The Mixquiahuala Letters

After returning to America, Teresa goes to New York to celebrate the new year with Alicia. Alicia’s cousin Alexis is a flamenco guitarist and has come to New York from Spain with his friend El Gallo. Alexis wants to make his fortune in America. Teresa and Alexis quickly become lovers, and Alicia and El Gallo pair off as well, even though El Gallo is married. The four spend their days having sex, touring the city, and listening to music. Teresa finds a Christmas card from Wolfgang in Alicia’s apartment, prompting Alicia to give Teresa a photo of him as he requested. The photo is soaked in pungent oil that makes Teresa nauseous. She goes to bed to sleep off the nausea, and Alicia comes in to wake her later. Teresa tells Alicia that the day she left Mexico City at the end of their second trip, an old beggar approached her and told her not to leave. He smelled like the oil on Wolfgang’s picture and bore some resemblance to Wolfgang. Teresa ponders all this. She tells Alicia that Alexis can burn the picture; Alicia says that he already has.

Alexis moves in with Teresa and the poet in Chicago. The poet is at first annoyed that Teresa has disrupted their domestic arrangement, but Alexis’s passion and musical abilities quickly win him over. The three take over separate spheres of responsibility: Alexis cooks, Teresa cleans, and the poet pays the bills with money from his family and proceeds from his work. Teresa wakes up one night to find Alexis tenderly rocking the poet in his arms and singing him to sleep. Alexis decides that he prefers women to men, however, and the poet moves out shortly afterward.

El Gallo returns to his wife and children in Spain, and Alexis tells Alicia to forget him and give herself wholly to her work. She applies to a prestigious art program and is accepted. Shortly thereafter, she joins a women’s group that demands that its members stay celibate to find self-sufficiency. Alicia is celibate for a while, but she soon invites one of her male classmates named Abdel, a Vietnam veteran who had hoped to become a filmmaker before the war, to move in with her because he’s going through a divorce. The two quickly become lovers.

Teresa becomes pregnant with Alexis’s baby and has an abortion. Alexis was initially supportive of the abortion but comes to Teresa after the procedure and says he’s changed his mind—he wanted the baby after all. He accuses Teresa of being selfish and storms out of the apartment. He comes back a few days later and moves out. Teresa goes to stay with her sister, who had pleaded with her not to go through with the abortion. Teresa apologizes to Alicia for not keeping in touch as she underwent and recovered from the abortion.

Teresa is 26 and living with an abusive man. She no longer writes poetry and now neglects her appearance, sleep, and diet. She becomes aware that the man she’s living with is involved with another woman. One night while she sits alone, she pulls out her old poems, which inspire her to reclaim her life. She goes to see a psychologist and doctor, a friend brings her better food to eat, and she frames one of her drawings. She writes to Alicia that even though Teresa may have been more “traditionally” attractive to men, she ultimately was submissive to them, which led to her abusive relationship.

Five years after she and Alexis split up, Teresa sees him at a nightclub. She knows he regularly spends time there, and so has always avoided it. On that night, however, she feels confident while out on the town with a new man. She goes to the club on the pretense of wanting to see a band that’s playing there. She deliberately places herself near Alexis and asks him to light her cigarette. This letter ends with a poem about the encounter, written from Alexis’s point of view. In the poem he compares the other women he’s been with to Teresa, saying that “She is you / ten years ago” (122) and that “I will always have your love / wrapped in a winter’s night desire” (123). From the fictional Alexis’s standpoint, Teresa writes that he has never loved another woman as much as he loved her.