Sonia

Sonia Ballarena is a young mother grieving the death of her daughter. Her testimony to Amaia Salazar gives the loss a forceful personal dimension: she rejects the idea that another child could take the place of the one who died, condemning the proposal as a way of reducing her daughter to something replaceable.

Appearance and Introduction

Sonia is introduced in mourning, dressed entirely in black and holding a crumpled tissue in her lap. Her eyes are red; the pallor of her face and the small red marks and broken veins from crying remain visible. The narration presents grief as having settled into a quieter phase, marked by subdued voices and slow, almost weightless movements.

When Iriarte thanks her for receiving the visitors on the day of her daughter’s funeral, Sonia gives no sign that she has heard. She stares into space until her mother, Inés Ballarena, gently calls her by name. Only then does she look up; Amaia is seated opposite her.

Grief and Testimony

After a pause, Sonia’s tears begin to fall. Inés embraces her, and Sonia hides her face against her mother’s neck. They remain silent for more than a minute before Sonia separates from the embrace and looks at the visitors. The scene gives her grief time to become visible rather than treating it as a brief prelude to questioning.

Sonia recounts that Valentín told her not to worry because he would get her pregnant again soon, so that in nine months she would have another child to occupy the place of the baby she had lost. She says she screamed that she did not want another child and that no child could replace her daughter. The timing and purpose of the suggestion are central to her account: she was still confronting the immediate loss when Valentín proposed a new pregnancy as a substitute.

Her Position on Replacement

Sonia tells Amaia that the proposal seemed monstrous because it made their daughter an object whose place could be filled. Addressing Amaia as someone who has a child, she explains that the thought of having another baby for that purpose disgusted her. She also voices a fear she had while responding to Valentín: if she had another child to replace the one she lost, she might be unable to love that child, might not love the child in the same way, or could even come to hate the child.

Her testimony distinguishes the possibility of becoming a mother again from the demand that a new child repair the absence of the dead one. Sonia does not present another pregnancy as an answer to grief; she insists on the irreducible identity of the daughter she has lost.

Contact with the Investigation

At the end of the exchange, Amaia asks whether Sonia or Valentín had any connection with Berasategui, a psychiatrist at the university clinic, or with the Pamplona lawyers Lejarreta y Andía. Sonia says she has never heard those names. Her answer records the limits of what she knows at that point, while her account of Valentín’s proposal supplies the investigators with a direct statement about the couple’s response to their child’s death.