Orange Pass Card

The Orange Pass Card is a permit for leaving the grounds of Nuestra Señora de la Fuentecilla Psychiatric Hospital. Introduced as part of the institution’s open regime, it makes freedom a matter of both policy and permission: patients may pass beyond the walls, but their movement remains subject to the hospital’s rules. For Alice Gould, receiving the card turns that limited liberty into a personal, eagerly anticipated experience.

Purpose and Open-Regime Context

The hospital’s open regime allowed patients relative freedom to move through the building and park. They could gather in the bar, play cards or dominoes, stroll in the garden, enter the extensive wooded grounds, attend occupational therapy, or work in workshops that made saleable goods and paid patients according to aptitude and output. Some patients could also leave the asylum and take a bus to nearby villages, particularly for local festivities. The Orange Pass Card belonged to this wider system of movement beyond the walls.

The policy had practical risks. In a later assessment of the changes made at the hospital, the director’s introduction of orange cards for walks outside the walls was linked to an increase in escapes. The card therefore marks an unresolved tension in the open regime: permission to move outward could support ordinary independence, yet the same opening could make departure from institutional control easier. César Arellano defended the removal of window bars as a humane reform, while stressing that such measures required supporting infrastructure. The history of the cards likewise suggests that an ideal of openness depended on how the institution managed its consequences.

Alice Gould Receives the Card

After a period of renewed optimism, Alice Gould received the Orange Pass Card from César Arellano. The gift was especially welcome: she had wanted one, and it gave her a concrete privilege within a life still governed by the asylum. Her admission had been processed as involuntary, despite her insistence that she had entered of her own accord. A pass for leaving the grounds could grant an outing, but it did not amount to legal discharge or undo the conditions of her admission.

Alice used the card immediately. She asked Montserrat Castell to accompany her beyond the walls, and Montserrat agreed, though the walk had to be short because the gates would close in an hour. Alice had crossed the gate only once before, on the disastrous group outing. This time, she wanted to present her permit to the guard who had previously refused her passage and to experience walking outside as an authorized individual, rather than as one member of a crowd. The card transformed a routine exit into a small assertion of agency.

Permission, Control, and Significance

The card’s force lies in the distinction between being allowed to leave temporarily and being free to leave altogether. At admission, Alice’s belongings had been counted and sealed away; later, the pass offered a narrow, regulated form of movement in the opposite direction. Yet the institution retained control over when the gates closed and over the status that made the permit necessary. The card could make the boundary crossable without abolishing it.

Its meaning is consequently double. For Alice, the permit makes freedom tangible in a way that abstract promises cannot: she can take it to the guard and walk outside with Montserrat. For the hospital, it is also an instrument of administration whose risks include escape. The Orange Pass Card condenses the open regime into a single object—an authorization that loosens confinement while confirming that passage still depends on institutional permission.