Elshego

Elciego becomes the place where Ritxi and Alice Espanet withdraw from the immediate aftermath of the twins’ deaths and attempt to resume life together. The record of their arrival there is fragmentary: it preserves the destination and the routines that followed, but leaves much of the couple’s private experience unknown.

Ritxi’s First Journey to Elciego

After Alice’s first interrogation, Ritxi did not return to the House of Armentia. One account said that a friend collected him at the police station and that they went directly to his home in Elciego. Only one newspaper attended to this detail; in most coverage, Ritxi disappeared from view. The narrator cannot establish how he spent the five days Alice was imprisoned or what occupied his thoughts during them, leaving Elciego as the known endpoint of a journey whose personal meaning remains inaccessible.

A New Home and Repeated Journeys

The couple stayed together and left the city to live in a small house in Elciego, near Ritxi’s workplace. Their life there acquired a measured rhythm of departures and returns. Every two weeks they went to the court in Vitoria-Gasteiz to sign in, with Ritxi accompanying his wife each time. At first photographers waited for them, hoping to capture the couple; gradually, the photographers stopped appearing.

Their other regular journey was to Barcelona, where every two weeks Alice saw a prominent psychiatrist and began treatment for psychosis. She kept her daily pills in a compartmentalized plastic box and resumed painting as occupational therapy. These precise routines place recovery not in a dramatic public transformation but in repeated acts of attendance, medication, and returning to her work.

Privacy and Disappearance from Public View

Elciego is associated with the couple’s move out of the city and out of the press’s sustained attention. There are no photographs of Alice from this period, and the media gradually left her alone until, as the narrator puts it, everyone had forgotten her. The twins had been cremated; the couple, too, seemed reduced to ashes in the public imagination. The contrast gives the house in Elciego a quiet significance: it marks a shared life continuing beyond the news cycle, while the narrator acknowledges that the private happiness the couple may have found there can only be imagined, not documented.