House of Armentia

The House of Armentia is both the setting of the twins’ deaths and a material witness through which the book examines how private violence becomes public spectacle. Its ordinary rooms, restrained modern architecture, and carefully kept garden contrast with the emergency response outside and the house’s later status as an empty place that neighbors may prefer not to discuss.

Setting and Domestic Life

Alice Espanet and Ritxi had moved into the large, discreet house less than four years before the deaths, after repeated troubles with an architect whose unprofessional conduct had delayed the project. On the summer afternoon when the story’s central discovery occurs, the house is still operating as a family home. Mélanie, the nanny, returns after her four free hours on Thursday. She has been in Vitoria-Gasteiz for nine months, learning Spanish and weighing what to do next in her life. She locks her bicycle at the back, tries to scrape mud from her sandals, and enters cautiously.

The first rooms she checks—the kitchen, the living room, and the room used as Alice’s study—are quiet. Hoping the twins may be asleep, Mélanie imagines that she might take a long, warm shower before resuming her work. The mud on her shorts and ankles comes from lying on damp ground with a young man she has just met after cycling in Salburua Park. Her small, ordinary wish for a shower gives the house a domestic scale before the discovery abruptly changes its meaning.

The Discovery and Emergency Response

Mélanie takes off her sandals before climbing the carpeted stairs. On the last step, she feels a vibration that she later associates with an impulse to flee. She has felt that kind of impulse before while working in the house, but this time she continues down the corridor. The bedroom door is ajar. Inside, the twins lie with their eyes closed on their parents’ bed, almost completely covered by the duvet; Alice sits beside them in an upholstered striped armchair. The book’s account makes the bedroom’s familiar furnishings—bed, duvet, chair—part of the first, unsettling view of the scene.

Mélanie calls for an ambulance and urgently asks for police and firefighters as well. The recorded call lasts two minutes and contains communication difficulties, sighs, crying, and disbelief. While she seeks help, Alice remains seated and still. Once responders arrive, the house fills with people. Mélanie waits outside on the entrance steps, hugging her knees and staring at the mud on her ankles; inside the kitchen, she struggles to answer questions and is given water and a white pill. For hours, ambulance lights and Ertzaintza vehicles illuminate the façade. Neighbors, runners, and passers-by gather outside, drawn by the rumors spreading through the warm summer evening.

The House as a Scene of Public Exposure

Ritxi reaches the house shortly before the judge, having left Madrid by chauffeur-driven car around the time Mélanie came in from her afternoon off. At the house, he sees the twins’ bodies placed in large gray bags and Alice taken away in a police car. She wears pilates leggings and a loose shirt put on hurriedly; she is not handcuffed. Ritxi calls her name once, but she does not turn toward him. The house thus becomes the point where the family’s private catastrophe is exposed to police procedure, witnesses, and a crowd outside.

After the first night, Ritxi returns to the house and disconnects the phones while refusing offers of help and insisting on being alone. Near eight the next morning, two police officers arrive at the oak front door to take his statement. He asks for two minutes to change his shirt, still wearing the one he had on the previous day, and invites them inside before setting out with them. The house’s threshold marks a further change: the home that had held the family’s private life is now entered by investigators as part of the inquiry.

Empty House and Remembered Place

In November of the year of the deaths, the Narrator visits the Armentia neighborhood with Niclas before attending an Euskadi award ceremony in Vitoria-Gasteiz. The house, widely photographed when the deaths occurred, stands near a meadow used for an annual pilgrimage and a Romanesque basilica, with other villas at a moderate distance. Its upper storey has a glass façade now covered by gray blinds; below, a long double-pitched roof and exposed wood give the building the appearance of a traditional Basque farmhouse. The symmetry and composed exterior seem at odds with what happened inside.

The house is closed and empty, but someone maintains its garden. The Narrator considers that it may be for sale, though there is no sign to confirm this. The visit takes place in heavy rain near dusk, with the Narrator carrying a sleeping child in a backpack and sharing one inadequate umbrella with Niclas. The Narrator senses a possible vibration or oppressive atmosphere; Niclas rejects the impression, attributing the discomfort to the weather and circumstances. No neighbors appear, so the Narrator cannot know whether the house is a neighborhood taboo or whether residents show it to visitors while recounting its history. That uncertainty matters: the building’s public notoriety is clear, but the private ways its surroundings accommodate or suppress its memory remain unknown.

The Narrator compares the house with properties in Hong Kong and Japan that acquire stigma after a suicide or crime and may attract investors who expect public memory to fade. This comparison makes the maintained, unoccupied house more than a backdrop: it is an object caught between ordinary real estate and a place marked by death. The twins drowned in a bath in the house in midsummer; on the later visit, its orderly exterior offers no visible explanation, only the uneasy contrast between an intact home and the event that has permanently changed how it is seen.