Bañera de plástico verde

Bañera de plástico verde is the tub in which Alice Espanet drowned her twins, Alex and Angela. In the investigation it is an unambiguous piece of physical evidence; in the courtroom, its modest, almost comic appearance sharpens the horror of what happened. The Narrator returns to the image of the tub as the trial’s material facts give way to the harder question of responsibility.

Appearance and Forensic Role

The tub is described as a green plastic vessel with a picture of a moustached seal on one side. Its plain domestic appearance makes it a jarring exhibit: the prosecution presents it not as an abstract instrument of death but as an object that could be recognized from an ordinary home. The autopsy established that the twins had drowned, and the water samples matched. The physical evidence clarified the means of death, even as it left the larger question of Alice Espanet’s mental state unresolved.

The Tub in Court

During the trial, an assistant placed the tub, identified as the murder weapon, on a wheeled metal table and carried it first before the forensic police and then before the jury. The scene is rendered as tragicomic: the seal, the assistant’s plastic gloves, and jurors craning their necks to see the exhibit coexist with the shadow of the two dead babies. The tub’s conspicuous ordinariness does not soften the crime; it makes the distance between an everyday object and its terrible use impossible to ignore.

The courtroom evidence could confirm that the children had drowned, but it could not settle every detail of the act. Alice Espanet said she could not remember which twin she killed first, and the forensic findings established only that both died at roughly the same time. The tub thus anchors what can be demonstrated while marking the limits of what the trial can recover.

From Evidence to Names

The trial’s images and objects initially make the children legible as babies, bodies, and evidence. When the prosecutor first says their names, Alex and Angela, the Narrator realizes that the names had been unknown and, until that moment, seemingly unnecessary. Naming them makes the case harder to hold at a distance. Against this shift, the tub’s presence in court is more than a means of establishing the cause of death: it belongs to a proceeding in which forensic clarity does not automatically restore the individual lives obscured by the crime.

Recurrence and Responsibility

Later, the Narrator recalls the green plastic tub alongside the wound of childbirth and the other images carried forward from the investigation. The recollection becomes inseparable from the Narrator’s admission of imaginative identification with the mother’s hands—the hands that drowned children. The tub is not evidence that the Narrator committed the crime; rather, it marks the disturbing pull of trying to understand it from within, and the responsibility the Narrator feels for inviting readers into that morally muddy territory. Its movement through the narrative—from household object, to courtroom exhibit, to remembered image—keeps the physical fact of the deaths present even when explanation remains uncertain.