Enrique Donadío

Enrique Donadío is a physician whose role in Alice Gould’s admission initially appears through the documents that confine her, then returns in a revelation that both confirms and unsettles her account of why she entered the hospital. He certified that she was ill and needed to be committed; privately, he believed her paranoia was real, felt compassion for her, and spoke with Samuel Alvar about the investigation Alice believed she was undertaking. His part in the story lies in the gap between those facts: the medical judgment behind her confinement and the apparent assistance he offered within it.

Identity and Professional Role

Donadío is identified as a physician registered in Madrid and as the doctor who signed the medical certification for Alice’s admission. The paperwork described by the director distinguishes her case from a voluntary admission: rather than relying on Alice’s own signed request and an admission certificate from Teodoro Ruipérez, the file contained Donadío’s certification of illness and need for internment, alongside an application from her husband, Heliodoro Almenara. Donadío’s signature therefore carried institutional force. Whatever Alice believed about her status, his assessment formed part of the formal basis for holding her as an involuntary patient.

His written report also shaped the first clinical reading of Alice. After Samuel Alvar, Teodoro Ruipérez, and César Arellano listened to a recording of her initial statement, Ruipérez said that the symptoms had seemed clear and consistent with the report from her former personal physician. The account does not make Donadío present at that meeting, but his judgment was already part of the doctors’ evidence. His role is thus established first at a distance: through a certification and a report that other physicians interpret.

The Admission and the Suspicion Around Alice

The surrounding account links the decision to admit Alice to a troubling domestic pattern. On days when the household servants were away and Alice prepared the food, Heliodoro was found in severe pain and a physician living in the adjoining flat diagnosed food poisoning from spoiled food. The episode recurred three more times. The repeated coincidence—that the suspected bad food was served when Alice had cooked—led both Heliodoro and a doctor to suspect that she was trying to poison him. The evidence does not identify that neighboring physician by name in the episode itself, so the connection should not be treated as a separate, certain biographical fact about Donadío.

That suspicion helps explain why the medical and family accounts converged on confinement, but it does not settle what Alice understood about her own condition. The later explanation is more complicated than a simple story of a doctor diagnosing a patient and a husband requesting treatment. Donadío had concluded that Alice was genuinely paranoid, yet he knew she believed she was simulating paranoia in order to enter the hospital and investigate a case. The distinction between what she thought she was doing and what Donadío believed she was doing is central to his place in the plot.

His Judgment and His Contact with Alvar

Donadío, as later described, felt deep pity at the prospect of bringing Alice into the hospital by force, through deception and against her will. He had reached his diagnosis but did not regard the circumstances of admission as emotionally simple. In agreement with Heliodoro, he went along with Alice’s apparent wish to enter while pretending to have paranoia; Donadío believed that the paranoia she thought she was feigning was genuine. The result was a striking mismatch between Alice’s self-understanding and the physician’s clinical judgment, concealed beneath an admission that she experienced as part of her own plan.

The later disclosure also confirms that Donadío really came to the hospital and spoke with Alvar, as Alice had maintained. He warned Alvar about the unusual case of a woman who wanted to be admitted under the impression that she was falsely presenting as paranoid, although she was in fact paranoid. Alvar responded that he would help her carry out the investigation she intended to pursue. That promise was subsequently conveyed to Alice by the man she believed to be Raimundo García del Olmo. Donadío’s conversation therefore connects her supposed investigative mission to an actual exchange between two doctors, even as the clinical premise behind the mission differs from Alice’s understanding of it.

Narrative Significance

Donadío’s significance rests on the way the story makes his existence and actions answer only part of Alice’s claims. Her insistence that he had visited and spoken with Alvar proves accurate; the revelation does not, however, validate her explanation that she entered as a sane detective pretending to be ill. Donadío believed the reverse: she was ill while imagining that her symptoms were a deliberate disguise. This reversal preserves the uncertainty around Alice’s account while showing that its details can be true even when her interpretation of them is not.

His conduct also exposes the difference between compassion and freedom. Donadío pitied Alice and helped sustain the possibility of her investigation, but he had signed a certificate supporting involuntary confinement, and her husband’s application formed part of the same procedure. The story does not reduce him to either a simple rescuer or a mere instrument of the institution. Instead, he embodies the uneasy overlap of diagnosis, concern, and coercion: a doctor who believed he understood Alice’s illness, regretted the force used to bring her in, and still participated in the arrangements that placed her there.