El Gnomo

El Gnomo is a resident of the asylum, introduced through a starkly physical portrait and defined in Alice Gould’s early encounters by sexual harassment and deliberate provocation. His small, hunched body and conspicuous features make him an unsettling presence, but the narrative does not leave him as a passive grotesque: he acts upon other residents, crossing bodily boundaries and taunting people confined in the Dementia Ward Known as the Lion Cage. His later fatal struggle with Alice Gould gives that menace a decisive consequence.

Identity and Appearance

Alice first sees El Gnomo among a group of residents whose bodies and behavior are presented in sharply contrasting detail. He is described as hunched, with a disproportionately large head, enormous projecting ears, a curved nose drooping below his lower lip, a very narrow forehead, and a continually smiling mouth shaped like a crescent. The fixed smile sits uneasily beside the vulnerability and distress visible in other people around him; it is an expression that makes his face seem less readable, not more reassuring.

The description places him within Alice’s rapid survey of the asylum’s residents, but his identifying traits are unusually specific. His ears, stoop, and persistent smile recur as markers of recognition, while the narrative makes his movements and conduct as important as his appearance. He chooses where to sit with deliberate slowness and meticulous care. That measured entrance precedes a sudden violation of Alice’s personal space, making the contrast between painstaking movement and impulsive intrusion part of his introduction.

Conduct Toward Alice Gould

While Alice is absorbed in watching a young woman rock rhythmically from side to side, El Gnomo comes up beside her and gropes her buttocks. His action interrupts her observation and turns the scene from uneasy spectatorship into a direct assault. The narration emphasizes Alice’s surprise and indignation, as well as the physical immediacy of the contact; his conduct is not merely an eccentric mannerism but an attack on another resident’s bodily autonomy.

A physically fit man intervenes, lifting El Gnomo by the armpits and removing him from Alice. The intervention establishes that other residents recognize his behavior as a repeated problem: the narration describes him as practiced in similar groping. The man rebukes him for failing to distinguish a respectable woman from a prostitute, a response that defends Alice while also exposing the gendered assumptions through which the incident is judged. The scene makes El Gnomo’s harassment concrete and recurrent, rather than treating it as an isolated misunderstanding.

Provocation and the Asylum’s Spectacle

El Gnomo’s aggression also extends beyond his encounter with Alice. He provokes residents confined in the Dementia Ward Known as the Lion Cage, where patients appear at windows in states of fury and paroxysm. The windows are open and only about a meter and a half above the ground, so escape would not be difficult; the vulnerability of the ward’s containment intensifies the scene. Against this background, El Gnomo’s taunting turns the patients’ distress into a spectacle observed from outside.

The scene is framed as a grotesque theatrical display, compared in the narration to Grand Guignol: brief scenes of horror staged to produce panic. El Gnomo is an active agent in that staging, not simply another figure among the people at the windows. His provocations help make their confinement visible as both a clinical arrangement and a spectacle for others. The episode links his personal cruelty to the asylum’s broader presentation of extreme distress, without making the institution’s patients’ suffering reducible to his actions alone.

Conflict and Ending

El Gnomo’s story eventually culminates in a fatal confrontation with Alice Gould. She fends him off, and he dies after their struggle. This ending reverses the earlier scene in which another resident had to intervene when El Gnomo assaulted her: Alice is no longer only the target of his intrusion but the person who withstands him in a conflict with irreversible consequences.

His role is therefore defined by a progression from unsettling introduction, to repeated harassment and provocation, to physical conflict and death. The same narrative that first makes his body an object of close, almost theatrical description later gives his actions material consequences for other residents. His grotesque appearance is not itself the explanation for his conduct; what marks him in the plot is what he does with his access to people who are vulnerable, confined, or absorbed elsewhere.