San Isidro is a symbolic setting that highlights the character’s traumas through supernatural events. In keeping with Gothic fiction, the hacienda takes on a life of its own as living memories come alive inside it. This illustrates The Existence of the Supernatural and the enduring impact of colonial trauma. Andrés believes that houses “absorb the feelings of the people who live in them. Sometimes those feelings are so strong you can feel them when you walk through the door” (124). However, because the murdered spirit of María Catalina dominates San Isidro, only negative feelings possess the house and therefore elicit traumatic responses from Beatriz Hernández Valenzuela and Padre Andrés.

Beatriz realizes that her past haunts her when the house attacks her at the end of the novel. The house represented freedom for Beatriz when she first arrived, but the supernatural events never let her forget her father’s death, her mother abandoning her, and the absence of love in her marriage. Beatriz married Rodolfo because his “money was liberation from Tía Fernanda’s reign of humiliation. Deliverance from desperate reliance on the fickle kindness of relatives [she] barely knew.