Txokoto is an Elizondo neighborhood whose narrow streets and river crossings frame several of the novel’s most intimate encounters between domestic life and criminal investigation. Its bakery workshop, associated with Ros, becomes a conspicuous public surface for hostility toward the family, and its rear entrance turns into a place Amaia Salazar watches for whoever is responsible. The neighborhood’s significance lies in that convergence: the ordinary work of making pastries continues amid a widening pattern of threats and violence.

Setting and Everyday Life

At daybreak, Amaia drives through Txokoto’s narrow streets on her way to the police station, stopping first to see Ros. The neighborhood is not presented as an abstract backdrop: the route takes her past the bakery’s darkened windows and around to its rear, where she finds Ros working to cover graffiti on the main wall. The image of a familiar workplace marked by public abuse makes the conflict visible before either sister discusses it.

The workshop also holds a private, sensory connection to the family past. Amaia has entered its workroom for as long as she can remember, and the smell of anise essence greets her when she visits. Ros says they are making ring-shaped pastries that day; the scent immediately brings Amaia’s mother to mind and carries her memory far back. In this setting, routine work and family recollection occupy the same space: the bakery is both an active workplace and a place where a smell can unexpectedly reopen the past.

Txokoto’s surroundings alter with the hour. In the morning, Amaia drives through streets beneath dense cloud descending from the surrounding mountains. On another early outing, she listens to the birds through an open car window as she moves along the empty streets. Later, after dark, damp air and fog settle around the river; the dam can be heard in the otherwise silent night, while the neighborhood’s tavern and the Trinkete are already closed. These changing conditions give the same streets a shifting character, from familiar route to secluded approach.

The Bakery Wall and Public Hostility

The rear wall of Ros’s workshop repeatedly bears hostile messages. On one morning, Amaia finds Ros covering a large black spray-painted insult aimed at Flora. Ros has already begun painting over it, but the dark lettering remains legible beneath the first coat. Amaia’s observation that Flora is not regarded as a hero by everyone in town links the mark on the wall to the divided public response around her, rather than treating it as anonymous damage with no personal target.

The harassment continues. Before dawn on a later occasion, Amaia passes the closed workshop and sees a fresh message sprayed across its wall. She does not tell Ros what she has found. Instead, she returns home, enters the quiet house while the others are still asleep, and lights the fire in the living room according to a childhood ritual. The undisclosed graffiti sits alongside this private act of steadiness: Amaia keeps the threat to herself while preparing to make a call to Aloisius Dupree in New Orleans.

The messages are not confined to one appearance. Amaia later encounters three boys on bicycles turning into the back of the workshop, each carrying a flashlight. She follows them on foot, switches on her powerful light, and identifies herself as a police officer. One boy is so startled that he loses his balance and falls against the others. Their presence shows that the rear of the bakery is accessible to local youths as well as to whoever has been writing on its wall; the scene does not establish that the boys are responsible for the graffiti.

Surveillance and Investigation

Rather than relying only on what has been written, Amaia eventually watches the workshop’s back entrance. She approaches after dark, checks her flashlight and phone, and instinctively feels for the weapon at her waist before hiding behind rubbish containers. Nearly half an hour passes before a single person, short and dressed entirely in black, approaches the store door. Amaia hears the rattle of plastic marbles inside the spray can and the hiss of paint being released. She steps out, shines her light on the painter, and photographs the person with her phone.

The confrontation does not produce an arrest. The painter is a woman; she gives a short, sharp cry, drops the can, and runs. The attempted identification nevertheless changes Amaia’s approach to the wall: Txokoto is no longer merely where the messages appear, but a site she actively monitors, using concealment, a light, and a camera to try to catch the person in the act. The episode leaves the writer’s identity unresolved in the available account.

Place in the Wider Case

Txokoto’s graffiti belongs to the novel’s larger pattern of written marks and repeated criminal signatures, but the evidence distinguishes the local threats from the separate, more grave clues in the murder investigation. In one case, a man who confessed to killing his wife denied responsibility for the post-mortem amputation of her arm. A photograph of a prison-wall inscription, scratched into plaster with a toothbrush handle and later painted over, revealed the word Tarttalo. Amaia’s subsequent reasoning connects the repeated, precisely executed amputation and the missing arm across cases to a possible single operator, rather than assuming that the abusive partners who committed the murders also removed the limbs.

The comparison gives the workshop wall a particular narrative resonance without making its graffiti part of the same proven signature. In Txokoto, the messages are visible acts of intimidation directed at people close to Amaia; elsewhere, a word left in a prison cell and the repeated removal of an arm help investigators distinguish murderers’ actions from a second participant’s intervention. The neighborhood concentrates the consequences of that investigation at street level: a place where Ros works, Amaia’s family memories surface, and the police effort to identify an unseen actor reaches the back door of an everyday business.