Rosario’s Emotional Withdrawal During Pregnancy

Rosario’s emotional withdrawal during her third pregnancy unsettles the life she shares with Juan: although she remains an exacting mother and a capable partner in their bakery, she begins leaving the house at night, walking alone, and closing off conversation. The doctor interprets these changes as possible depression and recommends practical support, but Rosario refuses it. Later discoveries about the twins born in 1980 expose how much of this family history was hidden, giving her earlier silence a darker context while leaving the precise circumstances of the newborn’s death unresolved.

A Marriage Divided by Silence

Juan’s account begins with absence. When he wakes and cannot find Rosario, he searches the house, including the room where their two daughters sleep, the kitchen, the bathroom, and the balcony. He would almost prefer to find her injured and in need of help; what he fears instead is that she has slipped out while he slept. He knows neither where she goes nor with whom, only that she returns before dawn, carrying a coldness that seems to persist between them after she falls asleep. In the bed, he smells the trace of her hair on the pillow and wonders what has changed between them.

The estrangement is especially hard for him to reconcile with the woman he remembers. Rosario had come to Elizondo from San Sebastián, and he had loved her from the first time he saw her. She had borne him two daughters, Flora and Rosaura, and was now pregnant with their third child. In the bakery, she worked beside him and, in his view, had a greater gift for business; her contribution helped the enterprise grow beyond what he had imagined. At home she appeared elegant and attentive, a loving mother to the girls. The woman who now withdrew from him was also the partner whose work and care had shaped their family life.

The distance had begun to reach beyond the marriage. Rosario was reserved with neighbors and avoided other mothers, though she could be charming in the bakery. Until a few months earlier, Elena had been her one friend besides Juan; then the two women stopped speaking. When Juan asked Elena what had happened, she said that she had lost Rosario’s friendship. Rosario’s nighttime departures, solitary walks, absences at unpredictable hours, and silences thus accumulated against a background of shrinking connection. When Juan asked where she went, she gave vague answers about walking and thinking. His light suggestion that she could think at home, with him, drew an angry look and a cold rebuke. Her response made even an ordinary attempt at closeness feel unwelcome.

A Possible Depression, and Refused Help

Juan turns to the doctor because he knows Rosario well but feels unequal to understanding her. The doctor had attended her previous two pregnancies and births, yet Juan still feels that there is little he can say about her inner life: she is strong and rarely complains. He describes the nighttime outings, the evasiveness about going to the bakery, her reluctance to confide in him, and her insistence on being alone. The doctor considers depression a likely explanation, but presents it as an assessment rather than a confirmed diagnosis.

The doctor places that possibility in a local and personal context. He says the valley has a high incidence of depression and suicide, and contrasts the light of the coast, where Rosario comes from, with the darkness of the valley after a year of rain. He also suggests that this pregnancy may be harder because Rosario is older than she was during the first two. In his view, her strict standards apply both to herself and to her roles as mother, wife, and worker: even a wanted pregnancy could intensify the fear that she would not manage everything perfectly. He warns Juan that her state might worsen after the birth and advises patience, affection, and concrete assistance rather than blame.

The proposed help is specific: Juan could take more responsibility for Flora and Rosaura, hire someone for the bakery, or find a woman to assist at home. Rosario will not discuss it. She objects that a local woman would pry into the household and gossip, and insists that she has neglected neither the home nor the girls and still goes to the bakery every morning. When Juan tries to explain that pregnancy may make her existing load too heavy, she says she can manage without help. She also threatens to leave for San Sebastián if he interferes with the way she runs the house, and tells him that even the suggestion has offended her. Her refusal is not simply a denial of exhaustion: it turns assistance into an intrusion and makes Juan’s concern another subject she will not permit him to raise.

The Pattern Returns

Rosario’s anger lasts for days, during which she barely speaks to Juan. Gradually, their household settles back into its familiar rhythm, but the apparent return to normal does not end the departures. She continues going out almost every night, while Juan waits awake for the sound of her return. He promises himself that they will talk the next day, then postpones the conversation again rather than risk her reaction. Relief arrives with the key in the lock, though it offers no explanation for where she has been or why she needed to go.

Juan recognizes his own part in the silence. He feels secretly cowardly and describes himself as afraid of Rosario’s reaction, as a child might fear a stern superior. That fear helps sustain the pattern: her withdrawal closes off discussion, his apprehension keeps him from insisting, and each night’s return postpones the reckoning rather than resolving it. The narrative therefore presents the distance not as a single quarrel but as a repeated domestic routine, maintained by both Rosario’s refusal to speak and Juan’s retreat from confrontation.

The Birth Behind the Silence

Years later, the records Amaia examines make the pregnancy’s history more troubling, though they do not establish a simple cause for Rosario’s withdrawal. The obstetric file lists an uncomplicated natural birth in 1973, with a seemingly healthy girl named Flora, and another in 1975, with a seemingly healthy girl named Rosaura. For 1980 it records an uncomplicated natural twin birth, but names neither baby. The entry establishes that Rosario delivered two children in that pregnancy, a fact the family had not openly shared with Amaia.

A separate search finds a death certificate for a newborn daughter of Juan and Rosario. Its stated cause is crib death, the common term then used for sudden infant death syndrome; the woman explaining the record adds that the baby may have been unwell. Much later, Amaia identifies the death’s surrounding circumstances as mysterious: her mother had concealed the birth from the family, the birth certificate contained irregularities, and bone remains discovered in unusual circumstances appeared to belong to the dead sister. The relatives say the coffin was closed and that they did not insist on seeing the baby. These records and recollections establish concealment and contradiction, not a complete account of the newborn’s death.

Ignacio recalls that relations with Rosario remained good at first, with visits continuing, and suggests that the change began after the baby died. His recollection connects the family’s later distance to the loss, but it does not prove that the documented death explains every feature of Rosario’s behavior during pregnancy. Read beside Juan’s account, the hidden twin history sharpens the significance of what he could not learn at the time: a pregnancy that appeared outwardly ordinary, a wife whose distress resisted his attempts to name or relieve it, and a family silence that endured long after the nights when he waited for her to come home.