The early 1980s

The early 1980s mark the period in which groups from Lesaka and Elizondo carried out sacrifices, a past that becomes part of Amaia Salazar’s attempt to understand a pattern of infant deaths. The period enters the investigation not as a fully reconstructed history but through fragments she brings together: the book, the instructions for the offering, and Sarasola’s account of the dangers contained in Berasategui’s files.

Historical Reference

The novel places the groups’ sacrificial acts in the early 1980s. The available account does not specify the dates or describe the rites themselves; it establishes the period as the historical setting for actions whose consequences Amaia is now trying to trace.

Place in Amaia’s Investigation

As Amaia studies her maps and adds two marks to the pattern, the earlier sacrifices become part of her effort to make sense of lives whose identities were never recorded. Her attention shifts from the shape of the evidence to the people behind it: she reflects on the indignity of not knowing their faces, and of lives so brief that no one had even assigned them a place in the world. The distance between the acts of the early 1980s and Amaia’s present-day inquiry is therefore measured not only by time, but by the unresolved absence of the victims’ identities.