Infertilidad

Infertilidad is presented not simply as an inability to conceive, but as a condition that reorganizes time, intimacy, and expectation around medical treatment. For Alice Espanet and Ritxi, the pursuit of pregnancy becomes a two-and-a-half-year sequence of consultations, tests, procedures, and suspended hope. The narrative follows that sequence closely while questioning the market language that promises reproduction as an attainable outcome and the assumptions that make every patient’s desire seem uniform.

The clinic and the beginning of treatment

The clinic stood beside the road from Erandio to Sopelana, on the right-hand side toward the coast. Traffic there was often congested, yet there was always somewhere to park behind the building. Its new-looking facade and spotless glass did little to announce its purpose to passing drivers. For the narrator, however, this unremarkable building marks the beginning of the story: Alice Espanet and Ritxi came there twenty-two times, from their first concern to what the narrative calls their eventual victory.

The couple had heard that concern was warranted after a year of trying to conceive naturally, but they did not wait that long. After seven unsuccessful months, Ritxi felt old and pressed by urgency; he was also unaccustomed to losing. They went to a clinic that had been highly recommended, intent on avoiding further delay in becoming parents. The duration and intensity of the process are thus present from its outset: their visits became a two-and-a-half-year pilgrimage, though they tried to treat them as outings and keep their spirits up.

The medical work accumulated in concrete stages. The clinic involved blood tests, semen analyses, a karyotype analysis, ultrasounds, hormone monitoring, and consultation with several specialists. The first diagnosis was vague: low ovarian reserve. The first medications named in the account are Gonal and Ovitrelle. Follicle counts and a hysterosalpingography preceded the decisive intervention of artificial insemination. Repeated pastel-colored waiting rooms, only sporadically updated magazines, and the sequence of examinations make treatment feel less like a single procedure than a new environment in which the couple must learn to live.

Unequal temperaments within a shared pursuit

Ritxi and Alice Espanet did not inhabit the process in the same way. Ritxi was optimistic, compliant in consultations, and described as a submissive patient. Alice Espanet’s mood fluctuated sharply: at times she was at the top, at others at the bottom, and never in between. She generally did not speak much. These differences matter because the treatment is undertaken jointly, but its emotional burden cannot be assumed to be shared evenly.

When Ritxi’s obligations allowed, the couple took the day off after appointments and made an occasion of the visit. In good weather they drove to Pobeña or Puerto Viejo de Algorta; in winter they chose Bilbao, where they liked a Michelin-starred restaurant on the Marzana quay. Alice Espanet did not drink alcohol and tried to eat cleanly, finding suitable food for her pre-pregnancy condition there. These outings interrupt the clinical routine without erasing it: treatment extends beyond the examination room into meals, travel, and the practical adjustments made in anticipation of pregnancy.

After three unsuccessful insemination cycles, each involving injections, ultrasounds, and follicle counts, the clinic recommended in vitro fertilization. The next step was longer, more expensive, more painful, and more desperate. They agreed, the narrator says, after passing a point of no return. The phrase conveys accumulated commitment rather than proving that either partner had wanted every stage from the beginning.

Reproduction as a market promise

The narrator sets the clinic’s reassuring appearance against a sharper account of fertility treatment as a service sold to people with a profound need. Advertising presents assisted reproduction as clean, scientific, and effective, even invoking a ninety-percent success rate. In that framing, a desired child becomes an outcome that can supposedly be secured by placing oneself in expert hands. The promise turns wanting into a kind of guarantee, while the possibility of failure can be made to look like a failure of persistence or attitude.

The book links this promise to a broader market logic in which material and spiritual needs alike appear purchasable. Reproduction occupies an especially charged border between the two: it is at once a bodily process and a deeply personal desire. The clinics’ motivational language makes effort sound empowering, but the narrator identifies a coercive edge in its optimism. Patients are encouraged to fight for what they want rather than complain; the emotional script can make uncertainty or exhaustion seem like personal weakness.

The waiting room also acquires the character of competition. Other patients, initially companions in the same process, can become rivals: who will reach pregnancy first, who will not reach it at all. The image of silent elbows and telepathic dirty tricks places market competition inside an intimate medical setting. It does not establish that any particular patient behaves this way; it describes the pressure the setting can generate when success is scarce, ranked, and publicly advertised.

Pregnancy and the limits of explanation

Three insemination cycles did not produce a pregnancy, so Alice Espanet and Ritxi proceeded to in vitro fertilization. The clinic transferred two embryos and froze three others. The transferred embryos were classified as category B, a quality associated with a medium probability of a twin pregnancy. The clinicians discussed the risks of multiple pregnancy, including preeclampsia, restricted growth, premature birth, and cesarean delivery. The couple nevertheless wanted two embryos transferred. A few days later, an ultrasound showed that both were developing.

A blood test confirmed the pregnancy. The narrator imagines the couple’s happiness as cautious, assigning happiness to Ritxi and caution to Alice Espanet; this is explicitly an imaginative reconstruction, not a reported account of their private response. The distinction is important in a narrative that repeatedly acknowledges how little can be known about Alice Espanet’s interior life from the outside.

At the clinic, the narrator considers whether Alice Espanet should be understood as an ordinary patient with fertility problems, then recognizes that this framing may be inadequate. A receptionist remembers the couple’s long treatment but cannot say whether Alice Espanet was simply another patient; she recalls only that Alice Espanet was extreme in her changing moods. The narrator also entertains possible explanations for the delay in conception, including the possibility that Alice Espanet did not want children or resisted treatment, but presents these as hypotheses rather than established facts. The account therefore leaves the central uncertainty intact: medical records document procedures and outcomes, while desire and consent remain harder to read. Infertilidad becomes both a physical and institutional history and a limit on what the narrator can responsibly claim about another person.