Cyclopes

Cyclopes are one-eyed mythic beings whose Basque-Navarrese figure Tarttalo embodies the threat of a powerful cave-dweller and devourer. In the novel, the creature’s legend supplies a charged reference for a note left for Amaia Salazar after Jasón Medina’s suicide: the name raises questions about the murder investigation, even as Amaia recalls that Medina confessed to his crime and to imitating another myth-inspired one.

Identity and Attributes

Tarttalo, also known as Tártaro and Torto, is described as a figure of Basque-Navarrese mythology and as a Cyclops. He is enormous, extraordinarily strong, aggressive, and has a single eye. His victims include sheep, maidens, and shepherds; although some accounts also make him a shepherd of his own flocks, the account Amaia reads characterizes him above all as a devourer of Christians.

The eye is Tarttalo’s identifying emblem, while the bones that accumulate in heaps at cave entrances make his violence visible in the landscape. His solitary life in a cave sets him apart from the more inaccessible haunts associated with the goddess-genius Mari: Tarttalo’s caves lie nearer valleys, where he can obtain food. The figure belongs to a wider European family of Cyclopes, with parallels in ancient Greek and Roman mythology. The account also places Tarttalo among the ancient Vascones and says that references to him continued well into the twentieth century.

Legends and Local Setting

The material Amaia reads introduces several well-known legends about Tarttalo’s encounters with shepherds, including a tale of his death by drowning in a well after a shepherd blinds him. It then gives a version associated with Zegama, where Tarttalo is said to have lived at Tartaloetxeta, or Tarttalo’s house, near Mount Sadar. From there, he made raids through valleys and mountains, stealing lambs and people to eat after roasting them.

In the opening of one such tale, two brothers are returning along a path from a neighboring town’s fair, where they have sold their sheep and enjoyed themselves. They are talking animatedly until Tarttalo appears; at the sight of him, they fall silent. The passage establishes the encounter but does not recount its outcome.

The Name in the Investigation

Tarttalo enters the contemporary investigation through a note addressed to Amaia after Jasón Medina, the confessed murderer of Johana Márquez, dies by suicide. Teniente Padua points out the coincidence: Amaia had worked on the Basajaun case, and Medina had attempted to imitate a Basajaun crime to conceal his own. The note’s single mythic name makes Padua wonder whether the connection is more than curious and whether Medina might not have been the author.

Amaia acknowledges that the circumstances are strange but maintains that the investigation had established Medina’s responsibility: he raped and murdered his stepdaughter, then made a clumsy attempt to imitate the Basajaun crime, which he confessed to in detail. The creature’s name therefore functions as an unsettling investigative prompt, not as proof that the established account is false. The novel places a figure from oral legend beside a modern criminal case, allowing myth to intensify uncertainty without resolving it.