Caray, Caray!

I said I was staying away from Barrera, but Sylvia was so sweet to me I had to come back tonight. Part of the dreariness of this novela is that everybody in it knows it's a dog and they can hardly drag themselves through the scenes. Nutria is the lucky one, she will die soon and then she can try her luck in some new, better production.

Anyway - Veronica is home now, at the restaurant, with Maite and Victor. She asks Victor why he doesn't care that Maite goes out with other men, and - surely there had once been some passion between two such sexy people! Obviously she doesn't know Victor's Big Secret. He asks: "Would you have preferred more traditional parents?" He takes her to the doctor, who finds nothing abnormal in her brain, because alternate personalities don't register on an MRI. Maite has two suitors, the poetry-wielding Ulises, and Pancho. Pancho romantically says: "I have a lot of money and you'd be an adequate woman to share it with." Even so, I prefer him to Unibrow.

Federico is, once again, yelling at his mother, who's wearing an absolutely hideous hot-pink bathrobe. She has been caught in the withered arms of Octavio, a guy from out of town who had been a friend to her brothers. Federico orders her to come with him. Why does she do what he says? He yells at her - "At Your Age, Mother!?" - and derides her for arrumacos, which is not in my dictionary but which I suspect to be hanky-panky. How can he call her a whore when she's wearing this ridiculous pink bathrobe? Federico forbids her to see Octavio. She says, futilely, "Respect me!"

In his usual two minutes of airtime, Unibrow puts things in boxes. That's an action hero for you. He is moving his family to Aguascalientes to be near the grapevines. Gordo points out Jacinta will be in the picture. Unibrow says it won't be a problem. Nutria the Doomed will be able to get her treatments in Aguascalientes. Unibrow says Manola is a special woman.

At the hospital we discover that Manola, the special woman, wants to get her husband, Gustavo the Cuckold - whom she threw over the balcony railing onto the patio below without completely killing him - back home so she can finish the job. Therefore, she is not at all keen on having nurses round the clock. "I can take care of him myself." Her dad whispers, "I can understand why you pushed him over the banister in the heat of argument, but this would be murder in cold blood." Manola informs us she's not sorry and would do it again (but I guess she'd push harder). Jacinta arrives with - gasp - a nun who will take charge of Gustavo's care. Drat! Federico tells Manola it's mighty fishy, this falling-off-the-balcony-by-accident story. Insinuation City. Maybe murderers can smell each other.

Speaking of murderers - in a parking garage, Jacaranda and her partner in crime have a perfectly audible conversation about their two murders. Haven't they heard of security cameras? She has a bad foreboding - Electra has read her cards and said there's a big change coming - he says that's superstition - she says "Electra's always right, for instance she told me I'd land a rich old guy." "I could have told you that without reading any cards, you'd spent years trying to land a rich old guy, and by the way, he's dead now and you're getting your inheritance tomorrow." "He may come back to haunt me." "Why worry? If that were an option, Magdalena would have been haunting us all these years - remember, your husband is not the first person we've dispatched to the other world." Discretion, people!

Valeria is babbling to the pink bathrobed Remedios about a recipe: "Oh, could it be, is it my mother's?" Ask me if I care. Juanita appears and there's a little plan to go to the internet café. Jacinta magically appears at just that moment and forbids Valeria to go. "You can't keep me locked up here!" Valeria convinces Juanita to stand in for her and sneaks out anyway - she writes Andres and they meet under blue lights near the gate. "My serial-killer granny has taken away my cellphone and I can't even make a long-distance call!" He tells her his family is moving to Aguascalientes. She suggests they can leave each other notes in some horsey place, not convenient but romantic, like the old days. They kiss. Andres is sort of tense and brittle but he's a good kisser.

Federico, brooding, tells Jacinta he found his mother in the arms of an old dude. How shocking. Jacinta says complacently, "Don't worry, sooner or later Divine Justice punishes sinners."

About the Maldonados, the wine guys: their parents had thought they couldn't have kids, but then they had three, and they named them Jose, Josef, and Josefina, and none of the three kids had kids. Well, Jose did, but he doesn't know it.

I'm telling you this because now, Victor takes Maite and Veronica to visit Don Josef Maldonado, who had been his teacher at cooking school. Josef is going to cook conches tonight and persuades Victor et al to stay and eat with him and his siblings. Josef's brother, Jose, is Maite's father. Their sister, Josefina, gets an award for the tightest, most lizard-like facelift on the show.

As his sister Josefina is dressing, Don Jose "acts," getting a face like he's sucking a lemon. She asks, "Why do you get that bad face every time I wear ..." and I thought she was going to say, "... this ghastly wig," but no, it's the earrings, which had belonged to their mother. The earrings bring up painful memories because he, long ago, gave the matching necklace to Eloisa, Maite's mom, and by coincidence Maite is wearing it this very night!

Maite knows the necklace was a present from her mystery father, whom she has been told abandoned her mother Eloisa.

Jose's sister Josefina helpfully reminds him: "But Eloise did not deserve your love, because she dumped you to go off with somebody else." Jose, still "acting," nods sullenly.

Josefina drops one of these special earrings; instead of picking it up, she takes the other one off. Simultaneously, Maite's special necklace catch breaks and she whips the necklace off - just as Don Jose, who no doubt would have recognized it, enters and says hello. We're supposed to care - after all, were they to have met wearing the matching diamonds, there might have been all sorts of revelations - but knowing this novela will drag on for another four months, I'm not holding my breath.

Soon Victor goes off to the kitchen with Josef (to admire his conches) and Josefina takes Veronica off to her art studio to show her a blank canvas and say: "The best thing is to make something from nothing."

That leaves Maite talking with her father. The father says he's nostalgic tonight, thinking about sad, ungrateful love. It's a story he'll tell her some day. She says she has a story too and will tell it some day. Yawn.

We end with riveting scenes of Andres accepting Teodoro's invitation to spend the night (and offering valiantly to do the dishes), and Jacinta yelling at Remedios (who is STILL wearing the hot pink housecoat) (1) for "dating" and (2) for asking how Rodrigo is taking his "father's" "accidental" defenestration.

Labels: barrera