Caridad engages in a life of drunken promiscuity until she meets up with the wrong lover. She runs afoul of a serial killer who tortures and mutilates her. “Sofi was told that her daughter’s nipples had been bitten off. She had also been scourged with something, branded like cattle. Worst of all, a tracheotomy was performed because she had also been stabbed in the throat” (33).
Reaction to Caridad’s plight is peculiarly Catholic. It is an enabling combination of pity and condemnation. Caridad’s horrible experience is seen as her penance she had to undergo for her sin of fornication. Depending on the individual point of view, “For those with charity in their hearts, the mutilation of the lovely young woman was akin to martyrdom” (33). Masses were held, a novena was devoted to her, and old women prayed for her. “But there are still those for whom there is no kindness in their hearts for a young woman who has enjoyed life, so to speak” (33). The sheriff and the local police department make no effort to find whoever attacked her.
Caridad does not benefit from any kind of psychiatric support that would make sense of her attack, help her see her self-destructive behavior and not internalize her trauma the way she did. She cannot turn her anger outward on men, even as she withdraws from them. However, it is telling that she saw her attacker as an inhuman force, rather than a human monster. It is something her mentor, Doña Felicia described as the “malogra,” a “wicked wool spirit” (78). When Caridad falls in love with another woman at first sight. She tracks her down, “because she knew that she could not bear the thought of living without that woman“(79), but finds her with another woman. Rather than pursuing a relationship with her anyway, she leaves the area and lives out the year “in a cave in the Sangre de Cristo mountains” (86).
There her path crosses with Francisco, the celibate santero, defined as pious (Larousse 467), who falls in love with her, but suffers an even more religious, sexually repressed form of susto, or fright (Larousse 495). “As Caridad became more and more fixed in his consciousness, worse than any of the pine splinters that stayed lodged in his palms, Francisco el Penitente became more determined to exorcise her out at whatever cost to his body and soul” (191). Francisco sees a healthy lust for women as the devil's trap, so he sublimates his desire for her by putting her on a saintly pedestal. However, his sexual frustration leads him to spy on Caridad only to discoverthe equally repressed Caridad spying on a lesbian couple, having fallen in love with one of them, Esmeralda (203). Ironically, Caridad was aware he was following her around for months (208), but was too inhibited to confront him about it.
Suffering from his own secret passion for Caridad, Francisco recognizes hers for Esmeralda and reacts as the rejected lover in this subterranean love triangle of which Esmeralda is totally unaware, stalking, abducting and confronting her privately (207) before he eventually chases both women over a cliff by Esmeralda’s grandmother’s house in Sky City (211). Then Francisco hangs himself (212).
It is telling that, rather than confronting Francisco’s psychotic and anti-social behavior, neither Caridad nor Esmeralda challenged it by filing police reports and getting protective orders. Instead they simply ignored it, with tragic consequences to themselves and Francisco. Even an open lesbian, like Esmeralda, had been indoctrinated by the culture to enable a man’s controlling behavior.
Works Cited
Castillo, Anna. So Far From God. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993.
Larousse Concise Dictionary. Spanish-English/English-Spanish
Third Edition, Paris France. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.
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