Blanca is the oldest child, and only daughter, of Esteban and Clara Trueba. She is born c. 1935 in an unidentified South American country—probably Chile. Blanca is a precocious and intelligent child and is much adored by her mother though her father, quite conservative and definitively sexist, largely ignores her. Blanca grows up in a privileged household without ever fully grasping the societal implications of her station. As a young child she spends much time in the country at her father's estates where she plays with parasite-ridden peasant children. As night she goes home to a nanny, opulent served meals, and clean sheets while they go home to a dirt floor and penury. One of her closest friends is Pedro Tercero Garcia, the peasant son of the estate manager. Their early childhood friendship develops into an adolescent crush and, later, love and sexual intimacy. When Blanca becomes pregnant her father flies into an uncontrollable rage and beats Blanca and her mother, then attempts to murder Pedro Tercero, striking off several of Pedro Tercero's fingers in the process. Trueba then arranges a forced marriage for Blanca with a perverse Frenchman named Jean de Satigny so that the child will not be born a bastard (ironically, Treuba has fathered an unacknowledged bastard on Pedro Tercero's aunt Pancha—something Trueba never thinks about).
