Pasuro Hospital

The hospital’s newly opened functional obstetric unit is the setting for the Narrator’s induced labor and Erik’s birth. At a moment when the death of Alice Espanet’s twins is fading from public attention, the hospital makes childbirth immediate and physical: the Narrator is attached to a monitor, given prostaglandins, and later separated from her newborn while he receives neonatal care.

Setting and Induction

Two weeks after Alice Espanet allegedly killed her twins, the Narrator is far from the flowers and teddy bears left at House of Armentia. She is in the hospital’s newly opened functional obstetric unit, where a prostaglandin tampon has begun to work and contractions are starting. The contrast places public mourning and private anticipation side by side: as the offerings at the house lose their freshness, the Narrator waits for labor to intensify.

The Narrator has spent the preceding months reading about childbirth, including accounts she regards as absurd. Now attached to a monitor and awaiting the pain of induced labor, she finds that her own experience bears little resemblance to the language she has encountered. When she loses her concentration and rhythm, she asks for an epidural. The hospital is thus not merely a backdrop to birth; its procedures structure the Narrator’s experience of waiting, pain, and diminished control.

Erik’s Birth and Neonatal Care

Seven hours after the epidural, Erik is born weighing two kilos and one hundred grams. The staff place him on the Narrator’s chest, where his body leaves a mark shaped like Lanzarote. The moment is quickly interrupted: staff take the baby away, the delivery room fills with people, and medical terms such as the Apgar test and stained waters reach the Narrator before she can make sense of them. In practice, she understands that the hospital will not yet return her child.

The pregnancy had first been described with the abbreviation PEG, which the gynecologist later changed to CIR when ordering the induction. The Narrator explains the distinction as one of urgency: PEG indicates that the fetus is small, while CIR means he is too small. Although the pregnancy is at thirty-eight weeks, the revised assessment prompts the team to deliver him. The gynecologist reassures her that the baby will probably not need an incubator, and Erik does not.

Separation and Return

Erik spends eight hours in the neonatal unit, apart from the Narrator. Still partly anesthetized and unable to move, she cannot visit him. Niclas is able to see him twice and take photographs, returning excited but anxious and repeatedly stressing that Erik is the largest baby in the room. He zooms in on the pictures to examine their details; the exhausted Narrator asks to be left in peace, though she cannot sleep.

During that separation, her thoughts repeatedly return to Alice Espanet and to Jade Espanet, whom she knew. She also checks that the Lanzarote-shaped mark from Erik’s first contact with her remains on her chest, bringing her nose close as if to capture the newborn’s sweet smell. When the hospital finally brings Erik to her at dusk, he has been washed but still carries an intense, newly familiar scent. The passage closes on the Narrator’s bodily response: he seems like a small bun just out of the oven, and she wants to eat him, literally. The hospital’s brief separation has made the child’s return both a reunion and a sensory recognition.