Your daughter looked at me with fear. She looked at me saying, Don’t touch me, don’t come any closer, she looked at me saying, Stay where you are, don’t leave your place. What is my place? Under, my place is under, always under, no matter how high I go, I’ll always be under. And for that reason my hands rose, my arms could not restrain themselves, my nails felt like daggers, and I could only tell your daughter forcefully while I killed her with caresses, I’m your Indian, I’m the Indian you don’t want to see in yourself, I’m not killing you, I’m killing myself, I see clearly that if I kill you, I kill myself, if I condemn you, I condemn myself, but now I can’t stop, my entire life is going downhill and I’m not going to fall alone, you’re going to fall with me, you’re going to pay for your fearful look at the Indian who dared to look at you, I know I can never possess you, what’s your name, woman, call me man, call me Indian, I know you’ll have me whipped if I let you go, I want you, but that doesn’t give you the right to be afraid of me, you can feel what you like toward me, physical repugnance, social scorn, racial discrimination, but don’t feel fear, not fear, please, for the sake of your life, don’t be afraid of me, if you keep looking at me with fear, I won’t be able to let you go, pressing my hands harder and harder around your neck, don’t fear me for no reason, I’m not bad, I’m not bad, is that what you want to hear now that you can’t talk anymore and only show your tongue and can’t close your eyes filled with terror of the twilight because you know there won’t be another day, because each night is the last night in the world, Alejandra, Alejandra, I kill you without even knowing your name, Alejandra, forgive me, forgive me for the pain you made me feel when, without opening your mouth, you said:
Don’t come any closer. I’m afraid of you.
All my life I wanted to drive fear out of my head. Señora: Your daughter was afraid of me, but I was more afraid of her for fearing me, and I was afraid of myself for not knowing how to overcome my fear.
Please don’t write to me again, Señora Vanina. You say I have all the time in the world. I’m going to believe you. God bless you. Thank you for writing to me. Thank you for paying attention to me.
José Nicasio, you have nothing to thank me for. I only wanted you to know whose life you had taken. Thank you for listening to me. Thank you for paying attention to me.
Alessandra, my dear daughter. I have communicated with the man who killed you. I wanted him to know whom he had killed. I didn’t want him to go to his death without understanding who you were. I don’t know if I achieved my purpose. I felt that something closed exists in this man, a door that no one — not even he — could open. That’s why I’m writing to you. A letter with a mortal post office box. I feel dissatisfied, daughter, diminished because of everything I would have wanted to tell that man and couldn’t. I don’t know if it was a hidden contempt for his intelligence, which would damage the basis of my intuition: Señor, know who my daughter was, Alessandra, Alejandra, Sandra, Sandy. Know whom you killed. Be my accomplice. Be, before you die, the memory of my daughter’s death.
Did he understand me? I couldn’t tell him that you freed the executioner. Not with your sex. Only with your gaze. But I wanted to free the executioner, do you understand, my darling? Better yet, do you approve? Alessandra, my dear daughter, perhaps I said to that man,
Make a kingdom of your prison. Don’t move again. Don’t ever move again. Don’t touch anything.
Do you remember, Alessandra? You had so much confidence in me, the confidence you always denied your father, that you reserved only for me, which is the reason I had to communicate with your killer, so he would understand whom he murdered. You remember: You were reading Pascal and quoted it to me. All the evils in the world come from our inability to remain still, seated in our chair.
Now I’ve written to a man locked in a cell in California about a woman walled up in a church in Coyoacán. We all come from somewhere else. We all leave Pascal’s chair and allow ourselves to be carried along by the great magnetism of the world. I imagine that man whom I’ll never see in person, and I see a dark pilgrim whose ancestors reached the land where the gods have their mountains, he migrated to Oaxaca and ended up in California.
The nation is called the U.S.A. What is the name of the Mexican locked in that prison? Can I comfort him from my own wandering, my dear, can I speak of my Spanish father killed by the Falange, can I speak of my mother fleeing the Italian Fascists? Can I speak in the name of my own orphanhood, sent as a girl to Veracruz in a ship loaded with orphans? Can I speak in the name of all this endless moving around of a humanity erring and errant, fleeing and fleet, incapable of remaining still because it believes that immobility is the opposite of freedom?
We are free because we move. We leave a wound called solitude and travel to another wound called death. There is a crossroads between the point of departure and the port of arrival. On that carrefour, my adored child, we always meet the other, the one who is not like us, and we find ourselves obliged to understand that if we move and meet one another, we ought to love one another on account of the contrast. Did you feel that contrast with your killer? Did he feel it with you, my love? Or do we perhaps go out into the world to fatally choose evil?
Fatally, because at the crossroads, we meet the other person and act on that person, giving free rein to our freedom, which is always the freedom to affect the lives of others. Perhaps José Nicasio, when he saw you that afternoon in Monte Albán, had a secret fear of not being free with you, betraying his freedom if he let you pass. He had to act before you, with you, but he didn’t know how. You gave him the opportunity. You were afraid of him.
You decided for him, my adored child. He wanted to choose another person as a sign of his freedom. Except on that afternoon there was no one else but you. If José Nicasio hadn’t approached you, he would have betrayed himself. He lived for that moment, do you understand? Imagine him alone before an alien, forbidden person, daring to look at her in search of a smile. Instead, he saw only the fear in your eyes. He saw the evil, Alessandra. Your fear of him was evil for him. He lived his life to win respect. Above all, the respect of not being seen as a man who was frightening, evil, hidden, ugly, Indian.
If he hadn’t killed you, José Nicasio would have betrayed himself. He had to kill you to know that he existed. That he culminated his life saying,
“Don’t be afraid of me. Please. Don’t give me fear. Give me love.”
And you gave him fear.
He killed you out of fear of himself, of his effort to come out of obscurity. You betrayed him with your rejection, my dear.
Now, kneeling before the urn that holds your remains, I tell you that perhaps you didn’t know how to remove the fear from your consciousness. Your intelligence, so brilliant, had that enormous flaw. You were afraid. It’s my fault. You gave me so much. If I can write these lines, it is because by educating you, I educated myself. But I, because of protective love, because of my protective devotion, could not tell you in time:
Don’t be afraid. A day will come when intelligence isn’t enough. You have to know how to love.