Melitón Deza

Melitón Deza is a nurse at the asylum whose vulnerability to the director’s authority makes him an early target of Alicia’s campaign against Samuel Alvar. His brief appearances show the pressure of institutional hierarchy at work: Deza has been disciplined, faces suspicion over the murders of two ETA prisoners, and has little power to challenge the director on his own.

Position and Vulnerability

The director has opened a disciplinary file against Deza. Although Alicia’s investigation has cleared him of being the person who physically killed the two escaped ETA prisoners, suspicion still shadows him: the director has suggested that Deza may have tipped off Norberto Machimbarrena about the prisoners’ presence and helped them escape so that Machimbarrena could kill them. That second accusation leaves Deza exposed even after the central murder mystery has been solved.

Deza describes the imbalance plainly when Alicia asks why staff tolerate such abuses. He answers that the director holds authority while he is only a technical assistant. His response conveys not indifference but constrained agency: he sees the abuse, yet his position offers no obvious means of stopping it.

Alicia’s Intervention

Alicia approaches Deza after the investigation has cleared him as the material killer. She is grateful for his admiration and gratitude, but she does not present herself as a victim seeking sympathy. Instead, she directs their conversation toward what she calls the injustice being done to him: his disciplinary case continues despite the discovery of the killer.

To intensify Deza’s sense of grievance, Alicia tells him that the director suggested to the police commissioner that Deza had informed Machimbarrena about the prisoners and facilitated their escape. The narrative identifies this claim as a lie, and Deza does not know that it is false. Alicia’s defense of him is therefore also a calculated maneuver: she uses his precarious position and his newly acquired gratitude to draw him into her opposition to the director.

Part in the Anti-Alvar Campaign

Alicia’s meeting with Deza is not arranged according to friendship or rank. In coordination with Rosellini, she chooses the order of her visitors according to the tactics of the anti-Alvar operation, and Deza is the first person she receives. The sequence turns a personal grievance into a possible point of leverage in the wider campaign.

Their conversation also touches on the story of the knives. Deza has not heard it, and Alicia uses the subject to continue probing his experience of the hospital and the director’s conduct. The available account does not establish what Deza later does or whether he becomes an active participant in the campaign; his documented significance lies in the way Alicia’s approach makes a disciplined, vulnerable staff member part of her opening move against Alvar.