Margarita Berasategui

Margarita Berasategui is remembered as a gentle, chronically depressed woman whose apparent suicide conceals the origin of her son’s identity. In Amaia Salazar’s reconstruction, Margarita’s death was not simply the final consequence of her despair: her son, later known as Doctor Berasategui, killed her and took her surname as a tribute, tying his chosen name to the first victim Amaia identifies in his history.

Identity and Background

Margarita was the mother of Doctor Berasategui and the wife of Esteban Yáñez. Engrasi recalls her as a very sweet woman and describes her death as a pity. Amaia’s account supplies a darker domestic context: Margarita had suffered from depression throughout her life, and her home was marked by sadness, silence, and crying.

That account also stresses the care she continued to give her household. The house was always clean, the clothes ironed, and the food prepared. Yet, as Amaia frames it, these acts of practical care did not provide a child with the play, companionship, and affection he needed. Margarita could not bear being touched, a detail that sharpens the portrait of emotional distance without erasing her effort to maintain the home.

The Apparent Suicide

Before her death, Margarita had attempted suicide more than once by taking large quantities of tranquilizers, but had survived. Amaia alleges that one day, after her son returned from school and found her half-conscious beside an overturned bottle of pills, he finished what looked like another suicide attempt. She suggests that he placed his father’s shotgun in front of Margarita and may have used her own hand to fire it.

The death was accepted as suicide because Margarita’s depression and earlier attempts were known, and because the area had one of the country’s highest suicide rates. Amaia points to the condition of the scene as a reason for doubt: despite her distress, Margarita kept her home immaculate, and the violent mess of the death seemed inconsistent with the order she maintained. In Amaia’s telling, Esteban Yáñez recognized that discrepancy. He took his son out of the house and sent him away; Amaia further says that the son’s father still feared him and obeyed him.

Name and Narrative Significance

Amaia presents Margarita’s death as the beginning of Doctor Berasategui’s story. He rejected his father’s surname, Yáñez, but did not simply return to his own family name: he took Margarita’s surname as an homage. Amaia interprets that choice as a cruelly deliberate act, because the name honors the mother whose death she accuses him of causing while also marking her as his first victim.

Margarita has little independent presence in the account beyond other people’s recollections and Amaia’s reconstruction. That contrast matters: Engrasi remembers a sweet woman, while the investigation recovers the sorrow of her household and the violence hidden beneath the accepted explanation of her death. Her carefully kept home becomes a concrete detail against which the supposed suicide is reconsidered, and her name survives as both a personal remembrance and a clue to her son’s concealed past.