Here the simplicity of the child’s vision and emotion gives way to the complexity of adolescence in the relative complexity of these stories, in which the themes are love and sex, birth and death, truth and lies.
The two narrators, “Ixchel” (the Mayan name her lover gives her; she is never otherwise identified) and Patricia Chávez, present themselves in very different voices, the one serious and traditional, the other flip and hard-edged; they are responding in different ways to the knowledge of sexual love and betrayal, of women’s vulnerability, and of death.
For “Ixchel,” there are two realities, one sacred and one profane, and she has chosen the sacred one with its mythic truths. Her sexual initiation is her initiation into this sacred world and has nothing to do with pleasure or the social choices that concern, for example, Patricia Chávez. “Ixchel” seems to sense intuitively a connection between love and death, grief and joy. The reader may wonder, but she does not, why “Chaq” shows her knives and guns but does not kill her as he apparently has killed other young women. In the conventional, ordinary world, there is no resolution to her story—or rather, there is the same resolution as her mother found: “Ixchel” will raise her baby and go on with her life, with no one but her friends Rachel and Lourdes knowing her secret and probably understanding it as imperfectly as the reader does. In the world of the sacred, “Ixchel” will go on believing the truth of what “Chaq” told her and of what happened to her on that “holy night.” In the ordinary, profane world, her story is ridiculous, she was amazingly lucky, and her lover is probably insane; in the sacred world, the world that she and “Chaq” believe in, which is outside time, everything is happening as fate dictates.
Patricia Chávez lives in a world in which nothing out of the ordinary has happened to her; the “death and resurrection” of her tocaya (the other Patricia), which she reports, is merely a stupid mistake, a nine-day wonder for the papers and television. The fact that the mistake was made at all suggests that Patricia Benavídez’s parents are careless and that the girl will probably run away again, tired of working in her father’s taco shop and tired of being beaten. Patricia Chávez is not really concerned.
But by the magic of naming, which Patricia C. acknowledges in calling Patricia B. her tocaya, or namesake, the two are doubles (like Poe’s William Wilson and his nameless double). The dead girl, too, is another double (a triple?), for she has no name until Patricia B.’s parents “name” her by mistake. That means that, on a symbolic level, what happens to one happens to all three. In one sense, Patricia B. has died and returned to life, as has her tocaya, Patricia C.; in another sense, both of them are as bereft of life as the third girl, the one found in a ditch. The sacred and profane exist side by side in this story, too, but here the sacred world—the world of religion, of death and resurrection—is reduced to empty “theology” talks like “Heavy Metal and the Devil” that Patricia Chávez rightly derides, without knowing of anything more meaningful.
While “Ixchel,” in the previous story, has an intuitive faith in the mythos of her parents’ culture (the “truth” told her by “Chaq”) to sustain her, Patricia B. (and by extension her tocaya, the narrator here) must resort to a phony British accent and the pseudo-sophistication of U.S. teen culture to escape the unhappiness of her family life—an escape that (by extension) the third girl failed of achieving. And while “Chaq’s” lies to “Ixchel” represent (at least to him and her) something mythically truer than the facts, Patricia B.’s parents’ lies to the media (ironically saying essentially the same thing “Chaq” says: “She was my little princess”) are so shamelessly untrue that Patricia C. doesn’t even bother to identify them as lies.
