The Narrator Gives Birth to Erik

The Narrator’s birth of Erik is both a physical ordeal and a belated recognition: as labor reaches its most intense point, she realizes that she once knew Alice Espanet, the woman now accused of killing her twin children. The two events converge in the delivery room, where the Narrator’s body brings a child into the world even as her memory returns to a woman whose children have died. Seven hours after the recognition, Erik is born small, briefly separated from his mother, and then returned to her care.

Labor and the return of memory

Two weeks after Alice Espanet allegedly killed her twins, the case was already fading from public attention. At the House of Armentia, flowers left by mourners were wilting and the teddy bears offered for the children had lost their brightness. The Narrator, meanwhile, was in the newly opened Functional Obstetric Unit at Hospital de Basurto. A prostaglandin tampon had begun to work, and her induced labor was starting.

She was attached to a monitor and waiting for the pain she had read about in the months before giving birth. The birth did not become the imagined experience of pleasure or masochism: for her, it was neither. In labor she likened herself first to a gorilla, a creature to whom no one should speak, and treated language as something belonging to the neocortex. The image conveys how far the event had moved from ordinary conversation and reflective control.

After three more contractions, an overwhelming one seemed to carry her into another dimension and another historical era: torches replaced lamps, and Roman togas replaced medical gowns. In that moment she recognized Alice Espanet. Eleven years earlier, she had met the woman she now knew by that name, and they had lived door to door for a week. At the time, Alice was called Jade Espanet. The Narrator had avoided media images of the case and had not thought about the young woman since losing sight of her; the passage of eleven years had made the face difficult to recognize. The pain of labor, together with the effects she attributes to prostaglandin, oxytocin, and the paleocortex, suddenly joined the woman in the news to someone from her own past.

Recognition and loss of control

The recognition left the Narrator breathless and disrupted the breathing rhythm she had been taught to use during contractions. She describes pain as something that seizes a person, drags her against a thorn bush, and takes control; the gorilla gives way to the image of a limp rag doll. After losing her concentration, she asked for an epidural. The midwife who had called her by a pet name had finished her shift, a departure the Narrator welcomed.

As the anesthetic spread, she tried to hold on to what she had remembered. She feared that the anesthesia might erase the revelation, although she later notes that it has no amnesiac effect and that she retained the memory. The scene thus makes recognition an event within the labor itself, not a thought calmly recalled afterward: it arrives in the height of bodily pain, interrupts the Narrator’s practiced control, and becomes something she deliberately tries to preserve.

Erik’s birth and separation

Seven hours after the revelation, Erik was born. He weighed two kilograms and one hundred grams, and the Narrator describes him as very small, warm, and dirty. When he was laid on her chest, his body left a mark on her sternum shaped like Lanzarote. The delivery room then filled with people, or seemed to do so, and the baby was taken from her. While she touched the hollow he had left against her, staff told her about his Apgar test and stained waters. She understood that, for the time being, he would not be brought back to her.

In the final weeks of pregnancy, the fetus had been classified as PEG; the obstetrician who ordered the induction changed that diagnosis to CIR, which the Narrator understands as the more urgent designation. At thirty-eight weeks, the pregnancy could be ended, and the doctor had told her that babies in this situation often did not need an incubator. Erik did not need one. He spent eight hours in the neonatal unit, apart from the Narrator, while she remained unable to move because half her body was still anesthetized.

Niclas was able to visit Erik twice and take photographs. He returned excited but anxious, repeatedly emphasizing that their two-kilogram baby was the largest in the room, and zoomed in on the photographs to take in every detail. The Narrator was exhausted and told him to leave her alone, yet she could not sleep. Her attention kept returning to Alice, whom she now remembered as Jade, perhaps allowing her not to think about Erik or to pretend that she was not worried. At intervals she checked that the Lanzarote-shaped mark was still on her chest and tried to catch the newborn’s sweet, unfamiliar scent.

Return to the mother and narrative significance

At last, in the evening, Erik was brought back to her. He had been washed but still carried the penetrating smell that had become familiar to her. The Narrator thought of him as a little bun fresh from the oven and felt an impulse to eat him, a startlingly bodily expression of attachment rather than a claim of literal intent. A pediatrician explained the tests and analyses Erik had undergone; adhesive strips marked his thighs where he had been pricked, and he had been given sucrose as pain relief. The medical account reassured her that he was all right, though the reason he had stopped gaining weight in the womb remained unknown.

The episode ends not with a resolution of the Alice case but with the beginning of the Narrator’s everyday care for her child. Trying to follow the midwife’s instructions, she put Erik to her breast; for the following months, she says, this became her principal task. The remembered woman and the newborn remain linked in the scene by the circumstances of the birth, but the immediate consequence is intimate and practical: after an induced labor, a frightening separation, and a revelation from the past, the Narrator’s life turns toward feeding and holding Erik.