Someone stifled a scream. The third, the hole in the door through which they passed food. A woman brought her hand to her mouth. The fourth, the marks on the wall, the days numbered with fingernails. Then he read the messages one by one, the ones Graciela sent pretending to be Carmen. I’m fine, my son. Rodrigo read aloud, and between each message he left a silence that weighed like lead. Don’t worry. Another silence. It’s best not to call me this week.
Graciela began to back away. Confidence melted from her face like wax. “That’s not true!” she shouted. “I took care of her. I brought her food every day. She was crazy, she hurt herself.” Rodrigo didn’t answer her; he addressed the town. “This woman,” he said, pointing at her. “My mother took her in when she was 12. My mother raised her, fed her, gave her a roof over her head, gave her a plot of land to build her house, and that’s how she repaid her.”
Locking her up in chains, stealing her money, impersonating her so I wouldn’t suspect anything. Doña Matilde stepped forward, looked Graciela up and down, and spat on the ground in front of her. She didn’t say a word; there was no need. Don Agustín stood trembling, walked to the center of the plaza, and spoke in front of everyone. I went three times to ask about Carmelita. Three times. The first time she told me she was with a friend, the second time that she had gone to Guadalajara, the third time that she was in a clinic and couldn’t receive visitors.
Her voice broke, and all three times I believed her. Because I raised her, Carmen, because I thought no one would do that to the woman who gave her everything. She clenched her fists. Tears streamed down her face. Forgive me, I should have broken down that door myself. Doña Matilde stood beside her. Her eyes were red. “I was there too,” she said twice, and she told me the same thing, that she was fine, that she was being taken care of. “I used to bring her bags of fruit to send to her, and that wretched woman, who knows what she did with them?”
The whole town carried the same shame. Everyone had asked questions at some point. Everyone had received a different lie, and everyone had left feeling reassured because the liar was the trusted niece, the one Carmen had raised, the one who lived next door. No one imagined that this very person was the monster. Tomás saw how the entire town looked at his wife with disgust. He saw the eyes of the men he knew, the ones who played cards with him on Sundays, staring at him as if he were a cockroach.
He couldn’t take it anymore. He turned around and started walking quickly toward the back street. He didn’t get far. Three men from the town grabbed him before he turned the corner. They brought him back to the plaza. They didn’t hit him; there was no need. Shame had already broken something inside him that wouldn’t be repaired. Graciela kept shouting that she was innocent, that it was all a misunderstanding, that she loved her aunt. No one listened to her anymore. The whole town had turned its back on her.
Literally and metaphorically, people turned away one by one, their backs on Graciela until she was left alone in the middle of the plaza with her husband holding her arms and her own daughter watching her from afar behind Rodrigo, without taking a step toward her. Lupita had already chosen her side. The next day, Rodrigo went down to the village with a lawyer. Not just any lawyer. A lawyer from the city, recommended by a friend of his in the United States.
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