Amaia Salazar—Rosario

Amaia Salazar’s bond with Rosario is marked by fear that reaches from Amaia’s childhood into her life as a mother. The concealed birth and death of a twin sister give that fear a newly documented family history, but do not settle what happened: a birth record, a death certificate, and relatives’ recollections point in different directions. In Amaia’s nightmare, the past becomes an immediate warning about her infant son, Ibai, making the relationship’s central wound both inherited and intensely present.

Fear and maternal threat

Amaia’s fear of Rosario is not presented only as a memory of childhood; it returns in a dream at a moment when Amaia is responsible for a vulnerable baby. In the nightmare, she hears a child call her name and finds Ibai crying in a violently rocking cradle. Nearby sits a girl in a nightshirt like Amaia’s own, with blond hair and a missing arm. Amaia recognizes the girl as herself, frightened and abandoned, and tries to comfort her. The child instead points toward Ibai and warns Amaia not to let his mother eat him as she ate her.

The warning makes the dream’s family resemblance terrifying: the threatened child is Amaia, but the mother named as a danger is also Amaia’s own role in the present. The dream does not establish that Rosario literally harmed or consumed a child; it gives Amaia’s fear a stark, bodily image. As she flees downstairs holding Ibai, a line of small, grieving children with amputated arms silently watches from the staircase. Their appearance links her private terror to the story’s other injured children, while keeping the emotional focus on her attempt to protect her son.

Amaia wakes sweating and trembling, her hands pressed to her chest as if she still holds Ibai. James is asleep, and the baby is restless in his crib. Amaia takes him into bed and breastfeeds him; when he needs more than she can provide, she goes downstairs to prepare a bottle. The dream’s threat is therefore followed by a concrete act of care. Amaia’s body and attention turn toward protecting and feeding the child whose safety the dream has placed in question.

The secret behind the fear

The family secret emerges through records of Rosario’s pregnancies. A file lists uncomplicated natural births in 1973 and 1975, naming the apparently healthy girls Flora and Rosaura. Its next entry records a natural twin birth in 1980, also described as uncomplicated, but gives neither child a name. Amaia reacts to the ease with which the clerk has disclosed that she had another sister, and immediately asks whether illness or death would have appeared in the file.

The surviving death certificate identifies a newborn daughter of Juan Salazar and Rosario Iturzaeta and gives the cause as “crib death,” a common term for sudden infant death syndrome. The clerk suggests that the baby may have been unwell, but this is an inference, not a diagnosis established by the birth record. Amaia’s questions about whether surgery or amputation would have been performed in a hospital, and whether a death certificate should exist, show her trying to test the documentary evidence against the remains and circumstances that have led her to investigate.

The records disclose a sister’s birth and reported death without explaining the contradictions surrounding either. The twin entry has no names; the death certificate offers a cause that Amaia regards as inconsistent with other information; and the appearance of skeletal remains in unusual circumstances raises further suspicion. The evidence makes the loss part of Amaia’s family history, but leaves its precise circumstances unsettled.

Family testimony and silence

Relatives’ recollections add another layer without resolving the record. One relative suggests that relations with Rosario began to change after the girl died. Amaia is startled that her relatives may have known something about the death, then says that Rosario concealed the child’s birth from the whole family: neither Amaia nor her sisters knew about their sibling. The statements sit uneasily together. The relatives’ account suggests knowledge of a death, while Amaia’s understanding is that the birth itself was hidden; the available testimony does not explain how those claims fit together.

The relatives also say they saw the baby being buried, but the coffin was closed and they did not insist on seeing the newborn’s body. Their recollection confirms a burial ceremony, not the identity of the body inside the coffin. Amaia carefully avoids calling it a corpse, choosing instead to refer to the body of a dead newborn. That hesitation registers the human scale of the discovery: behind the paperwork and the questions about evidence is an infant whose death the family apparently did not discuss with Amaia.

A relationship reframed, not resolved

The discovery changes the meaning of Amaia’s fear without offering a simple explanation for it. Rosario’s concealment places a profound silence at the center of the mother-daughter relationship, and the death of the twin provides a possible point after which family relations shifted. But the records and testimony remain incomplete and partly contradictory; they do not by themselves prove what happened to the child or why Rosario hid the birth.

The nightmare brings that unresolved history into Amaia’s present as a fear that she could fail to protect Ibai from the same mother she fears. Its amputated children connect the twin mystery to the threatening image of the child with one arm, while Amaia’s waking response distinguishes her care for Ibai from the abandonment she sees in her dream-self. The relationship with Rosario is thus defined not by reconciliation or a final explanation, but by the painful conjunction of childhood terror, hidden family history, and Amaia’s effort to protect the next generation.