Rosellini

Rosellini’s role in the hospital’s final deliberations is defined by a painful reversal: he had tried to protect Alice Gould from the former director’s persecution, but when he learns that she is in fact a disturbed woman who poisoned her husband, his faith in her collapses into grief. His response makes the revelation personal, not merely clinical, while his later interventions show that his concern for Alice does not simply disappear with his belief in her innocence.

Identity and Role

Rosellini is a physician at the hospital and one of Alice’s protectors. The narrative identifies him as someone who had wanted to save her from the persecution and hostility of the former director. That history places him on Alice’s side during the earlier institutional conflict, but it does not establish that he knew the truth about her condition.

The Revelation and Its Cost

After María Luisa Fernández recounts her findings about Alice, Rosellini understands that the woman he had sought to defend is, in truth, an envenomator and a disturbed patient. He breaks down crying “like a child,” apologizes, and leaves the room. When he returns, he neither speaks nor asks questions. The silence marks the shock of a protector confronting evidence that overturns the account of Alice on which his loyalty had rested.

Position in the Final Deliberations

Rosellini nevertheless agrees with the position that the matter should be left to justice and that Alice’s husband is unlikely to risk his gains by reporting her. His assent does not erase the revelation or restore his former certainty; it shows that his response to Alice remains distinct from a simple judgment of guilt. Later, when the doctors prepare an unsigned ballot on whether Alice may leave the hospital, Rosellini is the first to move to cast his vote. The scene is interrupted before he can submit it, so his choice and the ballot’s outcome remain unknown. His readiness to participate, after his earlier collapse, leaves his final position unresolved rather than converting his grief into a stated verdict.