Hospital de Basurto is where the narrator’s story of motherhood takes physical shape: first in a newly opened obstetric unit during an induced labor, then in a pediatric ward during a frightening illness in her young son. The hospital joins two moments separated by years but connected by the body’s exposure to pain and uncertainty. In the first, labor unexpectedly restores a buried memory of Alice Espanet; in the later visit, the threat of illness makes the narrator confront how little a parent can control.

The obstetric unit and a sudden recognition

Two weeks after Alice Espanet had allegedly killed her twin children, the public attention surrounding the case was already fading. At the House of Armentia, flowers left by sympathetic visitors were wilting, and the teddy bears offered to the children were losing their brightness. The narrator, meanwhile, was at Hospital de Basurto, far from those offerings and newly caught up in her own approaching birth.

She was in the hospital’s newly opened Functional Obstetric Unit, attached to a monitor as a prostaglandin tampon began to take effect. The induction brought on her first contractions and the expectation of severe pain. Her preparations had included reading widely about childbirth, including claims that recast labor as an ecstatic or masochistic experience; her own experience matched neither description. The hospital is presented not as a place of idealized birth but as the setting for a demanding, monitored procedure and the narrator’s effort to endure it.

During labor, the narrator’s body becomes the route to a recognition that ordinary thought had not produced. After several contractions, an especially powerful wave carries her into an imagined other time, with torches and Roman togas replacing the hospital’s lamps and medical gowns. In that altered moment, she remembers that she met Alice eleven years earlier and once lived door to door with her for a week, before Alice was known by that name. The narrator had avoided media images and had not thought about the young woman for years; the physical intensity of labor brings the connection back all at once. Hospital de Basurto thus anchors a decisive convergence: the narrator’s imminent birth reopens the story of a woman she had previously known only as a distant, alleged child-killer.

The pediatric ward and Erik’s illness

Years later, Hospital de Basurto appears again through its pediatric pavilion. The narrator identifies the place as a possible title for the story she has been trying to write, then locates its emotional climax in a green corridor. The corridor is not a courtroom, although the narrator has been absorbed in the trial and the case surrounding Alice, the twins, and the bathtub. Instead, the hospital brings the narrative back to the immediate vulnerability of her own child.

Erik undergoes a lumbar puncture, and the sight of the needle entering his spinal cord is painful enough that the narrator has to look away. Niclas embraces her. The test confirms viral meningitis. The diagnosis is not, in principle, severe, and the parents can breathe again, but Erik’s fever remains very high, so the hospital keeps him overnight for observation. Relief comes with a condition: the danger has receded, but the child still has to be watched.

The family spends the night on chairs on either side of Erik’s cot, in an arrangement the narrator likens to an orthopedic nativity scene. Neither parent sleeps. Erik wakes once to feed, and the narrator feels his mouth burning against her nipple; later, when he coughs, conversation stops until he turns over and continues sleeping. The parents resume speaking in whispers. The hospital vigil is made from small changes in the child’s condition, interrupted talk, and the effort to remain alert through discomfort. The narrator still senses Erik’s newborn smell, though she recognizes it as a remnant that will soon exist only in memory.

A place of care and limited control

Hospital de Basurto exposes a contradiction in the narrator’s experience of motherhood. She feels an urgent responsibility to protect her child, yet recognizes that fierce love cannot prevent accidents, illness, or other threats. At the hospital, that powerlessness becomes concrete: she watches a needle enter Erik’s spine, waits for the result, and can do little while his fever is monitored. Niclas’s embrace offers immediate comfort, while the parents’ shared vigil makes care a task performed through presence, waiting, and attention.

The narrator’s reflections connect this crisis with her ordinary life with Erik. At daycare, he notices her as soon as she arrives, crawls toward her, and offers his arms; she treasures his body and the intensity of their reunion while also questioning why the demands of care do not translate into the ease or creative vitality she expects. The hospital episode does not settle that conflict. Instead, it sharpens the difference between loving a child and being able to guarantee his safety. Niclas tells her that they are doing well; her private correction is that she means she must do better.

Narrative significance

The hospital’s two appearances establish a structural echo between childbirth and pediatric illness. The obstetric unit is where the narrator’s body, under the pressure of contractions, recovers the past; the pediatric ward is where her attention fixes on the possibility of losing control in the present. The first visit gives birth to a memory that redirects her understanding of Alice’s case. The second interrupts her expectation that the legal proceedings will supply the story’s final climax, shifting the decisive scene to the green hospital corridor.

That shift also complicates the book’s images of maternal strength. The narrator evokes a cultural ideal of the mother as an invincible protector, then measures it against the limits exposed by Erik’s illness. Hospital de Basurto makes those limits neither abstract nor spectacular: they appear in a test result, a high fever, an overnight stay, an uncomfortable chair, and a child who coughs and falls asleep again. Its significance lies in holding birth, remembered violence, and ordinary medical fear within the same narrative geography, without making the hospital itself a guarantee of resolution.