Teresiña Carballeira

Teresiña Carballeira is a resident of the psychiatric hospital whose identity is presented through sharply contrasting labels: she is associated with the killing of her mother and two hospital employees, yet is also known as the Smiling Embroiderer and directs an embroidery workshop. The novel gives her a place not only in its account of violence but in Alice Gould’s attention to the work and care that shape life inside the institution.

Identity and Reputation

Teresiña’s aliases preserve different aspects of how others identify her. The Matricide and Triple Murderer define her by the deaths attributed to her; the Smiling Embroiderer instead connects her to a skilled, productive occupation. These labels do not erase one another. Their juxtaposition makes her institutional identity more complicated than either a criminal designation or a clinical category alone.

The account identifies her as the killer of her mother and two hospital employees, but offers no further detail here about the circumstances of those deaths, her diagnosis, or her response to them. Her role in the hospital’s embroidery work is described more concretely: she directs the workshop, making her responsible for an ongoing activity rather than merely its subject.

The Workshop and Alice Gould

Alice Gould visits Teresiña’s embroidery workshop and considers proposing more modern ornamental designs for the pieces made there. The proposal is a practical one: it would bring Alice’s artistic ideas into a workshop already directed by Teresiña, rather than treating Teresiña only as someone to be managed or discussed by others. The evidence does not say whether Teresiña accepts or uses the designs.

Alice includes this possible collaboration among examples of how she might help people at the hospital even if her own account of the past remains delusional. In that imagined future, the workshop is one setting where Alice’s attention could become useful work, and Teresiña is the person whose existing activity gives that contribution a form.

Narrative Significance

Teresiña’s brief portrayal is built around a contrast between acts of violence and creative labor. The aliases make the violence impossible to overlook, while the workshop places her in a continuing social role within the hospital. The narrative does not resolve that tension by replacing one identity with the other; it allows the murderer’s epithet and the embroiderer’s occupation to coexist.

Her importance to Alice’s later reflections lies partly in this shift of emphasis. Alice imagines concrete ways of supporting residents, including helping develop designs for the embroidery workshop Teresiña directs. Teresiña therefore appears not simply as a figure from the hospital’s catalogue of notorious cases, but as a participant in its ordinary work, around whom Alice’s plans for companionship and practical care take shape.