Segregación de los agotes

Segregación de los agotes is the system of social, economic, and religious exclusion imposed on the Agotes, a group concentrated in Bozate for centuries. Its decisive significance in the novel is that the present-day desecrations at the church in Arizkun reproduce the places and objects through which that exclusion was enforced, turning a local history of discrimination into a key to the investigation.

Origins and Historical Status

The Agotes’ origins are uncertain. Jonan Etxaide tells Amaia Salazar that historians place their arrival in Navarra across the Pyrenees during the Middle Ages, amid wars, famine, plague, and religious persecution. One widely supported theory identifies them as Cathars fleeing the Inquisition. Others propose that they were deserters from Gothic armies who contracted leprosy in southern French lazarets, or a mixture of outcasts brought to serve the local feudal lord, Pedro de Ursua. The last theory may help explain why they settled predominantly in Bozate.

These accounts remain competing explanations, not a settled identity. In the conversation, Amaia recognizes the Agotes’ treatment as part of a broader European history of suspicion and exclusion, in which illness, ethnicity, poverty, or conduct judged abnormal could make a group vulnerable to persecution. The particular duration of their exclusion, however, distinguishes their history: Jonan emphasizes that it persisted for generations.

Restrictions on Daily Life

The Agotes were treated as inferior and were not allowed to live outside Bozate, run businesses, or marry people who were not Agotes. They were confined to woodworking and leatherworking, trades regarded as unhealthy. Their exclusion was made visible in ordinary public life: they had to wear an identifying marker sewn onto their clothes and, according to Jonan, were even required to ring a bell to announce their presence, as if they were lepers.

These rules did more than separate the Agotes from other residents. They made the stigma legible and repeatable, regulating where people could live, what work they could do, and whom they could marry. Even where the theories about their origins differ, fear of disease and inherited ideas about status provided grounds for maintaining the boundary.

Religious Exclusion and Its Legacy

The Agotes were Christians who observed Catholic rites, yet the Church’s practices reinforced their separation. They had a different baptismal font, and the holy water used for them was discarded. They could not approach the altar; in many churches they had to remain at the back of the nave and enter through a separate, smaller door. At Arizkun, a grille kept them apart from other worshippers. It was later removed as a rejection of the shame this treatment still caused among local residents.

A papal decree from Rome eventually recognized the Agotes’ rights as equal to those of other neighbors and called for the discrimination to cease. The decree did not erase the harm or promptly change local behavior: customs and beliefs proved resistant to reason, and discrimination continued for years. The contrast between formal recognition and its slow effect makes the rule’s legacy more than a matter of old legal language. The boundary had been embedded in community habits and in the church itself.

The Desecrations at Arizkun

Jonan connects the modern church desecrations directly to this history. The damaged baptismal font recalls the font from which the Agotes were excluded. A front-row bench, reserved for nobles and forbidden to them, invokes their denial of equal standing among worshippers. The altar cloths point to a sacred space they were not permitted to approach. The targeted objects therefore function as historical references, not merely as damaged church property.

The bones found in connection with the desecrations add a further association. Jonan identifies the Mairu-beso as an old witchcraft practice that was also linked to the Agotes. That association brings together local belief, the history of exclusion, and the investigation’s material evidence, while leaving the bones distinct from the church furnishings that directly represent the Agotes’ barred access.

Contemporary Institutions in the Investigation

The book also follows Amaia’s inquiries into prison psychiatric treatment and the University Clinic of Navarra. She asks whether a Logroño prisoner who died by suicide had seen a psychiatrist, and whether Jasón Medina and Ramón Quiralte received treatment while imprisoned in Pamplona. Information from the prisons confirms treatment for the Pamplona prisoners and records an unidentified psychiatric service for the Logroño prisoner. In the latter case, the report bears an illegible signature and names no psychiatrist.

Amaia later describes a series of prison reports signed by Padre Sarasola but lacking the name of an assigned psychiatrist; a judge notes that the documents were signed by a head of psychiatry and were not challenged by prison authorities. Amaia suspects that the clinic’s prison volunteer work served to identify unusually violent patients, rather than being solely altruistic, and raises the possibility that the search continued beyond the case of Rosario. She also confronts Sarasola over Doctor Franz’s objection to the procedure used to transfer Rosario to the clinic. These suspicions are not presented as the same historical rule as the Agotes’ segregation. Their juxtaposition instead places the church’s inherited exclusions beside a modern inquiry into how institutional authority, records, and clinical selection can shape the treatment of people already under constraint.