Amaia Salazar—Rosario Iturzaeta

The relationship between Amaia Salazar and Rosario Iturzaeta is neither ordinary maternal estrangement nor a conflict that began with Amaia’s adult investigations. It is a bond formed around a hidden twin, a mother’s recurring threats, and years in which Amaia experienced Rosario as both intimately watchful and physically unreachable. The violence that once made Amaia fear for her own life returns when Rosario threatens Ibai, turning the history between mother and daughter into an immediate struggle over whether the next generation will be placed in danger.

A Childhood of Distance and Threat

Amaia remembers an invisible barrier separating her from Rosario from as far back as she can recall. Her father and sisters helped her dress and comb her hair; her father took her to the doctor and cared for her when she was ill. Rosario, by contrast, did not touch Amaia or take her hand. In Amaia’s recollection, the distance did not mean that her mother was absent: Rosario seemed to sense her even when they were not in the same room, keeping her under watch through a connection Amaia imagined as a taut, unseen cord.

That watchfulness was bound to physical danger. At the bakery workshop, Amaia looks at the flour trough and remembers the night Rosario waited there, beat her, and buried her in it, believing her dead. The trough’s pale surface brings the image of a coffin to mind. Amaia had gone to retrieve birthday money her father had given her, money she was supposed to hide from Rosario; her mother, Amaia recalls, knew what she was doing. The attack was not, in her understanding, an isolated eruption. It belonged to a pattern in which Rosario could seem to keep her at a distance while still controlling and threatening her.

At night, Rosario crossed that distance in a more deliberate way. She would come to Amaia’s bed while the household slept and repeat a threat that made sleep itself unsafe. Amaia remembers waiting until her mother was asleep before going to her sisters’ beds, pleading to stay with them and promising to serve them. In this account, fear became a nightly practice of listening, watching, and seeking protection elsewhere in the house.

The threat also gathered around Amaia’s birthday. As the date approached each year, Rosario’s usual distance turned hostile. Amaia remembers feeling watched and sensing the danger grow more immediate; once the birthday had passed, the two returned to a tense pattern of avoiding and monitoring one another. Amaia distinguishes this from a mother’s grief resurfacing on a painful anniversary. She believes Rosario’s hostility reflected a postponed intention, one that sharpened around the birth date shared by Amaia and the identical girl born alongside her.

The Twin and the Family’s Silence

The secret of the twin changes the meaning Amaia gives to her earliest fear. She has dreamed for as long as she can remember of an identical girl crying, and begins to suspect that the threat she has felt since childhood may date from the moment the two girls were born. Her sense that her life was under sentence therefore reaches beyond the bakery attack: she connects the recurring danger to the concealed story of the other child.

A family discussion makes the unevenness of what was disclosed more visible. When asked why Rosario had said that a baby was stillborn but had not mentioned another girl, the explanation is that she had to acknowledge the death in order to bury the child there. The distinction is consequential: a death was disclosed for the practical purpose of burial, while the existence of the other girl remained unspoken. Amaia’s response is physical; she feels her heart stop for an instant as the implications reach her.

Ros’s later confession adds another layer to the family’s silence. As a child, she knew that Rosario was doing something dangerous to Amaia. One night, after Amaia had insisted on sleeping close beside her, Ros waited for her to fall asleep and switched beds. Rosario came to the bed where Ros lay, apparently believing her to be Amaia, and repeated the threat. Terrified, Ros returned to Amaia’s side. From then on, she let Amaia sleep with her and watched Rosario as Rosario watched Amaia. She had never told anyone before.

Amaia responds by placing responsibility on the adult who could have intervened. She tells Ros that the children were too young to act, and blames their father for failing to protect her. In Amaia’s account, he protected Rosario and sent his nine-year-old daughter away from the home she shared with him and her sisters. She calls that removal an exile. Ros defends their father as someone who wanted the family to function, but Amaia insists that preserving the household in this way was a failure of protection. The sisters’ later exchange—Ros disclosing what she had witnessed and Amaia comforting her—does not erase that history, but it replaces years of private knowledge and silence with an acknowledged account of what happened.

Fear Returns in Adulthood

The old terror persists beneath the order of Amaia’s adult life. When she sees Rosario walking after a period of immobility, Amaia experiences the sight as a violation of the image she had carried for years. Her body registers the return of fear before she can settle it into words: she shivers, struggles to swallow, and has to draw breath after holding it. The danger is no longer only a memory of a child at the mercy of her mother; Rosario’s presence can still bring that child’s expectation of pursuit back into the present.

The novel makes the connection between past and present concrete in the cave where Amaia finds Rosario with Ibai. Rosario is kneeling beside the child, holding a dagger over him, while a figure of white material and candles surrounds him. Amaia hears one of Ibai’s familiar sounds and sees that he is alive, but the ritual scene makes clear that his safety is at stake. When Rosario looks at her, Amaia feels herself returned to childhood: the old, invisible hold seems to place her again beside the flour trough and under the threat of death.

For a moment, fear threatens to govern her as it did when she was a girl. Ibai’s whimper breaks that spell and gives way to a furious resolve. Amaia confronts Rosario and asserts that Ibai is her son. Rosario, confused by the fact that he is a boy rather than the girl she expected, insists that he was meant to be the sacrifice. She then turns the danger back toward Amaia, making clear that the threat is not confined to the child. The confrontation gives the relationship its most direct reversal: the daughter once unable to escape her mother’s control now stands between Rosario and her own child.

Inherited Threat and Protective Change

Rosario’s expectation of a daughter links her treatment of Amaia to the danger surrounding Ibai. The child she wants for the sacrifice is not the child Amaia has, but Rosario’s confusion does not end her hostility; she tells Amaia that she has not finished with her. The scene thus brings the twin secret and the old threat into the same crisis without suggesting that the danger has been resolved simply because Amaia recognizes its pattern.

Amaia’s decisive change is visible in what she does while afraid. She does not mistake terror for proof that Rosario still controls her, nor does she wait for the past to become harmless before acting. Her declaration that Ibai is her son is also a declaration of protection: she refuses Rosario’s claim on the child and confronts the threat directly. Their relationship remains marked by violence, secrecy, and an unresolved history, but its immediate direction has changed. Amaia, once the child who sought refuge in her sisters’ beds, now acts to prevent her mother from reaching the next generation.