"The intruder could hear the murmur of the television in the adjacent room, and the heavy breathing of the woman asleep on the sofa, lit by the screen’s cold light. The intruder’s eyes slid over the room, captivated by the moment, drinking in every detail, as though wanting to preserve that instant, transform it into a memento to be cherished forever. Eager but calm, the figure memorized the gentle pattern of the wallpaper, the framed photographs, the travel bag containing the little girl’s nappies and clothes, and then focused on the cot. A feeling akin to intoxication overcame the intruder, accompanied by nausea in the pit of the stomach."
The opening pages of this novel read like the opening scene in the screenplay for a slasher film. The reader instantly finds themselves inside the consciousness of an “intruder” whose purpose certainly seems malevolent. The sickness in the stomach is occasioned by the sight of the actual baby whose presence is merely alluded to in this excerpt. In a matter of seconds, the “seeming” of malevolence turns into an actual display of it. Commencing your novel with the murder of a baby is a risky gambit. The risk is increased all the more because the actual description of the murder is not cleaned up, but fully describes the consequences of the intruder’s actions upon the innocent infant. What may be the most disturbing thing about this mercifully short opening chapter, however, is that by the end of the act the killer’s morality seems ambiguous. This ambiguity is foreshadowed in the quiet above in which the malevolent intent is allusively hinted at rather than starkly implied. The decision to open the novel in this way will prove to serve a purpose, however. By the end of the story, morality has become a murky swamp.
“…the baby’s great-grandmother insisted that Inguma was responsible for the girl’s death. According to her, Inguma is a demon, a creature that enters people’s bedrooms at night, sits on their chests while they’re asleep, and robs them of their breath.”
Inguma is a devilish force in Basque mythology who is closely associated with dreams. This demonic spirit which would in most police investigations be immediately dismissed becomes a centerpiece of the mystery of the intruder responsible for killing the infant in that opening scene. In addition to killing children, Inguma has been blamed for deaths determined to have been caused by sleep apnea as well as engineering the most intense of nightmares. The death of the baby will bring about comparisons of mythic demonology as the historic killer of babies to the still-not-quite explained scientific determination of Sudden Infant Death Syndome (SIDS). As a character in the story explains, however, SIDS is merely the term written on official death certificates as a collective name describing multiple unexplained deaths of children under the age of two, though mostly limited to those less than a year old. The suggestion being, of course, that until the actual specific scientifically proven cause of death which fall under the umbrella term SIDS is determined, why should soul-sucking demons be ruled out entirely?
“In this family, we are experts at keeping terrible secrets, behaving as if everything were fine.”
A conversation between important characters in the latter part of the book helps to situate the pervasive sense of moral ambiguity that originates in the opening scene and continues to develop throughout. This admission of pretense in the face of knowledge of immoral secrets caps an intense scene in which one character blackmails another for having done things that are definitely blackmail-worthy. Neither is easily characterized as definitively good or bad people. When Rosario tells the woman she is blackmailing that she fully understands why she did what she did, she is basically describing the foundation upon which moral ambiguity exists in real life. Certain acts are so malevolently evil that understanding why they are committed is beyond most people’s ability to understand. A great deal of discourse in the novel is committed to the futility of trying to understand the inexplicable actions by attaching one’s own personal sense of logic to them. The moral morass in which the book ends is the result of the extent to which people are able to convince themselves of the lie that everything is fine. The conflict only arises as the result of some people having a lower tolerance for such pretense than others.
