Susana Is Forced by Her Father to Search a Mine for Bones and Money

Susana San Juan’s childhood descent into an underground space is an episode of coercion in which her father, Bartolomé San Juan, makes her retrieve human remains in the hope of finding gold. The scene joins bodily danger to emotional abandonment: the rope is her only link to the outside world, while her father’s insistence drives her farther into darkness.

The descent and the search

Years earlier, when Susana was a child, Bartolomé directed her downward and repeatedly urged her to look for something below. She was suspended by a rope that cut into her waist and made her hands bleed. She would not let go, because it was the sole connection she had to the world outside. Her father illuminated the space with a lamp and lowered her farther, telling her to signal when she reached the bottom.

Susana had entered through a small opening between boards. Below, she moved over old, rotten, split beams coated in sticky earth. When she found a foothold, fear silenced her; above, the lamp moved away and returned, while her father continued calling for her to search. He then demanded that she pass up what she found. The first object she grasped was a skull, which she dropped when the light fell directly on it.

The remains came apart as she handled them. The jaw separated as if made of sugar, and Susana passed the bones up one by one, beginning with the skull and continuing through the finger and toe bones. Bartolomé kept pressing her to search for money and gold coins, making the child’s terror serve his pursuit of treasure. Afterward she lost consciousness and did not come to until many days later, amid the coldness of her father’s gaze.

The memory returns

When Susana is told that Bartolomé San Juan died two nights earlier, has already been buried, and could not be brought home because the journey was too long, she smiles. She understands the visitor as Bartolomé and takes his presence as a farewell. The news leaves her, in the speaker’s words, alone in the world; her response, however, turns toward recognition rather than visible grief.

The narration then reaches back to the childhood descent, making that remembered ordeal the explanation for her present laughter. The shift binds a father’s death to an earlier encounter with death’s physical remains: Susana had once been made to handle them at his command, and now she identifies him as having come to say goodbye. Her smile holds the two moments together without resolving the distance between them.

Command, perception, and the limits of paternal authority

The scene is organized around an imbalance: Bartolomé speaks from above, directing the search, while Susana’s access to what lies below is restricted by darkness, fear, and the narrow reach of the lamp. His instructions treat discovery as a matter of looking harder and descending farther; her experience instead registers through the body, in bleeding hands, a rope cutting her waist, and fear that leaves her unable to speak. The contrast makes the search more than a frightening task: it shows how her father’s purpose overrides what she can see and endure.

That gap between command and perception also shapes the episode’s emotional force. Bartolomé asks for objects as though they can be passed up and accounted for, but the remains disintegrate in Susana’s hands. His insistence on money and gold gives the descent a material objective; the memory, as recounted, offers no discovery of treasure or reward, only the child’s collapse and the coldness that follows. The scene thus leaves his demand suspended against its human cost, exposing the distance between what he wants her to retrieve and what the experience does to her.

The body as the scene’s measure

The search turns the father’s demand for treasure into an encounter with the material reality of death. Susana does not find an intact object that can be lifted out and claimed: the corpse falls apart, its jaw separating, its bones passing through her hands one by one. The sequence slows the search into a physical inventory, while Bartolomé’s repeated demand for gold keeps imposing a different value on what she touches. Nothing in the memory confirms that she finds the coins he seeks; what it does establish is the cost of being made to search, ending in her loss of consciousness and her father’s cold gaze when she wakes days later.

The memory’s placement beside the news of Bartolomé’s death sharpens that contrast without explaining away Susana’s smile. As a child, she was ordered to descend toward a dead body; now, hearing that her father has been buried far away, she recognizes his presence as a farewell. The episode brings the father, the dead, and the act of recognition into the same frame, but leaves Susana’s feelings unresolved: she smiles, and the narration identifies the ordeal as the reason for her laughter, not as an uncomplicated expression of grief or reconciliation.