ETA

ETA’s role in the novel is concentrated in the arrival of two members at the asylum and the lethal chain of events that follows. Their admission brings political conflict into the hospital’s daily life, while their deaths reveal that Norberto Machimbarrena’s decades-old delusion of hunting Basque separatists remains dangerously active.

Political Context and Introduction

The two ETA members arrive together and are described by staff as political prisoners who do not belong in a psychiatric hospital. Their conduct quickly becomes a practical concern: they slap a social worker after she fails to speak Basque, and one attacks the nurse Melitón Deza when he tries to escort him during an initial inspection. Deza later knocks the assailant down with a punch. The episode presents the pair not through an account of their political history, but through the immediate disruption their arrival causes among staff and patients.

Escape, Murders, and the Asylum’s Failure

The confrontation did not end with the first day’s assaults. The two ETA prisoners escaped from the emergency ward, and staff later reported that they had been found in the basement of the old charterhouse, both dead with their throats cut. Their disappearance from a ward that was supposed to contain them became a murder investigation inside the asylum itself: political violence had entered the institution with the men, but the killings exposed a danger already lodged within its walls.

The killer was Norberto Machimbarrena, a long-term patient whose delusion had been mistaken for recovery. He had spent more than four decades in the hospital after believing he had received an order from his superiors, transmitted from mind to mind, to eliminate Basque separatists. For years he had been considered cured; the arrival of the two ETA members brought that old mission back into action, and he killed them within a day. Their deaths therefore revealed the failure of the asylum’s confidence in a settled diagnosis: a belief treated as dormant remained capable of directing lethal violence.

The investigation also produced a disputed suspicion about Alice Gould. The director suggested that she had not killed the men herself but had prompted Machimbarrena by alerting him that the two gudaris would be placed in his hands. The suggestion linked the murders to the asylum’s competing interpretations of Alice, but it remained an allegation rather than an established fact. In the account she dictated after examining the dead, Alice presented her observations and deductions to the investigating authorities, while the larger question of how the men escaped and were killed exposed the institution’s vulnerability to both mistaken judgments and concealed violence.

Political Violence and Diagnostic Uncertainty

The pair’s violence extended beyond their confrontation with the social worker and Melitón Deza: in a later discussion, staff recalled that they had also knocked Ignacio Urquieta unconscious. Their conduct sharpened a question the hospital could not settle simply by labeling them political prisoners: whether the men were mentally ill, antisocial offenders, or some combination of the two. The doctors’ discussion turned toward the possible roots of adult behavior in childhood trauma, making the newcomers not only a security problem but also a test of how the institution understood the boundary between illness and criminality.

That uncertainty sits beside the asylum’s practical response. Dolores Bernardos warned that the two men should be separated because, together, they emboldened one another and competed to prove their toughness. The warning shows how the institution read their violence as relational as well as individual: their proximity could intensify the danger. Yet separating them could not address the other failure the murders exposed—the presence of a long-term patient whose supposedly extinguished mission was reawakened by their arrival. ETA’s brief appearance thus connects political violence outside the hospital to the limits of diagnosis and control within it.

Political Violence Within an Open Institution

The murders also sit against the asylum’s recently adopted open regime, under which patients could move with relative freedom through the building and grounds, spend time in the bar or workshops, and, in some cases, travel by bus to nearby towns. That general freedom did not mean every ward was open or that the two ETA members’ escape followed directly from the policy; they had been admitted to the emergency ward. The contrast nevertheless sharpens the institution’s predicament: a hospital organized partly around liberty and ordinary social activity had to contain newcomers whose violence alarmed staff, while its own long-term patient population included someone whose murderous delusion had been mistaken for recovery. The ETA episode makes political violence a test not only of diagnosis, but also of how an institution can reconcile patient freedom with protection when its judgments about danger prove fallible.