Nacimiento de Amaia y su hermana gemela

The birth of Amaia Salazar and her twin sister is first presented as a frightened father’s vigil and a reassuring announcement, then recast as a family secret. On June 23, 1980, Rosario Iturzaeta delivered two girls at home in Elizondo. Juan Salazar was told that both were healthy, but later records identify the death of a newborn daughter, while concealed information and unexplained remains make the circumstances of the birth and death uncertain.

A concealed high-risk pregnancy

The scene opens during a storm over Elizondo. Juan has retreated to the bathroom, where he kneels by candlelight to pray, ashamed to be seen in such distress. More than three hours earlier, at about nine in the evening, Rosario had asked him to take their daughters to her mother’s house. The girls lingered to watch older boys light bonfires in the streets. Rosario had called Doctor Juan Hidalgo, but Juan has heard no reassuring update; the house’s power has failed, and its ominous silence follows the screams from the room where she is giving birth.

The delivery takes place at home by Rosario’s choice. Doctor Juan Hidalgo had recommended hospital care, and the pregnancy carried the added risk of twins, but Rosario would not go to hospital or even have an ultrasound. She intended to give birth at home as she had during her earlier pregnancies. She had also kept the twin pregnancy from her family, so the arrival of two babies was concealed before either child was born. The combination of a known medical risk, refused examination, and deliberate secrecy makes the birth more than a private domestic event: from the outset, the people who might have shared responsibility or witnessed what happened were kept at a distance.

The announcement in the candlelit house

When Doctor Juan Hidalgo calls through the bathroom door, Juan quickly washes his face and comes out carrying a towel. He asks first whether Rosario is all right. The doctor tells him that she is well and that both babies are well: two strong, healthy girls. Juan takes the doctor’s disinfectant-scented hand, smiles, and asks to see them. He is told to wait while Fina Hidalgo finishes cleaning and preparing Rosario. Still smiling, Juan jokes that he seems to know how to make only girls and offers the doctor a drink.

The scene gives Juan a moment of apparent relief, but it does not show him meeting the newborns. His request is postponed while Fina remains with Rosario, and the reassurance that the girls are healthy reaches him through the doctor rather than through his own sight of them. Read alongside the later records, that gap acquires weight: the announcement promises a simple, happy outcome, while the family’s knowledge of what followed proves incomplete.

Records that revise the birth

Years later, Amaia examines Rosario’s obstetric file. It lists an uncomplicated natural birth of a seemingly healthy girl, Flora Salazar, in 1973; another uncomplicated natural birth of a seemingly healthy girl, Rosaura Salazar, in 1975; and an uncomplicated twin birth in 1980. The two babies are recorded as seemingly healthy, but, unlike the earlier entries, no names are given. The archive confirms that there were twins, while its omissions leave the identities and subsequent fates of the babies obscure.

A separate death certificate deepens the contradiction. It identifies a newborn daughter of Juan Salazar and Rosario Iturzaeta and gives the cause as crib death, the common term for sudden infant death syndrome. The certificate does not erase the doctor’s announcement that two healthy girls had been born; instead, the two pieces of information sit uneasily together. The record’s stated cause also prompted suspicion that the child may have been unwell, but it does not, by itself, settle what happened. Amaia’s inquiry is further complicated by irregularities in the birth certificate and by the unusual discovery of skeletal remains thought to belong to the dead twin.

A family secret and an unresolved death

The later family account confirms how thoroughly the birth was concealed: Amaia and her sisters had not known that Rosario gave birth to another child. An uncle suggests that the family’s relationship with Rosario changed after the girl died. Relatives say they saw a burial, but the coffin was closed, and they did not insist on seeing the baby. Their testimony can establish what they believed they had witnessed, not the identity or condition of the body inside.

The unease surrounding the remains also intersects with the local belief in the Mairu-beso, which was understood to derive its supposed power from the bones of an infant who died unbaptized. That belief supplies cultural context for why infant remains could carry significance, but it does not prove the twin’s fate or explain the documentary irregularities. The event therefore remains suspended between a birth announced as uncomplicated and healthy, a certificate recording a newborn death, relatives excluded from the pregnancy, and evidence that raises further questions. Its decisive consequence is to turn Amaia’s own birth into an investigation of the sister whose existence her family had been made to forget.