La Expresión del Deseo

Togo just wants to watch his neighbors' homes, wash their cars and clean up their sidewalks. But the drug traffickers want more from him.

Mariana doesn’t like her name and starts calling herself Gloria. Her parents split up before she was one year old and today, like many separated couples, they are brought back together under the same roof only because they don’t have a decent job. Cristina, her mother, rents a part of the house to her ex-husband for a bit of extra money. “Francia” talks about those people who will never travel far from their home, where they take refuge, for good or bad, from all disgusting things in the outside world. Meanwhile, Mariana puts on her headphones when she hears her parents fighting. Those fights which now serve as a relief to the helpless.

A story about metaphor, exploring metaphor rather than a naturalistic or contemporary narrative, avoiding the discursive. It's not difficult to find the parallel between what happens and what actually happened: a family (us as a society) protected by a violent drunk (the government at the time), his wife and son, naked victims of their father's violence and impotence. The well-meaning bourgeois family (the cultural empire of good manners) seems to be restoring order when, in the face of such a situation, what they're actually doing is appropriating what they need under the guise of imperialist civilization. Reading it merely as a vampire story reaffirms this metaphor: out of our ignorance, we despise what conquers us, only for it to conquer us again without hesitation, with morality and good manners on its side.