Montserrat Castell

Montserrat Castell is the asylum’s social worker, caregiver, and one of Alice Gould’s most important allies. She first appears as a humane counterimage to the frightening attendant Alice expects, then becomes a guide through the institution, a collaborator in Alice’s inquiry, and a trusted friend. Her eventual decision to enter a convent gives her story a quiet departure, but the work she leaves behind is shown to be unusually difficult to replace.

Identity and Work

Montserrat tells Alice that she entered the asylum as a social worker eight years earlier. Her role extends beyond a single administrative function: the novel associates her with helping patients understand their rights and pensions, accompanying newly admitted people through their first hours of confinement, and offering the personal attention that can make those hours less frightening. The breadth of that work matters. Montserrat is not presented only as a friendly face at the edge of clinical care; she performs the practical and relational labor that helps people endure institutional life.

That labor takes place within a ward where care is shared unevenly among staff and patients. Nurses attend to people who cannot move, while patients in other conditions also volunteer to help. Rómulo, for example, accompanies the Niña Oscilante. This wider arrangement places Montserrat’s work in a setting where care is both organized and improvised, and where attention to another person cannot be reduced to professional treatment alone.

Alice’s Arrival and First Care

Montserrat’s first appearance revises Alice’s expectation before either woman has had time to establish trust. Alice has imagined a sturdy, disheveled witch in a white coat, brandishing a straitjacket. Instead, a woman in a bright, cheerful blouse and an unfastened wool jacket appears in the doorway. To Alice, the contrast makes Montserrat seem like an angel. The image captures the force of first impressions in a place Alice fears: a familiar human presence briefly interrupts the institution’s anticipated menace.

Montserrat’s care is expressed in small, concrete acts rather than grand reassurances. She offers to stay with Alice for a while as Alice goes to bed. At another point, she takes Alice by the arm. These gestures do not erase the fact of confinement, but they provide companionship within it. The offer is especially significant because Montserrat’s work includes meeting new arrivals in their first hours of institutional life; her attention to Alice belongs to a sustained practice, not merely a moment of politeness.

Her connection to the clinical staff also gives her a role in Alice’s formal assessment. Montserrat tells Alice that Dr. Arellano has assigned her to administer tests. The episode places her between personal support and institutional procedure: she can be a reassuring presence while also carrying out work commissioned by a psychiatrist. That dual position reflects the asylum’s overlapping demands, in which care and evaluation occur in the same relationships.

From Caregiver to Collaborator

As Alice begins investigating within the hospital, her relationship with Montserrat changes from one of guidance to one of collaboration. Alice spends days moving through places from the kitchens to the nurses’ meeting rooms and arranging introductions to non-psychiatric doctors, using minor complaints as pretexts. Montserrat is part of the institutional world Alice is learning to navigate, but later the direction between them reverses: Montserrat follows Alice down a corridor with a typewriter balanced on her forearms, while Alice now leads her.

The reversal is more than a change in who walks ahead. Montserrat asks Alice to dictate what she has seen and deduced, turning Alice’s observations into material to be recorded. In a later exchange, Montserrat says that it is now her turn to be María. The remark indicates a shift in how the women are presenting themselves to one another, though the scene does not require the reader to treat that role as a permanent identity. What remains clear is their readiness to work together and to move between the hospital’s expected roles and the purposes they have developed for themselves.

Their alliance carries risk and urgency. When Alice asks for help escaping, Montserrat is the person she appeals to. The request shows the trust Alice places in her, but it also sets the friendship against the institution’s power to detain. Montserrat’s position is therefore not simply that of a sympathetic employee: her closeness to Alice brings her into the difficult space between hospital duty and personal loyalty.

Family Background and Personal Ties

Montserrat recounts a childhood connection that also explains her relationship to Samuel Alvar. She says that, after her birth, she was nursed by a peasant woman employed by her mother on an estate near Girona. That woman’s son was Samuel; Montserrat’s older brothers later paid for his medical studies, and his mother continued working for Montserrat’s family. The account links the doctor and Montserrat through an intimate family history, rather than through their professional positions alone.

Montserrat tells this story while redirecting the conversation toward Alice. The distinction is telling: she supplies personal history but does not let it displace the immediate concern between them. Her friendship with Alice is further marked by long private conversations after Alice and her companion are freed. They spend many hours together on one afternoon, and similar conversations recur over several days. The repeated meetings give their bond duration beyond the crisis of Alice’s first arrival and investigation.

Departure and Legacy

After the liberation, Montserrat is waiting to congratulate those who have been freed. She has formally informed the provisional board that she wishes to retire and is waiting for the Carmelites to tell her when she may take the veil. The novel presents this intention alongside her continuing intimacy with Alice: the two women still spend long stretches talking, even as Montserrat prepares to leave the institution. Later, Alice thinks of Montserrat as she travels through the lands associated with Teresa of Ávila and imagines the Catalan woman entering a convent in a cold, harsh region. The future remains one Alice imagines from a distance, but Montserrat’s announced decision is definite.

The account of her departure makes the scale of her contribution plain. The hospital has social workers who can explain patients’ rights and pensions, but the narrative says it has no one who can combine those duties with accompanying new arrivals, keeping a smile, and conveying relief through affection, sympathy, and dedication. Montserrat’s importance lies in that combination. She has made the institution more bearable through repeated acts of attention, and her leaving exposes how much of that care depended on one person rather than on a role the hospital could readily fill.