Flora

Flora, the eldest daughter of Rosario Iturzaeta and Juan Salazar, is a quiet but consequential witness to the family history Amaia Salazar must reconstruct. Her memories place her beside Amaia in infancy, while her later disclosures illuminate Rosario’s isolation, the secrecy surrounding a newborn death, and a threat that reaches forward into Amaia’s own motherhood. Flora does not supply a complete account; her importance lies in the precise fragments she can give and in the silences surrounding them.

Identity and Family History

The birth records Amaia consults list Flora as the apparently healthy child born in 1973, followed by Rosaura Salazar in 1975. The 1980 entry records a natural twin birth: two apparently healthy girls, with neither named in the file. Flora was seven when Amaia was born, a detail that gives her childhood memories a particular weight. They come from an age at which she was old enough to remember caring for the baby, but not necessarily to understand the adults’ decisions or the hidden history Amaia later uncovers.

The archive records a newborn daughter of Juan Salazar and Rosario Iturzaeta dying of what was then called crib death. That certificate sits uneasily beside the twin-birth entry and the family’s incomplete knowledge. Amaia tells her relatives that Rosario concealed the birth from the family, that the records contain irregularities, and that human remains found in strange circumstances may belong to the dead sister. These are the contradictions against which Flora’s partial recollections must be read: her testimony helps recover ordinary details of Amaia’s infancy, but does not itself resolve what happened to the other newborn.

Remembering Amaia’s Infancy

Flora remembers that she and Ros took turns giving the baby a bottle. Juan prepared it, sat the girls on the sofa, placed Amaia in their arms, and let them feed her in turn. Flora recalls that the sisters probably found the task enjoyable. The scene is modest and domestic: care is organized by their father, then passed into the hands of two young girls who share it. It gives Amaia a memory of being held and tended by her sisters, even as the records around her birth disclose a family crisis that the children were not told about.

When Amaia asks about Rosario, Flora recalls that their mother was already in poor mental health at the time, and that she had suffered for a long time. Flora’s description is sympathetic, not a detailed explanation of Rosario’s behavior. That distinction matters: Flora can remember the atmosphere of illness and the sisters’ practical role without claiming to understand, as a child, what was happening to their mother.

A Sister’s Protection and the Family’s Fear

Rosaura’s later account reveals a more frightening side of the childhood the sisters shared. On one night when Amaia had insisted on sleeping beside her, Rosaura waited until Amaia was asleep and returned to her own bed. Rosario came in, apparently mistook Amaia for Rosaura, and spoke of eating the little girl. Rosaura says she was terrified, went back to Amaia’s side, and thereafter let her sister sleep with her while she watched Rosario. She had never told anyone before confiding in Amaia.

Flora is not the speaker of this memory, and the account does not establish what she knew at the time. It does, however, place her recollection of bottle-feeding within a wider pattern of the sisters protecting and caring for Amaia while Rosario’s conduct frightened them. Amaia tells Rosaura that the children were too young to intervene and faults Juan, the responsible adult, for protecting Rosario while sending nine-year-old Amaia away from home. The sisters’ childhood closeness thus sits beside a family separation whose consequences Amaia still names as exile.

Elena Ochoa and the Rupture with Rosario

After meeting Amaia at the cemetery, Flora leaves but calls her with a lead: Rosario’s former friend Elena Ochoa lives in the first white house beside the market. Flora says the two women fell out many years earlier, stopped speaking, and never reconciled. In her view, Elena was the person who knew Rosario best during that period. The recommendation opens a route into Rosario’s past, but Flora sets a condition as she offers it: Amaia must treat their mother respectfully and must not speak ill of her. Her warning makes clear that providing information does not mean abandoning her loyalty to Rosario.

The estrangement is also part of the evidence Amaia is assembling around Rosario’s concealed newborn. Relatives suggest that Rosario told them the baby had been stillborn because she needed to account for burying the child locally, while saying nothing about the other girl. Another relative connects a change in relations with Rosario to the child’s death. These accounts do not make Flora responsible for the secrecy; they show the family’s competing recollections and the limits of what its members were told.

The Pregnancy Disclosure and Flora’s Role

Much later, Amaia calls Flora while pursuing the identity of a killer. She asks whether Flora told Rosario that she was going to have a child. Flora first hesitates, then admits that she told their mother she was going to be a grandmother. At the time, Flora and those around her still expected the baby to be a girl. She says Rosario’s reaction was so disturbing that she did not mention the pregnancy to her again. When Amaia presses her to repeat what Rosario said, Flora reports a threat to eat the little girl.

The disclosure transforms an earlier family warning into something with immediate relevance to Amaia, who has a child of her own. It also links Flora’s experience to Rosaura’s account: Rosario’s threat toward an imagined baby echoes the terrifying words Rosaura remembers hearing when Rosario believed Amaia was in her bed. Flora’s testimony does not establish that the two incidents were identical in circumstance, but together the sisters’ accounts make the threat a recurrence rather than an isolated phrase.

Flora’s narrative role is therefore neither that of a full historian nor a simple messenger. The records establish dates and omissions; Flora supplies the embodied recollection of a baby in her arms, the explanation for a lost friendship, and the account of a pregnancy disclosure she chose not to repeat. Her evidence deepens Amaia’s understanding of the family without erasing its uncertainty: the past emerges through documents, guarded loyalties, and memories that become speakable only when the danger of Rosario’s words has returned.