A short story by Daniel A. Olivas
As she stepped into the warm Los
Angeles morning, María remembered what her late mother, Concepción, told her
each night at bedtime since María had turned thirteen: “Mija, when you kill a
man, you must find the weak spot that all men have and make him suffer pain as
he has never suffered before.”
At this point, Concepción would
always lean close, her hot, moist breath smelling of café con leche and
cigarettes, to add: “Don’t forget to look straight into his eyes when you do
it, otherwise his death will have no meaning.”
And María, without fail, would
always ask her mother, “What will I see in his eyes, mamá?”
And also without fail, almost as if
it were a strange dance that they had rehearsed each night for many years,
Concepción would pull back and exclaim: “You will know when you do it right,
mija! You will know it as you know your
own name.”
An hour earlier, María had stood in
Rigoberto’s den, walls filled with books collected throughout the years, as Rigoberto
gently turned the unblemished pages of a rare, inscribed, first English
translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s magnificent novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“How did you find this?” Rigoberto
had asked in amazement, too afraid to lift his eyes from the book lest it
disappear into the ether like so much smoke.
María remembered how she had looked
down at her Latin-American Studies professor, a man three decades her senior, a
brilliant man, winner of too many awards, tenured at a prestigious university,
a man who preyed on beautiful, promising undergraduate students such as
María. She had stood before this man, in
silence, waiting for him to look up at her, into her eyes, the way he never
seemed to do when they were alone in his bedroom. Finally, María’s refusal to answer forced
this great man of letters to turn his face upward, toward this young woman whom
he assumed would be but a titillating footnote in his life.
Their eyes had finally met. María then pulled the long, glistening knife
from her purse. Rigoberto’s eyes widened.
And as she walked down the
sidewalk, warmed by the sun, she smiled because she finally understood her
mother’s advice, fully and completely, as well as she knew her own name.
[“Mamá’s
Advice” first appeared in PANK and is featured in The
King of Lighting Fixtures: Stories (University of Arizona Press).]
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