Gaueko

Gaueko is the name Amaia Salazar remembers from her grandmother Juanita for the old fear that gathers around her in darkness. More than a separately established creature, it is the story’s night-bound image for a terror that inhabits Amaia’s dreams, recedes under the pressure of understanding, and returns when her hard-won calm is disturbed.

Name and Imagery

Amaia’s fear takes the shape of an old vampire hovering over her bed while she sleeps, hidden in the shadows and filling her dreams with dreadful presences. She recalls that Juanita called it Gaueko, meaning the one of the night. The name gives an identity to something that has long seemed both intimate and difficult to grasp: an invisible, unwelcome traveler that reveals itself in moments of weakness.

The image is at once supernatural in its language and rooted in Amaia’s inner life. The passage does not establish Gaueko as an independently acting being; instead, it presents the presence through Amaia’s experience of fear. Its power lies in the way it makes darkness feel occupied, while its retreat remains connected to Amaia’s ability to face what she has kept buried.

Fear, Memory, and Retreat

For years, Amaia carried this fear without fully confronting its source. A breach in her defenses allowed light, understanding, and comprehension to expose terrible facts that had marked her life and that she had forcibly buried in her soul. Knowing the truth and facing it became her first step against the fear. The apparent withdrawal of Gaueko therefore follows not a physical struggle but a change in Amaia’s relation to her past: recognition weakens the darkness in which the fear had remained concealed.

That victory is deliberately incomplete. Amaia understands that she has won a battle, not the war. She works to keep the breach in the wall open, and the light entering through it strengthens both her relationship with James and the view of herself she has built over the years. Gaueko’s retreat registers real progress, but the text does not turn that progress into a permanent cure.

Return During Pregnancy

Amaia’s pregnancy initially coincides with an unusually peaceful period. She feels well throughout most of it, sleeps soundly without nightmares or shocks, and has more energy than she expects. The child growing inside her brings a peace she had never imagined. That calm ends about a week before the scene of labor, when, as the narration puts it, the old evil returns.

During a severe contraction, Amaia distinguishes the fear from ordinary apprehension about giving birth. The pain feels like an iron corset tightening around her kidneys and compressing her lungs, but what frightens her is deeper: a familiar terror she has faced before. In this moment Gaueko marks the return of an old vulnerability at the edge of a major physical and emotional threshold, not proof that Amaia’s earlier confrontation was false.

A later dream breaks the near-grace in which she has lived since conceiving her daughter. Lucía Aguirre appears as a silent, freezing, bewildered figure, and Amaia wakes distressed by the anguish the dream has conveyed. The episode places Gaueko among the nightmares and ghosts that had seemed banished to another world, making their return a sharp contrast with the pregnancy’s long stretch of rest. The presence remains a measure of Amaia’s struggle: understanding has opened a way into the light, but fear can still find its way back.