Padre Sarasola

Padre Sarasola is a priest and Vatican attaché for the defense of the faith whose authority crosses religious and psychiatric settings. In the investigation of the attacks on the Arizkun church, he presents himself as an adviser who can explain their historical and symbolic stakes. Later, his knowledge of Rosario Iturzaeta’s treatment becomes a troubling question for Amaia Salazar: Sarasola says he never treated Rosario, yet appears to know details that seem to belong within medical confidentiality.

Identity and Institutional Role

At a meeting attended by senior police and church officials, Sarasola is introduced as an adviser to the gathering. The archbishop, Monsignor Landero, is present, but Sarasola takes the lead: while Landero turns a pen between his fingers to draw the room’s attention, Sarasola begins speaking from his place beside the balcony. His position is marked less by formal precedence than by the command he exercises over the discussion.

Sarasola greets Amaia Salazar with a firm handshake and says he has heard much about her. She answers only with a slight inclination of her head. He then returns to his place by the window, turning his back on the room before addressing the meeting. The staging makes him both a participant in an official conference and its most conspicuous interpreter. His black suit, noted as looking inexpensive beside the secretary’s, offers a contrast to the institutional weight he soon claims.

Afterward, Jonan Etxaide explains that Sarasola is also known as Doctor Sarasola and is an attaché from the Vatican for the defense of the faith. Amaia calls him an inquisitor; Jonan indicates that the institution no longer favors that name. The exchange places Sarasola within a modern church structure while recalling the coercive history that the investigation itself will bring into view.

The Arizkun Desecrations and Their Interpretation

Sarasola gives the meeting a chronological account of the attacks. Two weeks earlier, intruders forced the simple, unalarmed sacristy door at night. They did not take the collection money: instead, they split the more than four-hundred-year-old baptismal font with a single blow. On the following Sunday, again in the early hours, someone hacked a pew into splinters. In the latest attack, the altar was set on fire and human bones were left at the scene.

For Sarasola, the sequence is not ordinary vandalism. He argues that it carries a hatred of the Church founded on misunderstood historical ideas, and that the use of human remains makes the case unusually complex and dangerous. He also presses for discretion. Publicity, he warns, can encourage similar acts; meanwhile, parishioners at the Church of Saint John the Baptist are already alarmed and beginning to understand what might lie behind the attacks. His appeal therefore works on two levels: he identifies the church’s concern about the pattern and urges police to contain its public consequences.

Amaia initially struggles to see why the meeting treats the matter as so grave beyond the destruction of a historic religious object. That difference in perspective is important: Sarasola supplies a framework in which the attacks are not isolated damage but signs of a historical grievance and a potentially dangerous symbolic practice. The chief commissioner assigns the investigation to Amaia, citing her investigative abilities and knowledge of the area, and promises that the police will act with diligence and discretion.

History, Exclusion, and Religious Symbols

The historical explanation is developed in conversation between Amaia and Jonan. Historians disagree about the agotes’ origins: proposed accounts connect them to religious refugees, deserters who contracted leprosy, or outcasts brought to serve the local feudal lord. What is clearer in the account is the long exclusion they suffered in Bozate. They were restricted from living elsewhere, running businesses, or marrying outside their group, and were directed into trades considered unhealthy. They also had to wear identifying marks and, in some accounts, ring a bell to announce their presence.

Church practice reinforced that exclusion. Although the agotes were Christians who observed Catholic rites, they were treated as pariahs: they had a separate baptismal font, and their holy water was discarded. They could be kept away from the altar, relegated to the rear of the nave, and made to enter through a smaller door. At Arizkun, a grille once separated them from other worshippers; it was later removed in rejection of the shame its existence still caused local residents. This history gives substance to Sarasola’s claim that the desecrations may invoke old religious divisions, even as Jonan’s account complicates any easy distinction between the Church’s sacred space and its record of exclusion.

A second symbolic layer concerns the bones left at the church. Jonan identifies them as a mairu-beso, an infant’s bone arm believed to have magical protective properties when the child had died unbaptized. The belief attached its power to particular circumstances: the infant’s age, death, and passage between worlds. In describing the bone, Jonan emphasizes that it could not properly be an adult arm. The object thus links the desecration not only to the church and cemetery but to popular beliefs about baptism, death, and protection. Sarasola is not the source of this explanation, but his insistence that human remains alter the case’s significance sits alongside the investigation’s effort to understand the bone’s specific cultural meaning.

Rosario Iturzaeta and Amaia’s Doubts

Sarasola’s role becomes more personal when Amaia questions how he knows Rosario’s psychiatric history. At Santa María de las Nieves, he has said that he knows her case, although Amaia knows he never treated her. He explains that the clinic reviews psychiatric cases for a particular feature present in Rosario’s case. Amaia asks whether he means the feature of evil. His explanation does not settle how he acquired his knowledge; instead, it makes his interest in Rosario part of the investigation.

Amaia notices that Sarasola knows details about Rosario’s treatment and behavior that are ordinarily protected by doctor-patient confidentiality. A message she receives raises the same issue and prompts her to consider whether Sarasola might be the visitor recorded at the psychiatric clinic. She rejects that identification: Sarasola and the clinic director, Doctor Franz, know each other too well for a disguise of glasses and false beard to fool him, and Sarasola’s appearance and build do not fit the estimates drawn from the recording. Yet the possibility remains in her mind, along with the unresolved question of how he came to know so much.

When Amaia and Jonan visit him at the clinic, the staff invoke a strict privacy protocol intended to protect prominent visitors. A nun leads them to an office on the fourth floor, near the nursing station, where Sarasola receives them after the door is closed. He reiterates that Rosario’s treatment is confidential to the rest of the world, despite Amaia being her daughter. Amaia presses him on the discrepancy between that principle and his own familiarity with the case.

Sarasola then takes Amaia to the observation room behind a one-way mirror. Rosario stands with her back to the visitors, facing an uncovered window. As Amaia approaches the glass, Rosario turns toward it with a look of horrible satisfaction; Amaia instinctively retreats behind the wall. Rosario says she can see her, although Sarasola insists that the room is isolated and that she cannot see or hear the observers. The encounter leaves Amaia frightened and confused. Sarasola has arranged a direct test of Rosario’s apparent condition, but the scene does not establish what Rosario perceives or what Sarasola knows. His place in the investigation remains defined by that tension: an authoritative interpreter of hidden meanings whose access to private knowledge is itself difficult for Amaia to explain.