Ospedale della Iena

Ospedale della Iena is a wartime hospital remembered not as a place of healing but as a scene of abandonment, unbearable suffering, and morally devastating choices. Its patients’ silence, and Salinas’s account of his brother’s death there, make the institution a concentrated image of what survives when a war’s violence has entered the sickroom.

Patients Left Behind

Near the end of the war, Salinas and his companions entered the hospital before the army arrived, intending to kill those they regarded as their enemies. They found that the people in the beds had been left behind by the hospital’s former staff, who had fled, leaving the beds and patients where they were, even in the corridors. No one cried out: the patients were too weak to complain, and, as Salinas understood it, many no longer wanted to live or be saved. The silence was not evidence that suffering had ended; it testified to how thoroughly suffering had exhausted them.

The Brother’s Death

Salinas found his brother in a bed in the hospital chapel, among the other patients. His brother looked at him as if he were a mirage; his eyes were wide, his breathing painfully slow, and he seemed unable to recognize or answer him. At last he asked Salinas to kill him. Salinas promised to carry him away and care for him, but could not move. Nearby, el Blanco smothered another patient with a pillow, weeping as he did so, then closed the young man’s eyes. When the news came that the army was approaching, Salinas faced the same unbearable choice: he pressed a pillow over his brother’s face, stopped, and found him still alive, gasping. el Blanco handed him a pistol. Salinas placed it against his brother’s forehead and fired.

The episode became the second of only two times Salinas said he had fired during four years of war. He described the killing not as a victory or an act of rescue, but as a decision made inside a room where every available choice had been made terrible by the patients’ suffering and the danger of capture. His account turns the hospital into the setting of a moral injury that could not be resolved by the claim that the war was over: years later, he insisted that he would fire once more, for the last time.

Wartime Origins and Later Associations

During four years of war, Salinas said, he had fired only twice. The first shot went into the dark, at no one; the second was the shot that killed his brother. He also recalled that he had spent the war at a desk decoding enemy messages and placing spies, while his opponents called him “Salinas the Rat.” The contrast between intelligence work and the two acts of shooting gives the hospital story its particular weight: his brother’s death was not one more routine act of combat, but a lasting rupture in the identity Salinas had built around his role in the war.

The hospital’s wartime history also remained entangled with suspicion in the postwar years. Two years after the events surrounding Manuel Roca, Salinas was found dead in his bed, reportedly from a heart problem. A rumor later alleged that his doctor, Astarte, had poisoned him gradually over several months, but an investigation produced no conclusive result. Astarte had made money during the war from Botran, a remedy for fevers and infections that he developed with a pharmacist, Ricardo Uribe. After the war, Uribe faced police inquiries when his name appeared on a list of suppliers to Ospedale della Iena and someone claimed to have seen him working there. Others said he was a decent man; after answering questions and being released, he moved to a remote town in the southern countryside, bought a pharmacy, and lived with his young daughter, Dulce. The conflicting accounts leave the hospital associated not only with patients abandoned during the war but also with unresolved questions about who had worked there and what they had done.

A Hidden History and Its Echoes

The hospital’s history also surfaces indirectly through Nina’s survival. Ricardo Uribe’s name appeared on a list of its suppliers, and someone later said they had seen him working there; others defended him as a decent man. After police questioned him and released him, he left for a secluded town in the southern countryside, bought a pharmacy, and lived alone with his young daughter, Dulce. The narration reveals that Dulce was not his daughter as he claimed: Uribe was hiding Nina, Manuel Roca’s surviving daughter. The hospital thus remains bound to the aftermath of the raid and to the concealed identity that made Nina’s later life possible.

Its violence also returns through sound and silence. During the assault on the farm, Nina, hidden beneath the floor, heard gunfire sweep through the house and saw shadows pass through the cracks; that auditory perspective recalls Salinas’s memory of the hospital, where the patients’ silence made their suffering more terrible, not less. Years later, as Nina speaks in a café, old songs play and people dance nearby. The contrast between music in the present and the remembered silence of the chapel does not settle what happened there. Instead, the narrative presents wartime experience as something difficult to tell: the old man listening to Nina cannot find adequate words for what he witnessed and begins to cry. Ospedale della Iena remains an emblem of suffering that outlasts the battle and resists clean explanation.