Why do you shoot off your mouth, José Nicasio.
Learn to calm down.
Life has treated you well.
But the grimace was still there, Señora, as if nothing had happened.
José Nicasio: You’re mistaken if you believe my daughter, Alessandra, discriminated against you. She was incapable of anything so vile. I’m not saying that Sandra was a Sister of Charity. She didn’t display condescension. That kind of thing horrified her. She simply treated inferiors with respect and dignity. I mean, people different from her. She was conscious of the hypocrisies of our society and rejected them. How many times did I ask her to make friends with this girl, approach that woman, and she’d say, No, Mama, you haven’t seen that the girl has already learned the art of dissembling, you haven’t seen that the woman is a master of deceit.
How do you know, Alessandra? They’re not bad people. I know them.
No, it’s not that they’re bad. It’s that they’re obliged to pretend they’re good. They’ve been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don’t want to be like that. I prefer the company of the spirits. .
Please, accept other people’s limitations. Sooner or later, you’ll have to be just a little familiar with society.
Never.
A mother is speaking to you, José Nicasio. I am speaking to you freely and with the futile hope that you yourself feel free. What I’m saying to you about Alessandra, I’m saying so you’ll know who my daughter was. At the same time, I keep asking myself: Who was Alessandra? I thought I knew her character. That is what I’m describing to you. But I also knew that each character has its own exception. Is this what happened to you? That nightfall in Monte Albán, did you see the exception in my daughter? Did you discover the fault, the crack in a personality so carefully constructed?
Her father, my husband, a practical man, would become desperate.
“Tell me, Vanina, doesn’t our daughter have a single defect?”
I would tell him no, Sandra was perfect, because I never was going to allow her own father to dissect her like an insect. For me, Alessandra was sacred. But I am not, and behind my husband’s back, I had to look for the chinks of imperfection in my daughter.
Love.
Did Alessandra really love? Did her love for dead artists and thinkers hide a profound contempt for ordinary people? Forgive me, José Nicasio, was my daughter a social snob, a typical bas bleu? I implore you to forgive my frankness. My husband and I love each other. My husband is an excellent lover. He knows how to give me pleasure. Forgive me. I mean that Alessandra wasn’t born of the routine obligations of marriage. No, my husband knew how to excite me, transport me, raise me to the pleasure enjoyed by a woman who knows herself not only desired, but physically ecstatic. Alessandra was born of pleasure. But she doesn’t seem ever to have touched the pleasure I’m describing to you while she was alive.
I was afraid, observing my daughter’s lack of sexual interest, that her coldness led back to me, to her mother, to that sadness that is the price of love not shared with those you love. Sandra had to know she was beautiful. At least I knew it. When she was already a woman, she would ask me to dry her after her bath. Running the towel along her wet body, I would tell myself how beautiful, how desirable my daughter is, does she know it, or is she still the little girl I would dry with the most delicate love during her childhood?
You know, José Nicasio, there is no human body that isn’t visible and concealed at the same time. What is revealed in our bodies is as important as what is hidden. With my daughter, I had the secret feeling that the visible and the invisible were the same thing. She concealed nothing of her body because its mystery was only in her mind. That was for me, for the world, the invisible part of Alejandra. That was how she offered herself to me, her mother. I had to ask myself, how did she offer herself to a man? What will happen on the day Alessandra opens her visible body to a man who desires her only for her body and only later for her soul? Because in Alessandra, just as she was, there was no dissatisfaction.
Tell me, José Nicasio, do you believe you woke my daughter’s latent bodily dissatisfaction? You, who describe yourself as an ugly man, forgive me for repeating it to you, almost a monkey, a dressed macaque, a simian with a narrow forehead and short neck and long arms? Forgive me. Forgive me. I want to see you the way my daughter saw you that afternoon. You, you couldn’t wake the desire in my daughter. You, you, though you’ll never admit it, desired my daughter that afternoon. You made her feel that a man’s sex was threatening her. You wanted to be loved by a woman who did not desire you. Looked at by a woman who did not direct a glance at you. Greeted by. .
You sexually assaulted Sandra. You took advantage of the solitude of twilight at Monte Albán to unleash your bestial instincts on my helpless daughter. Tell me it happened that way, José Nicasio. I need to know the truth. I’ve been sincere with you. I’ve written to you in prison so you’ll know who my daughter was. You have to know whom you killed that afternoon in Monte Albán.
Answer me.
Tell me you understand.
I’m familiar with your situation. You became a U.S. citizen in San Diego. It was a necessary step, I imagine, to overcome discrimination, no matter how slightly. Now your ambition has worked against you. If you were a Mexican, they would have sentenced you to life, and in the end, influence would have set you free. Not in California. You’ll be tried as a citizen of the United States. You’ll be sentenced to death.
Tell me the truth before you die. Why did you kill my daughter?
Señora Vanina: Believe me, I am deeply grateful for your letters. Word of honor, I respect your courage and spirit enormously. I know what lies ahead. You don’t need to remind me. I swear I want to tell you the truth. We were alone that afternoon, your daughter and I, watching the twilight in Monte Albán. It was clear that was the reason we stayed there when all the visitors had gone. To admire the sunset sitting on the steps of the Zapoteca temple.
What does a gaze mean, Señora? Is a gaze directed at the mountain the same as a gaze directed at a person? Do you look at a twilight and a woman the same way? I didn’t want to look at your daughter, Señora, but I did want to look at her looking just as I was and know I shared with her the emotion of natural beauty. Perhaps I should have controlled myself. Perhaps I should have repeated the lesson of my entire life and continued to be the crouching man. The Indian who does not have permission to raise his eyes from the ground.
I rebelled, Señora. I wanted to look at your daughter. I looked at her. Not like a crouching man but like a haughty one. The arrogant one? The one made equal? Or the one redeemed? Judge however you like. The artist. The one who sees.
Now I blame myself. But you, Señora, do you forgive me for having sought out — the two of us alone, your daughter and I, at that moment of nightfall, in the midst of silence — the eyes of the girl seated three meters from me? Do you forgive me for having believed myself worthy of your daughter’s eyes? Do you pardon my daring to seek out Alejandra’s eyes in order to share the beauty of my country? Do you excuse my having stood without paying attention to the cry of alarm that escaped like a bird from your daughter’s lips? Do you absolve me for my inability to transfer the amiability of my eyes to the bitterness of my lips?
Your daughter looked at me, Señora, and I would have liked to tell her:
I suffer because I cannot help anyone. What am I going to give to my old village of Indians? What am I going to give to the mestizo Mexicans who despise me because I remind them they are part Indian and run the risk of returning to the tribe? What can I give to the gringos who use me as an excuse for feeling like humanitarians? Am I partial everywhere, never an entire being: partial, a quantity between two parts, never an entire being?