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.
