Esteban Yáñez

Esteban Yáñez is a retired gardener whose work at the Juanitaenea family estate places him close to the disturbed family burial ground and the investigation that follows. He is also the father of Doctor Berasategui, later identified by Amaia Salazar as the son of Esteban and Margarita Berasategui. Although Esteban does not appear directly in the available scenes, his garden, his key to the family property, and the bones he is accused of providing make him a consequential link between the burial-ground mystery and the church desecration.

Identity and Background

Esteban tends the garden around the Juanitaenea family estate. Amaia remembers the hostility with which he looked at her, a detail that colors her later attention to the grounds. During a visit after heavy rain, she puts on rubber boots and walks around the property beneath an umbrella. The disturbed soil over the graves has been smoothed by the rainfall, but she sees no new exploratory holes. The quiet inspection does not establish who disturbed the graves; it keeps the burial ground, and Esteban’s role as its gardener, central to her suspicions.

Amaia also asks her aunt about the man who looks after the Juanitaenea garden. When the gardener is identified as Esteban, she asks whether his son resembled him. The question shows that she is trying to connect the familiar local figure to the man whose identity she is investigating, though the exchange does not itself provide an answer about their resemblance.

Connection to the Investigation

When Amaia works out where the fugitive might go, she names the house of the fugitive’s father in Elizondo and identifies that father as Esteban. She also directs the search to the Juanitaenea family estate, explaining that Esteban has a key. His access to the property gives the location practical importance in the pursuit: it is not merely a place associated with the investigation’s earlier discoveries, but somewhere the suspect could potentially enter through a family connection.

In her confrontation with Doctor Berasategui, Amaia identifies him as Doctor Yáñez and calls Esteban the beginning and origin of the story. She says Esteban found his family’s Itxusuria and supplied bones to Antonio Garrido. According to the account Amaia gives, Esteban described the bones as part of a macabre joke directed at people who had trespassed on land he considered his. The accusation makes his grievance over the property the stated context for passing on the bones, while distinguishing his alleged contribution from the church desecration itself.

Father and Son

Amaia names Margarita Berasategui as Esteban’s wife and explains that their son took Margarita’s surname as a tribute to her. She describes Margarita as chronically depressed and recalls a household marked by silence and crying, despite her efforts to keep it clean and provide meals and pressed clothes. This is Amaia’s reconstruction of the son’s childhood, not an independent account from Esteban.

Amaia further alleges that the son completed his mother’s apparent suicide after finding her unconscious beside a spilled bottle of pills, using his father’s shotgun to make the death look like suicide. In her interpretation, Esteban recognized that the scene did not fit Margarita: although she was unwell, she kept the house immaculate, and the manner of death was too messy to match her. Amaia says this was why Esteban sent his son away, and why he still fears and obeys him. The account makes Esteban both a witness to a concealed family crime and, in Amaia’s reading, a man whose response to it became part of his son’s lasting power over him.

Narrative Significance

Esteban’s role emerges through other people’s attention to places and family history rather than through a scene in which he speaks for himself. The garden first makes him a watchful presence beside the graves; the key makes him a route into Juanitaenea; and Amaia’s accusation connects him to bones used in the desecration. Finally, the identification of Doctor Berasategui as his son turns Esteban’s local, seemingly ordinary position into a point of origin for the investigation’s account of the criminal’s family past. The evidence leaves his own full motives and perspective unvoiced, while showing why Amaia regards him as both an accomplice in one strand of the case and a fearful father bound to another.