This section of the novel focuses primarily on the narrator’s returning memories, recounting her life before coming to the Sacred Sisterhood. Some of the narrator’s first returning memories are of books. She remembers her mother’s love and respect for literature, how she called the books their “friends” and mourned their loss in a flood as if they were people. The Unworthy is largely devoid of a specific sense of place. The exception is found here, as Bazterrica references classic Argentinian authors like Juan José Saer, Silvia Ocampo, and Julio Cortázar. In the National Library with the tarantula kids, the narrator reads them a story about a girl visiting “a house where a tiger prowled from one room to the next” and another “about a man who threw up bunnies” (63-4). Both stories come from Cortázar’s collection of short stories Bestiario, published in 1951. Referencing this literature situates the novel firmly in Argentina and speaks to the importance of literature in shaping national and individual identity. This directly engages the theme of The Role of Language in Constructing Identity and Humanity. The narrator’s earliest, most cherished memories involve storytelling, not only as a cultural anchor but also as a form of resistance. Even when forced to burn books to survive, she tries to preserve meaning by choosing which texts to sacrifice, treating literature as sacred despite its physical destruction.

In the narrator’s memories, books also constitute a form of connection and a way of holding onto one’s humanity amid a crumbling world. Books were a cornerstone of the narrator’s relationship with her mother, who “urged” her daughter “to love” reading, even as ecological disasters wracked the outside world. Later, with the tarantula kids, the narrator read to them around the fire, allowing them to forget their fear and hunger, even momentarily, and behave like the children they were. Now, however, the narrator lives in a world devoid of literature and devoid of humanity. As her memories come back, she realizes for the first time how lonely she is—she is “protected” in the House of the Sacred Sisterhood “but without friends” (67). Her act of writing—done in secret and at great risk—acts as a bridge between past and present, love and loss. This reinforces The Role of Language in Constructing Identity and Humanity, as it shows how language becomes the last trace of her former self, allowing her to reclaim a moral orientation lost in the Sisterhood’s indoctrination.

These pages also begin to develop Lucía’s character. She is wholly different from the other women and instantly becomes an object of fascination and jealousy among the Sisterhood. Unlike the other unworthy, who exist completely in the fabricated world of the Sisterhood, Lucía is both the “maker” and the “sole inhabitant” of her own “inner universe” (88). She is independent, a free thinker who can dream up sacrifices that shock the other women and even the Superior Sister. She also lacks the ulterior motives of the other women, offering her sacrifice of walking on coals “without smiling or boasting” (89). The other women, focused on self-preservation and defensive violence, usually offer up “one of the weak” (89) to make sacrifices on their behalf, but Lucía acts from a desire to support the community, not out of her own self-interest. Lucía embodies the theme of The Redemptive Power of Love and Connection. She disrupts the logic of competitive sacrifice that defines the Sisterhood, demonstrating that strength can come from conviction rather than cruelty. Her actions begin to dissolve the narrator’s rigid worldview, reawakening her capacity for awe, empathy, and desire. By introducing a character who defies the norms of the Sisterhood without directly opposing them, Bazterrica creates a powerful counterpoint to the oppressive model of holiness defined by mutilation and surveillance.

As the narrator’s memories return and she grows closer to Lucía, she starts to doubt the Sisterhood’s rhetoric. She wonders, for example, if the women could all be drinking water from the Creek of Madness instead of the dew that the Superior Sister claims to collect. She wonders if she could really just be “insane” and also begins to doubt the existence of the animals that the Sisterhood claims to possess. When the Enlightened warn that acid rain is coming, the narrator wonders how that can be possible since “factories have stopped operating” and “there are fewer and fewer humans” (86). She doesn’t “quite believe” the Superior Sister, but she scratches this out, still not ready to face the implications of the Sisterhood’s doctrine being a lie. This uncertainty shows the beginnings of a spiritual and ideological unraveling. The narrator’s fear of fully articulating her doubt—crossing it out on the page—suggests how language itself has become both a cage and a key. Her suspicion that the apocalypse may be exaggerated or fabricated further reflects the theme of Misogyny, Oppression, and Organized Religion. The Sisterhood manufactures fear to justify suffering and control, echoing religious systems that frame female pain as redemptive and distrust as heretical. The narrator’s resistance is not yet fully formed, but Lucía’s influence and the return of memory allow her to start naming falsehoods, even if only to herself.

The narrator’s ambivalent act of helping Lucía also reveals the theme of The Redemptive Power of Love and Connection. Although she tries to reject the forest woman at first, shouting at her not to speak the name of the “erroneous God,” she ultimately leaves food and water and agrees to help her. Her aid is reluctant and incomplete, but it marks a turning point—the first reemergence of mercy since Circe. The pain she associates with connection (the loss of her mother, Circe, and the tarantula kids) has taught her that love equals danger. Yet she cannot fully shut herself off, especially in the presence of someone who radiates beauty, hunger, and vulnerability.

Lucía’s walk across burning coals—emerging “immune to fire”—is rich with symbolic weight. It marks her not just as a holy figure in the eyes of the Sisterhood, but also as someone who transcends its logic. Fire, which so often signifies punishment in this world, becomes instead a testament to endurance. In this moment, she rewrites the meaning of sacrifice, offering a model of strength that is not predicated on domination or pain.

This section forms a crucial pivot point in the novel. The narrator is still trapped within the language and logic of the Sisterhood, but memory, mercy, and Lucía all work to expand her internal world. Each recollection—of her mother, her books, the tarantula kids—reclaims part of her stolen identity. Each moment with Lucía opens a space where connection feels possible again. Through storytelling, doubt, and desire, the narrator begins to imagine a self beyond unworthiness. And through Lucía, she glimpses a faith that doesn’t require mutilation to be holy.