Ruipérez’s admission interview with Alice Gould establishes the novel’s central uncertainty around her: she can describe her confinement with apparent clarity, yet the medical record frames that clarity as part of a potentially deceptive and delusional presentation. His provisional diagnosis of pure paranoia turns an interview into a contest over who can interpret Alice’s account—and whether intelligence and composure are signs of health or tools that make illness harder to recognize.

The warning in the file

Before speaking with Alice, Ruipérez opens a private letter from E. Donadío to the absent director, Samuel Alvar, reasoning that the director’s vacation permits him to read it. The letter warns that Alice habitually has an answer for everything, even when answering requires a lie or contradicts something she has said before. It also describes her as unusually skilled at explaining why an earlier falsehood was necessary and why her present account should be believed. Her intelligence and her delusions, Donadío argues, work together: she may persuade inexperienced psychiatrists, while sometimes being unable to recognize that she herself is lying.

The letter therefore gives Ruipérez a framework before he has heard Alice’s case. It does not simply tell him that she lies; it cautions him that inconsistencies may arrive wrapped in persuasive explanations, and that delusion may complicate the distinction between deliberate deception and self-deception. Alice’s intelligence is consequently treated as both a real capacity and a clinical complication. The interview begins under the pressure of a prior interpretation, rather than on neutral ground.

Alice’s account of her confinement

Ruipérez identifies himself as the director’s assistant and asks Alice whether she knows what kind of institution she has entered. She answers that it is a mental asylum. When he asks whether she understands exactly why she is there, she says she has been legally kidnapped. Her formulation casts admission not as treatment she sought, but as an imposed seizure of her liberty.

She rejects the account that she had admitted attempting suicide before a judge. Alice says she was not committed by judicial sentence: she was accused by a doctor she considers incompetent, and she denies ever confessing to E. Donadío that she had done what was alleged. The force of her denial does not settle its truth. For Ruipérez, it has to be heard alongside the warning that she can offer coherent explanations for contradictions; for the reader, it preserves the possibility that the records and Alice’s account describe sharply different versions of the same admission.

Asked why her husband, Heliodoro Almenara, would want her confined, Alice gives a financial and legal explanation. She claims that eliminating her would leave him as administrator of her fortune and help him have her declared a spendthrift, restricting her control over her property. She adds that his debts from poker would then be secure. The allegation is specific, but Ruipérez records it as a perfectly constructed delusional fable and writes a provisional conclusion of pure paranoia. The exchange thus places the same details in two incompatible frames: Alice presents them as a motive for her husband’s actions; Ruipérez treats the account as evidence of illness.

Diagnosis and immediate precautions

Ruipérez’s judgment is not that Alice lacks intelligence. He considers her clearly intelligent and professionally specialized, while suspecting that her delusions strengthen a sense of superiority over those around her, including her own doctor. Donadío’s diagnosis appears increasingly accurate to him as the interview proceeds. He anticipates that Alice may behave so normally that others will believe her well, and that release would lead her to pursue an obsessive intention to attack her husband. These are Ruipérez’s predictions, not events that the interview establishes as having happened.

He also imagines how apparently admirable conduct could be used to persuade others of her sanity: she might risk her life rescuing a patient from a fire she herself had started, or pull someone from a pool after pushing them into it. His examples reveal the severity of the interpretive problem he sees in paranoia. In his view, actions may look spontaneous and compassionate while serving a deliberate effort to disprove a diagnosis; at the same time, a person may be normal in every area untouched by the obsession. The interview therefore produces no simple test by which Alice’s conduct can be read.

Ruipérez regards her as doubly dangerous because of the combination of illness and intelligence. He decides to restrict access to anything in her clothing, belongings, or toiletries that might be used to harm herself or someone else. The planned safeguards give the diagnosis immediate practical force: before the institution can establish what Alice has done or intends to do, its response already limits what she may possess. Soon after admission, Alice insists that she is a resident because her admission has just been completed, while Montserrat Castell objects that she is not one yet; Alice bends down to retrieve a lighter and hands it over. The small dispute makes the transition into institutional status visible as a process being asserted and contested, not merely a settled label.

The record and the later test of judgment

A later explanation of Alice’s file clarifies that her admission followed the procedure for involuntary cases. The paperwork included E. Donadío’s medical certificate stating that she was ill and required hospitalization, together with a request from her husband as her relative. Alice, by contrast, later insists that she entered of her own will as a professional detective. This procedural detail sharpens the original interview’s conflict: her claim of legal kidnapping is not simply contradicted by a court sentence, which she denies, but set against documents that authorized involuntary admission through medical certification and her husband’s request.

The story also supplies later grounds to take Alice’s powers of observation seriously without making those grounds a retroactive proof that every claim she made at admission was true. In a later investigation, she reasons from the two ETA prisoners’ slit throats that Ignacio Urquieta could not have killed them, and reconstructs how a Basque-speaking man lured them into the basement with a promise of an old monks’ secret passage before returning with a knife. After recognizing Remo’s body, she says she immediately suspected the killer; she later describes the Elephant Man’s crushing attack and is asked whether she witnessed what she recounts. She also explains that she requested access to selected patient files to check who had permission to leave the hospital around the time García del Olmo was murdered.

These later episodes do not erase the interview’s ambiguity: accurate deductions about murders do not, by themselves, disprove a diagnosis, just as a diagnosis cannot by itself establish that Alice’s allegations against her husband are false. They do, however, complicate Ruipérez’s initial confidence that the warning letter and her account can be fitted into a single clinical explanation. The admission interview is decisive less because it resolves whether Alice is ill or truthful than because it establishes the terms of that unresolved struggle: her words may be evidence, symptoms, or both, while the institution’s procedures give its interpretation immediate power over her freedom.