Berasategui—Esteban Yáñez

Berasategui’s relationship with Esteban Yáñez is presented as both a formative wound and a concealed connection to the crimes under investigation. Amaia’s reconstruction links a childhood marked by his mother’s death and his father’s rejection to his adult return, his adopted name, and Esteban’s involvement with the bones taken from the family burial passage. The father’s role thus reaches from the son’s origin story into the present case, where apparent distance gives way to continuing access, fear, and complicity.

Bereavement and Exile

Amaia describes Berasategui as an intelligent, highly educated child whose mother, Margarita Berasategui, had suffered depression throughout her life. Her home, as Amaia portrays it, was orderly but emotionally bleak: the house was clean, the clothes ironed, and the meals prepared, yet the child lacked play, love, companionship, and affection. Amaia’s account makes the absence of tenderness central to the family history without treating material care as a substitute for intimacy.

The decisive rupture, in Amaia’s reconstruction, came after Margarita’s death. She alleges that the young Berasategui found his mother partly unconscious after taking tranquilizers, then used his father’s shotgun to finish the killing and make it appear to be suicide. The account is presented as Amaia’s explanation, not as an independently established fact in the confrontation. She reasons that Esteban recognized the scene as inconsistent with Margarita’s habits and sent his son away from home. In her telling, the father’s response was not simply separation: it left a bereaved child rejected by the only person he had left.

The Father’s Name and the Son’s Return

Amaia connects that expulsion to Berasategui’s adult identity. He renounced Esteban’s surname but did not take his father’s name; instead, he used Margarita’s surname, Berasategui. Amaia interprets the choice as a tribute to his mother and, more ominously, says that it was the name of his first victim. The name therefore holds two parts of the relationship together: attachment to the dead mother and a history of violence that Amaia traces back to the family home.

The separation did not, in Amaia’s account, free Esteban from his son’s influence. She argues that the father still feared and obeyed him, despite having sent him away. That alleged fear gives the childhood exile an unsettling reversal: the parent who once exercised authority over the child becomes, in adulthood, someone the son can control. The novel’s account does not present this reversal as a reconciliation. It suggests a family bond preserved through fear and concealed knowledge rather than trust.

Esteban’s Place in the Investigation

Esteban re-enters the case through the remains found at the family’s Itxusuria. He is retired and tends the orchard surrounding Amaia’s house; Amaia identifies him as the person who found the burial passage. She also tells Berasategui that Esteban supplied bones to Antonio Garrido. According to her account of Garrido’s statement, he claimed not to know that the bones would be used in a church desecration and described them as a macabre prank intended to bother the women he regarded as trespassing on his land. This explanation places Esteban’s act within a land dispute as Garrido represented it, but it does not erase the bones’ connection to the family burial ground.

Esteban’s continuing access is also practical. When Amaia considers where Berasategui might take an elderly woman and a baby during the storm, she immediately names his father’s house in Elizondo and Juanitaenea as places to search, adding that Esteban has the key. The detail does not by itself establish what Esteban knows about the abduction. It does show that his link to the family’s property remains active and that the investigation must reckon with him as more than a figure from Berasategui’s childhood.

The Confrontation and Its Limits

In the final confrontation, Amaia identifies the relationship directly, addressing the handcuffed suspect as Doctor Berasategui and then as Doctor Yáñez. She calls Esteban’s story the origin of the case: the son of Esteban Yáñez and Margarita Berasategui, the man who found the Itxusuria, and the father whom Berasategui had supposedly renounced by abandoning his surname. Berasategui’s smile freezes, and he listens without moving. The stillness registers the force of the identification, but it does not amount to a confession.

Amaia’s account joins intimate family history to the wider pattern she attributes to Berasategui: as a psychiatrist he had access to people he could manipulate, directing them toward violence while keeping control of the larger design. She presents Esteban’s fear and the childhood expulsion as parts of that origin, and her explanation of Margarita’s death as the hidden event beneath it. The lawyer’s immediate demand for evidence leaves a necessary distinction in place: Amaia’s theory is coherent and specific, but the scene does not convert each element of her reconstruction into a demonstrated fact.

Significance of the Relationship

The father-son bond matters because it connects private abandonment to public harm. Esteban’s alleged rejection helps explain the history Amaia assigns to Berasategui, while his later discovery of the Itxusuria and provision of bones place him within the chain of events surrounding the desecration. The same relationship is therefore both origin and present-day complication: the father’s past decision to send his son away did not prevent their lives from intersecting again through the family’s land, remains, and secrets.

The contrast between surname and conduct sharpens that pattern. Berasategui casts off his father’s name, yet Amaia argues that Esteban remains bound to him by fear; meanwhile, the son adopts his mother’s name, which Amaia associates with his first victim. In this reading, the family’s names do not settle its loyalties. They preserve the marks of loss, violence, and a history that the apparent separation between father and son could not contain.