Mariana

“My dear, you know that a little girl is a lie, a lie that grows a little every day, but never in the same direction. She’s a chameleon lie, like an artificial flower injected every season with a chemical to make it change color - white today, black tomorrow, day after day, alas, she reaches a point where she shows the world a neutral, undefinable color. She doesn’t stop being a flower, only now, my dear, she is hidden, secret. A hypocritical flower. Forever.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“Mother had another way of looking, too, that bored into me when I had my back turned, making a vacuum around me, driving out every molecule of air, of life. Suffocation.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“A little girl, my dear, is a sin that is paid every attention, to make sure it never turns into virtue. She is taught to hide her thoughts behind false words. Like a doll in a shop window, she learns the gestures of a ritualized imitation of life, and not life itself. She is taught to wear a certain expression: a look of perpetual surprise, always full of innocence, always hungry for rape. A consenting victim. And this is how a child is made into a well brought up girl, as I was.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb

“From the moment Mother first told me ‘’ I never wanted you’’ I undertook to go back in my past to a time before I was born. And I began to understand. She started resenting me the day my fetus swelled her body too much for her to bend elegantly over her damned rosebuch. But I understood that my desire for revenge was too facile, too romantic. I have gone further. I have reached love, or rather the death of love. A commonplace tragedy.”
― Agustín Gómez Arcos, The Carnivorous Lamb