Esteban’s childhood history develops his violent characteristics he portrays on others throughout the novel. Esteban’s childhood was unlike others of his high social class, but rather a struggle.
[He] has grown up in a ruined home, witness to the moral and economic deterioration of [his] father and then the slow illness of [his] mother…there was not enough money in the house to pay the grocer and he had to go to school on foot because he did not have the fare for the streetcar. He recalled how they had packed him off to school with his chest and back lined with newspaper, because he had no woolen underclothes and his overcoat was in tatters. The only source of heat in the whole house was in his mother’s bedroom. He had been of a childhood …show more content…
In combination, the fury and pride engender a belligerent character to anyone associated with him. This passage is additionally narrated by Alba, who is recounting these events on behalf of Esteban in the future. The diction Alba uses to describe his childhood evokes sympathy in the reader, in such a way that he wants you to understand and agree with him on why he renders violence on others. Esteban not only feels like he has a constricting childhood, but withal feels as if it was stolen from him by his father. Esteban states, “Trueba had simply been a regrettable accident in the life of Dona Ester, who was destined to marry someone of her own class, but she had fallen in love with that good-for-nothing immigrant…[who] had squandered first her dowry and then her inheritance.” (Allende 45) Allende uses genealogy to effectively characterize Esteban through this line. The childhood he feels was robbed from him by his father’s surname, effects how he views passing on his own. Esteban belligerently rapes the fifteen year old girl named Pancha Garcia, who is the first of many women to be ravished by Esteban, and consequently becomes impregnated with his first son. Esteban kenned that him, as well as many other children of Tres Marias over the years were his, but never claimed one because he feels “the only ones that