Esteban García: the revenge the hacienda left as an inheritance

The boy has just given away the hiding place of Pedro Tercero García, Blanca’s lover. The master, Esteban Trueba, chops off three of Pedro Tercero’s fingers with an axe; the wounded man escapes, the boy calmly picks the fingers up off the floor and, back at the house, tugs at the master’s sleeve to ask for his reward. Trueba sends him off with a slap. There is no reward, he says, for traitors who inform. This is chapter VI of The House of the Spirits (1982), titled “Revenge,” and the boy is Esteban García. He is the grandson of Pancha García, the peasant woman Trueba pushed down into the bushes by the river at Tres Marías, and he bears the name of the man who has just humiliated him. Years later he will come back in a colonel’s uniform.

Isabel Allende has gone back to that house. On October 15, La hora antes del alba (“The Hour Before Dawn”) won the Planeta Prize. According to the first reports, it picks up Alba as she returns pregnant to the family home after prison and torture, and it reaches Spanish bookstores on November 4, according to Planeta’s listing. The publisher’s synopsis does not name him, but it says that her former captor lurks outside Alba’s door, set on making her pay for her grandfather’s sins. The wounds she brings home are his. With the Prime Video series released in April, it is a good moment to ask where a torturer comes from.

// The theoryThe penal system that leaves no record

Latin American critical criminology was born in the 1980s, with Rosa del Olmo (1981), to describe what European textbooks did not see. In 1984, in a report coordinated by Zaffaroni, Lola Aniyar de Castro gave a name to the underground penal system: the torture, disappearances and executions that run alongside the codes and that the state carries out and denies. And Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, in En busca de las penas perdidas (1989), explained why that system is not an anomaly. Penal power is selective by design: the law prohibits almost everything, the agencies can handle only a fraction, and they pick the most vulnerable. To exercise their violence, they recruit their agents from those same poor sectors and shape them until their identity is replaced by one useful to the agency, a process he called “policization.”

Read Esteban García’s full case file · Criminología Crítica Latinoamericana →

// The caseThree generations of the same debt

Allende writes the underground system before the state, on the hacienda. At Tres Marías the master rapes peasant women, punishes with an axe and answers to no one: he is judge, jailer and executioner of his own land, like the knight commander of Fuenteovejuna three centuries earlier. Selectivity already works there, because only those at the bottom are ever punished. One of those rapes produces a son who bears the master’s first name, though not his surname, and that son fathers another Esteban. The debt passes from grandmother to grandson as a story: Pancha tells him about the inheritance that would have been his had he been born into the legitimate family. The boy who asks for a reward is not cashing in on a betrayal. He is asking, for the first time, for the master to acknowledge him.

The master does not, and the young man learns another way to collect. In chapter IX he turns up at the house in the city, abuses six-year-old Alba while he waits in the library, and asks the senator for a letter so he can join the national police. Trueba writes it to settle the old debt and, along the way, to have a man of his own inside the force. It is Zaffaroni’s policization with a return address: the master hands over to the state the resentment he manufactured on his land. At the door he asks him why he was named Esteban.

After the coup, the letter pays off. In chapter XIII a patrol drags Alba out of the big house on the corner with her eyelids taped shut, and someone announces her: this is Senator Trueba’s granddaughter, colonel. García makes her his private prisoner: she appears in no register, no judge sees her, and her fate depends on one man’s mood. Trueba, who had cheered the coup, finds that his name does not open that door and has to ask for help from Tránsito Soto, the prostitute he met as a young man. The system the master helped build no longer obeys him. Like Dorfman’s Doctor Miranda, García knows that what is done in the basement leaves no paperwork.

// The crackThe inheritance does not sign for him

The school explains agencies, not biographies. It says why a dictatorship needs men like García and why it finds them among the humiliated, but not why this particular peasant became a torturer. Pedro Tercero García grew up on the same hacienda, under the same master, and ended up singing against the landowners. Reading the colonel only as a product of Tres Marías comes close to excusing him, and explaining is not excusing. He beat, raped and applied electric shocks because he chose to, and the novel never grants him a moment of doubt. The inheritance explains where the grudge comes from, not who decides to use it.

The novel offers another way out (spoiler for the epilogue). Alba, pregnant and not knowing whether the child is Miguel’s or the product of the rapes, suspects that García is one rough, crooked stroke in a drawing traced before she was born, and she decides not to take revenge, because “my revenge would be just another part of the same inexorable rite.” In the doghouse cell, Clara’s ghost had suggested that she write in her mind, and that testimony, which ends up becoming the book, is exactly the record the underground system wanted to prevent. La hora antes del alba starts there: according to the synopses, Alba rebuilds her life by helping other victims of political violence. Planeta’s synopsis says her former captor is lurking again; how Allende tells it, we will find out in November.