Cleansing the River and Washing Away Offenses

Cleansing the River and Washing Away Offenses is a recurring motif in Amaia Salazar’s visions, where the Baztán River becomes more than a landscape: it is a place in which violence, grief, and unanswered demands surface. The command to clean the river and valley links the suffering of the dead to the work of confronting what has been done, while the birth of Amaia’s son Ibai gives the river image an intimate, living counterpart.

The River as a Visionary Space

During labor, Amaia’s darkened room gives way in her perception to a forest. The floor seems to soften into damp earth, and the smell of floor wax turns to the richer, mineral scent of wet ground. She moves among trees and hears the Baztán River running nearby. At the stony bank she whispers the river’s name; her voice echoes against the rock walls enclosing its course. The shift from bedroom to forest and river places an ordinary, bodily crisis inside a landscape experienced as charged and otherworldly.

There she sees a dead girl, about fifteen, lying among the river stones. The girl’s eyes remain open, her hair spreads in orderly strands, and her hands are turned upward in a gesture of offering that displays emptiness. The image does not present the river as a cleansing refuge: it is instead where the dead become visible. As Amaia’s vision continues, the bodies’ hands rise together and point toward her belly. A wind seems to issue from the river, disturbing the water and the dead girls’ hair; amid it, Amaia hears the crying of the girls and of the child she once was. The river gathers separate experiences of suffering into one unsettling scene, without making their pain disappear.

The Demand to Cleanse

The figures on the rocks are women with webbed feet, long hair, and sharp teeth. They strike the water with their feet and repeat a demand that Amaia clean the river. Their chant expands to include the valley and the washing away of an offense. Its movement matters: the river is not named as the only place that needs attention. The valley, too, is implicated, and the demand reaches beyond physical water toward a wrong that remains unsettled.

Amaia answers that she cannot do anything. The dead girls’ crying and the figures’ insistence leave her overwhelmed rather than empowered. This refusal or inability is sharply contrasted with the command’s certainty: the voices do not explain how the river should be cleaned or identify a remedy, but they do insist that the offense must be addressed. The scene therefore makes cleansing less a completed purification than an obligation that has not yet been met. Its force comes from the gap between the dead’s demand and Amaia’s immediate helplessness.

Labor, Naming, and the River’s Return

The vision breaks into the circumstances of childbirth. A midwife calls Amaia back to the delivery and tells her that the next contraction requires her to push; James supports her from behind as she grips the bars. Yet the demand from the river persists over the midwife’s voice. The river’s call and the physical work of giving birth occupy the same moment, and Amaia’s effort to return to the present does not silence what she has heard.

After the boy is born, the midwife remarks that Amaia has kept saying his name during labor. Amaia recognizes the word as meaning river, looks at James and then at her son, and confirms that the child will be called Ibai. The naming does not resolve the vision’s demand, but it carries the river from the landscape into Amaia’s family. The same image that has held the dead and their grief now also names her living child. That contrast gives the motif a double significance without cancelling either side: the river is associated both with suffering that calls for recognition and with the beginning of a new life.

The Motif and the Work of the Investigation

The river imagery also resonates with Amaia’s encounters with victims beyond the childbirth vision. Lucía Aguirre appears to her beside the Baztán River, amid violent wind. Unable at first to make herself heard, Lucía eventually repeats a plea for Amaia to catch someone. Amaia promises that she will, but Lucía’s face sinks into the river. This vision does not repeat the cleansing command word for word; instead, it turns the river encounter into a demand for action. The dead do not simply appear as memories. They press an unfinished task upon the living, while the river remains the place where their message is received and threatened with disappearance.

That pressure has a concrete counterpart in the investigation. Amaia examines a series of murders in which the perpetrators’ violence against women is accompanied by the postmortem removal of an arm, a detail that does not fit the otherwise recognizable patterns of prolonged abuse, violence, and substance use. In one prison, a man has scratched the word Tarttalo into a wall with his toothbrush handle; a similar message, with the same unusual spelling, appears in the cell of the Logroño murderer. Jasón Medina confesses to killing Johana Márquez but is bewildered when asked about her missing arm. He says that after killing her impulsively he went home to fetch a rope, intending to imitate a crime he had read about; when he returned, the arm was already gone. Amaia consequently asks how the figure who took the trophy could have arrived at the exact moment, and considers that he may have been following Medina.

These investigative details do not establish that the river visions explain the crimes. Rather, the motif and the case share a concern with what remains concealed when violence is treated as finished: a missing limb, a repeated mark, a victim who cannot speak plainly, or an offense left unacknowledged. The command to clean the river is therefore not a promise that water can erase wrongdoing. In the visions and the investigation alike, what has been done returns as a demand to notice, identify, and pursue it.