«Los muertos hacen lo que pueden»

«Los muertos hacen lo que pueden» is Engrasi’s deliberately open-ended answer to Amaia’s question about the dead. Spoken at bedtime and recalled the next morning, the phrase becomes a quiet refrain connecting Amaia’s bond with her aunt to the case’s unsettling traces of infant death and burial.

The Question and Engrasi’s Answer

As Amaia is about to go to her bedroom, she hesitates and asks Engrasi whether the dead can do anything. Engrasi invites her to continue, and Amaia haltingly clarifies what she means. Engrasi answers, «Los muertos hacen lo que pueden». The reply offers no assurance that the dead can intervene, but it does not deny the possibility either; its restrained wording leaves the question suspended.

Return in Amaia’s Thoughts

The phrase returns the following morning after Amaia has slept peacefully for the first time in many days. James places Ibai beside her, and she kisses the child’s head and hands, holding his small hands in hers. In that moment of tenderness, her thoughts turn to Iriarte’s reference to «un bracito», then to the small skull with its fontanelles still open and the Mairu graves around Juanitaenea. Engrasi’s answer surfaces again beside the remembered words, «Supongo que es usted una de ésas.» The recollection binds the warmth of Amaia’s present with images that make the dead feel newly close, without resolving what they can do.

Significance

The expression works through recurrence rather than explanation: first as an answer to a personal, tentative question, then as part of Amaia’s morning recollection of the case. Its careful ambiguity accommodates both ordinary grief and the possibility of a supernatural presence. Set against Amaia’s affection for Ibai and the evidence of a child’s remains, the phrase carries a particular tension: the dead are invoked not as an abstract idea, but in the same sequence of thought as vulnerable bodies, family burial places, and the living child in her arms.