Sacraphobia

Sacraphobia, defined in the novel as fear or hatred of the sacred, becomes a proposed explanation for the Penitent’s attacks on religious images in Santa Teresa. The term gives the police a possible account of behavior that appears irrational, but it does not establish that the suspect has a verified condition or explain the wider pattern of violence against women. Its force in the story lies partly in that gap: a psychiatric label may organize what investigators know, while leaving the most consequential questions unresolved.

The Term and Its Proposed Meaning

The word enters the investigation through a message from the director of the asylum to Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez. At five in the morning, after returning home, Martinez hears the director’s recorded message: the person they are looking for is sacraphobic, and she will explain further if he calls. He phones her back, leaves a message, and arrives at the station by six. The timing places the proposed diagnosis amid an investigation already shaped by exhaustion, interrupted sleep, and the routine demands of police work.

When journalist Sergio Gonzalez later asks Martinez about the Penitent, the inspector requests that their discussion remain off the record. He says the suspect is sick and identifies sacraphobia as the illness. Martinez explains it as fear and hatred of sacred objects, then adds his understanding that the Penitent does not desecrate churches with a deliberate intention to kill: the deaths, as he frames them, are accidental, while the suspect’s purpose is to vent rage on images of saints. This is the inspector’s account, not a diagnosis confirmed in the narrative by an examination or a direct statement from the suspect.

The Penitent and the Limits of Diagnosis

Martinez and the police chief have already been discussing how to stop the Penitent. Martinez suggests stationing an officer in every church and waiting for the next move. Their conversation treats the churches as potential sites of another attack and the suspect as someone whose conduct might be anticipated. The asylum director’s message offers a name for the behavior, but it does not itself produce a method for preventing it.

In a later conversation at a bar, the director elaborates on her view. She defines sacraphobia as fear or hatred of the sacred, particularly sacred objects belonging to one’s own religion. Martinez points out that the Penitent has recently killed a priest and another person. The director maintains that he carries a knife to destroy sacred images in churches, not to hurt living beings. That distinction is her interpretation of the suspect’s intent; the fact that deaths have occurred remains part of the investigation and cannot be erased by the proposed explanation.

The director says she has searched the asylum archives for a former patient with a similar history but has found no match. She speculates that, if the Penitent is as old as Martinez says, he may have been institutionalized at some point and that a psychiatric center in Hermosillo or Tijuana might have a file on him. She also suggests that he could have taken medication and stopped. Each possibility is explicitly conjectural. The archive search has not identified him, and no treatment history is established. The scene therefore presents institutional knowledge as both a possible avenue of inquiry and an incomplete record.

A Vocabulary of Fears

The bar conversation expands from sacraphobia into a catalogue of phobias. The director names familiar terms, including claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and necrophobia, then moves through less familiar fears of hair, words, clothes, doctors, women, rain, the sea, flowers, trees, and other things. She argues that fear may govern behavior even when its object is difficult to avoid; words, for instance, are present even in silence. Her list makes classification feel at once precise and unstable: a fear can be named, but naming it does not show what caused it or what a person will do.

The discussion becomes more pointed when Martinez says that fear of the dead would be a handicap for a policeman, and the director responds with examples of phobias that could produce severe consequences. She describes optophobia, fear of opening one’s eyes, as potentially associated with violent behavior and hallucinations, and refers to two cases in which people injured themselves. These remarks are presented as part of the director’s conversation, not as a clinical assessment of the Penitent. They broaden the scene’s inquiry into the gap between a symptom’s name and an individual case, while leaving the suspect’s actual history unknown.

Martinez asks which would be preferable: fear of everything or fear of fear itself. He chooses the latter, reasoning that a police officer could not work if afraid of everything. The director counters that fear of fear can trap a person in continual contemplation of what frightens them; when those fears materialize, she says, the result is a self-feeding cycle. The exchange gives the discussion a recursive logic: a label meant to explain fear may itself direct attention toward fear without resolving it.

Sacred Objects and the Surrounding Violence

The Penitent’s suspected attacks occur within a city where church desecration is only one strand of violence. When Gonzalez visits one of the churches, an inspector tells him that the suspect’s actions are not premeditated killings, but the journalist later learns from a priest that women are also being murdered and that those crimes remain mostly unsolved. The juxtaposition matters: the explanation of one suspect’s behavior does not account for the broader crisis, even as both forms of violence occupy the same civic landscape.

The novel repeatedly sets diagnostic language beside evidence whose limits are made explicit. In the account of a woman found in a vacant lot in January 1993, the narrative gives her name and age, records the examination and autopsy, and describes the early decision to count killings from that point onward, while acknowledging that other deaths may have preceded the list. In another case, a woman found in a field has been dead for several days, but her name is never learned; the medical examiner cannot settle every detail of her death. Such cases do not prove anything about the Penitent or sacraphobia. They show, instead, how official knowledge can remain partial even when bodies, reports, and investigative theories are present.

Narrative Significance

Sacraphobia is therefore a tentative interpretive tool, not a resolution of the crime narrative. Martinez uses it to relay the asylum director’s theory to Gonzalez, while the director grounds that theory in her own reading of the suspect and an unsuccessful search of institutional archives. The Penitent himself does not confirm the label in these scenes. The distinction between a reported diagnosis, professional speculation, and established fact remains essential to what the term can mean.

The concept also sharpens a contrast between explanation and attention. The police try to anticipate the next desecration; the director supplies a psychological category; the journalist carries the account into a report and soon forgets the story. Meanwhile, the killings of women continue to be described through uncertain identifications, incomplete findings, and delayed recognition. By placing a neat-sounding term beside an investigation that cannot fully establish either a suspect’s history or the circumstances of many deaths, the novel makes classification seem less like closure than a provisional response to what remains unknown.