Sleep Apnea

Sleep apnea is described as a temporary cessation of breathing during sleep, a condition that gives a medical name to experiences once attributed to Inguma. The connection brings folklore into the novel’s investigation of infant deaths, but the text does not diagnose any individual death as sleep apnea; instead, it holds traditional explanation beside the grief and uncertainty surrounding a child’s death.

The Condition and Its Folkloric Explanation

The account defines sleep apnea as a period in which a sleeping person stops breathing without an apparent cause and then begins again. The pause may last only seconds, but it can also continue long enough to cause death. The explanation notes that the condition is often found among smokers and very corpulent people, presenting it as a bodily event rather than, by itself, proof of a supernatural cause.

Basque tradition gives that frightening interruption another form. Inguma is described as a night demon who enters the rooms of sleepers, sits on their chests, constricts their throats, and steals their breath. The same tradition attributes nightmares and nighttime choking to the spirit, and holds it responsible for sudden infant deaths during sleep. The resemblance between the legend’s image of a weight on the chest and the bodily fact of interrupted breathing makes the folklore legible beside the medical account without making them identical.

Fear, Enclosure, and Protection

The traditional precautions against Inguma turn a respiratory fear into a problem of domestic space. Sleeping with windows open was considered dangerous because the spirit could enter; people said to be vulnerable closed doors and windows and covered even the smallest gaps. The imagined threat was difficult to exclude completely, since Inguma was believed able to pass through the narrowest opening.

A protective formula was recited before sleep. Its opening, “Inguma, I do not fear you,” asserted defiance before the spirit could act; the rest set it an impossible task of counting all the stars in the sky, the herbs on earth, and the grains of sand on the coast. The delay imposed by the counting was meant to keep the demon occupied until morning. The account compares this strategy to the traditional belief that witches had to count the thorns of a protective flower before entering a house. In both examples, protection works through a ritual that turns the threat’s approach into an unfinishable task.

Infant Loss and the Limits of Explanation

The novel sets these beliefs against Markina’s recollection of his baby brother’s death. The child was three weeks old. After his mother fed and changed him one morning and put him back to bed, the family heard her scream around midday. Markina remembers running upstairs with his father and seeing his mother try to breathe life into the baby, although he already understood that the child was dead. The scene records the discovery and the family’s response; it does not identify sleep apnea as the cause.

The loss continued long after the discovery. Markina recalls his mother’s cries, followed by silence and her repeated question about where her baby was. She stopped speaking to or touching her husband and surviving son, blamed herself, attempted suicide, and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. In recounting this history, Markina describes the death of a healthy baby as impossible for his mother to accept as natural. That conviction echoes the fear preserved in the tradition of Inguma, but the narrative supplies no medical diagnosis that would settle the cause.

Yolanda’s account of her children’s deaths introduces a different uncertainty: she insists that their bodies are not in the tomb, and later confirms that her baby’s body was stolen. That revelation concerns what happened to the remains, not how the children died. Read alongside the account of sleep apnea, it underscores the distinction between a possible explanation for death and the separate facts that an investigation must establish.