Dios escribe derecho con renglones torcidos

“Dios escribe derecho con renglones torcidos” is an expression that gathers Alice Gould’s reflection on suffering, care, and the future she wants to build inside the hospital. In the scene where she thinks it, the phrase links the painful disorder of individual lives with a possibility of purpose, without making that suffering disappear.

The phrase in Alice Gould’s reflection

Alice Gould considers the people close to her: Rómulo, whom she wants to teach a trade; Niña Péndulo, with whom she hopes to communicate mind to mind and make smile; and Teresiña Carballeira, whose embroidery workshop she has visited. Her gratitude to Cosme el Hortelano is joined by a shared aspiration: she is considering following his example and leaving all her property to the hospital.

The reflection also takes in people who need care or consolation, including the Woman on Hanger, whose legs bear sores caused by incontinence, and Luis Ortiz. Alice Gould’s attention extends beyond the patients to the men and women whose work is to ease other people’s pain. It is after assembling this community of need and care in her thoughts that she recalls the expression.

From crooked lines to a chosen home

The phrase’s image does not present hardship as orderly in itself; instead, it allows Alice Gould to imagine that meaning and compassionate work may emerge amid lives marked by pain. That reading is grounded in what follows: she thinks of the hospital as her home and wants to live and work there until the end of her life. If César Arellano permits, she also intends to study medicine.

Relation to the novel’s title

The expression echoes the title Los renglones torcidos de Dios. In Alice Gould’s reflection, its crooked lines find a human counterpart in the patients’ varied difficulties, while the possibility of writing straight is associated with acts of teaching, communication, consolation, and care. The echo gives the title a concrete, communal dimension: its image of order is encountered not as an abstract answer to suffering, but through the work of attending to those who suffer.