as a person with whom she shares an attachment to the hospital. In the closing movement, she thinks of him alongside residents she wants to help and staff who labor to ease suffering. She wants to imitate his example by leaving all her property to the hospital. The connection has thus changed in scale: the gardener who first offers her friendship becomes one of the people through whom she imagines a future tied to Fuentecilla.

Protection and False Testimony

Cosme’s loyalty is tested after a patient’s death. He has not witnessed what happened; Alice herself tells him the events. Convinced that she is telling the truth, he decides to spare her the distress of being accused of practicing judo, whether from whim or madness, on disabled and deformed patients. To shield her, he tells the doctors that he saw what he did not see, and gives the court an account of events that did not occur.

The falsehood is specific, not simply a denial that anything happened. In the account later cited at the medical meeting, Cosme is presented as the sole eyewitness to a version in which a man who habitually ran in erratic zigzags stumbled and broke his already defective spine against a rock. Cosme’s supposed testimony gives that account official standing before both the doctors and the court. Its force comes from the gap between what it claims and what the narrative establishes: Cosme did not see the incident, but trusted Alice enough to put himself behind her version.

His intervention protects Alice while also making her situation more precarious. A false witness can help avert an accusation, but the testimony becomes part of the institutional record and can be invoked when her conduct is questioned. Cosme’s act is consequently both an expression of personal care and a consequential breach of truth. It is not presented as detached judgment about the incident; the narrative gives his motive plainly as a wish to spare Alice distress because he believes her.

Attachment to Fuentecilla and Narrative Role

Cosme belongs to the group of residents described as suffering from fear of separation or pathological dependence on the hospital, a condition César Arellano explains as a form of hospital dependence. His friendliness toward Alice and his attachment to Fuentecilla are distinct facts, but the novel places them beside one another: he makes the institution more habitable for another person while remaining himself unable to regard departure as simple release.

That attachment illuminates Alice’s return. As she leaves, she begins to feel relief when the direction changes, and her physical distress recedes. Yet the people inside the hospital remain close to her heart. Cosme is among them, and she considers following his example by giving her possessions to the institution. Her choice is not reducible to his influence, but his presence helps make the hospital more than the place from which she has just departed: it is also a community of particular people toward whom she feels responsibility.

Cosme’s importance rests on this interweaving of the ordinary and the consequential. He is the gardener who promises to teach Alice how to care for seedlings; he is the self-declared friend who welcomes a newcomer; he is the patient whose dependence on the hospital anticipates a central difficulty in Alice’s own departure; and he is the witness who lies in order to protect her. The final roll call of significant figures at Fuentecilla identifies him by his fear of separation, bringing his defining vulnerability into focus. His acts of care do not erase that vulnerability, and the novel does not present his loyalty as uncomplicated. Instead, the same attachment that makes him a steadfast ally also binds him to the institution that has become his world.