Alice and Ritxi's twins

Alice and Ritxi's twins are born of a long, medically assisted effort to conceive and become the victims of a death that the narrative reveals through the shock of their discovery. Their story is told almost entirely through other people: as embryos transferred by a fertility clinic, as babies found in their parents' bedroom, and, after their deaths, through the small circle attending their cremation. The twins have no separate interior lives in the account; instead, the contrast between the elaborate anticipation of their arrival and the stark physical facts of their deaths gives their brief presence its force.

Conception and the Pregnancy

Alice and Ritxi reached in vitro fertilization after three unsuccessful insemination cycles, each involving injections, ultrasounds, and follicle counts. The treatment was described as longer, more expensive, more painful, and more desperate than insemination. By then, the Narrator observes, the couple had passed a point of no return. Her account also considers whether Alice experienced the treatment as a choice that had narrowed over time, but presents this as a working hypothesis rather than established knowledge.

At the patients' request, the clinic transferred two embryos and froze three more. The transferred embryos were classified as category B, which made the chance of a twin pregnancy medium rather than certain. The medical team discussed the risks of a multiple pregnancy, including pre-eclampsia, restricted growth, premature birth, and cesarean delivery. Alice and Ritxi nevertheless chose to proceed with two embryos. A few days later, an ultrasound showed that both had continued to develop. The twins' existence thus began not as an accident of treatment but as a known possibility the couple accepted despite the warnings.

The Narrator reconstructs the couple's response to the pregnancy as divided between Ritxi's happiness and Alice's caution, while acknowledging that this is her own imagining. That uncertainty matters: the account can give precise details about the treatment and the embryos, but cannot establish what either parent privately felt. The twins are first made visible through medical procedures and the Narrator's retrospective interpretation, rather than through any account of their own experience.

Discovery and Death

The twins appear in the bedroom of the House of Armentia when Mélanie, the twenty-two-year-old au pair, returns after her Thursday hours off. She moves quietly through the house, hoping the children may be asleep, and climbs the carpeted stairs without her muddy sandals. On the final step she feels a vibration and experiences what she later describes as an impulse to flee. She does not follow it. In the bedroom, she sees two small bundles on the parents' bed, almost covered by the duvet, with only the tops of their heads visible. Alice sits beside them in a striped upholstered chair, wearing a nightgown.

Mélanie approaches in trembling silence. As she takes the few steps to the bed, her mind empties; she cannot look at Alice. When she touches the bundles, she understands that the twins are not sleeping. They do not move; their lips are purple, their skin cold, and both are naked. The sheet is still wet. The later account identifies their deaths as drownings in the bathtub, in the height of summer. The bedroom scene and the later statement about the bathtub are distinct parts of the narrative: the first records how Mélanie finds them, while the second identifies how they died.

Alice responds calmly, telling Mélanie that the twins are all right now. The contrast between her composed manner and the physical condition of the babies unsettles the au pair, who experiences Alice's voice as terrible and unbearable. The scene gives the twins no speech or action of their own; their stillness is registered through Mélanie's touch and the concrete signs that they are dead. That limited perspective makes the discovery a rupture in an otherwise ordinary return to the house, and fixes the twins in the story at the moment their absence becomes undeniable.

Cremation and Narrative Aftermath

Alice spends five days in prison, all of them in the infirmary, while officials struggle to decide what to do with her. During those five days, the twins are cremated at a funeral home outside Vitoria-Gasteiz. The ceremony is intimate: Ritxi, his brother, newly arrived from Austin, and a few close friends attend. They arrive and leave by car. There are no photographs of the inside of the funeral home, and the Narrator does not know whether poems were read or songs sung at the civil ceremony.

The missing details are part of the account's treatment of the twins' aftermath. The Narrator explicitly declines to fill in the ceremony with imagined particulars, even as she acknowledges that she could wish to know them. The twins' funeral therefore remains a private event seen only from its edges: who gathered, where the cremation took place, and what the record cannot establish. Their lives are not recovered through a memorial scene; instead, the account registers the boundary between public knowledge and the family's grief.

Significance and Limits of the Account

The twins' narrative trajectory is compressed from medical possibility to death and cremation. At the clinic, their possible arrival is measured through embryo categories, probabilities, procedures, and known risks. At the house, those abstractions give way to two cold, motionless bodies. The movement between these registers does not explain why the deaths occurred or resolve the parents' private feelings; it shows how sharply the story changes scale, from clinical detail to the irreducible fact of two dead babies.

The account also resists turning the twins into fully individualized characters. It gives no names, speech, or remembered traits for them in these scenes, and does not claim access to their brief experience of life. Their significance instead lies in the relationships and consequences that gather around them: the prolonged treatment that preceded their conception, Mélanie's discovery, Alice's arrest, and the intimate cremation during her imprisonment. The twins remain at the center of the case while their own lives are largely inaccessible, a silence the Narrator marks rather than disguises.