Caray, Caray!

Now this is a new strategy to build an audience – stealth programming! Here’s the episode Loonyvisión (apparently) didn’t want you to see.


Victoria is at María’s apartment to share her newly granted miracle – María Desamparada is her daughter. But alas, the news isn’t having the desired effect on María. She isn’t quite ready to turn the other cheek when she’s still nursing bruises from the last time she was VicSlapped.

Vic tells her that she’s the one who gave Juan Pablo the magic crucifix. She wants María to know the whole story, how she was a helpless (desvalida) girl who, in her loneliness and sadness, sought love with a man who was forbidden to her, a man who had dedicated himself to God.

Hablando del rey de Roma –
PJP prays that MD will forgive Vic and leave her resentment in the past and that the meeting between mother and daughter will be loving and giving. (And what have you been smoking, Padre?)

Padre Jerónimo comes upon PJP and, thinking he’s worrying about his spat with María, reassures him that she’ll come around. It’s more serious than that, JP tells him: Victoria knows the truth and she went to MD’s house to tell her. Jero wonders what Bernie has to say about it. PJP admits she doesn’t know yet but he is hoping she takes the news well, that she repents and leaves her hatred behind. (I ask again. What have you been smoking, Padre?) Jero will pray. Very hard.

Victoria continues: That humble girl, alone in the world, reached out for affection on a night that would end up marking her – And Juan Pablo. And María – forever.

María interrupts her: Please don’t tell me you were a victim!

Yes, says Vic, in a sense she is a victim -- of Bernarda de Iturbide. She’s the one who threatened her, who threw her out of the house. She is the one responsible for all her suffering.

Bernarda de Iturbide is sleeping the sleep of the wicked. She dreams of the flames of hell. She sees the victims of her hideous crimes – Octavio, Tomasa, Mother Superior, the Scorpion guy, Padilla. They remind her of the inferno that awaits her.

Then she dreams of how much she enjoyed holding back the name of Victoria’s daughter. Suddenly she sits up in bed, wide awake, Victoria still in her mind. She resolves that Vic will never know who her daughter is. (Sorry, Demente, that ship has sailed.)

Yeah, Vic knows. But María is no pushover. She knows how to hold a grudge. Victoria tells her that Bernarda hid the fact of her pregnancy from Juan Pablo. And by doing that, she took from them the right to decide what to do with their lives. So she was completely alone when she gave birth to María. She tells the girl: You were born in the street!

You must have despised that infant, says María. No, no, no – Vic hastens to correct her. It was one of the most glorious nights of her life. Once she held her child in her arms, she was no longer alone. She loved that child with all her heart.

María scoffs. You loved me? You abandoned me!

Once again, Vic corrects her and tells how she was run over, was separated from la pequeña María; and from that night never stopped searching for her.

María recalls the nights she spent longing for the love and protection of her mother. Meanwhile Victoria was dreaming of her lost daughter – it was her loss that kept Vic from ever being happy.

Happy, echoes María bitterly as she turns away from Vic. Something you made sure I never was.

But now that Vic knows María is her daughter, she wants her to be happy. María won’t accept what she sees as pity (lastima). Vic is quick to assure her it is love. Yeah, well. Too late, Señora, says María. Now she herself has a child and all her love is for him; he’s not going have a bad mother like she did.

Mala madre! No! Again Vic tries to make her understand: We were victims of circumstance; I was never a bad mother. And I prayed and prayed for a miracle. Your father told me many times that the miracle had been granted but I didn’t see it. You weren’t capable of seeing it, says María. That’s different.

Back at Bernies, PJP comes calling on his ma. With her hair unfettered by the crazy daytime rolls, she looks like a different person. She’s not though.

When JP – ever innocent, ever hopeful – announces that God has finally granted him the miracle he has been praying for, she tries to brush him off: I know you’re a priest and all and miracles are a big deal to you, but can’t it wait until morning?

Afraid not, madre. This miracle has to do with our family:
Gracias a Dios, Victoria ya sabe que María Desamparada es su hija!
(By the grace of God, Vic now knows that MD is her daughter!)

The next scene calls for some audience participation. All together:
No no nooooooooo! The squeamish among you – avert your eyes. Juanjo carries Nati over the threshold and into a balloon-festooned honeymoon bedroom. Ya basta.

Let’s get back to the money scene. Bernarda’s reaction to JP’s miracle – she whacks herself repeatedly in the forehead and mutters “She didn’t deserve to remember it” isn’t exactly what the good padre was hoping for. He reminds her that she’s the one who told Victoria her daughter’s name and sooner or later, she was bound to recall it. And he himself had nothing to do with it. It was God’s work – everything happened when Vic spotted the magic crucifix in MD’s apartment.

Clearly, there’s still some divine work left to be done because, back in the vecindad, María’s not buying what Victoria’s selling. She isn’t Vic’s daughter, she says, and Vic will just have to get used to the idea that she’s never going to find her.

No no no no no. Don’t say that, rejoins Vic. It’s our destiny, it’s a miracle.

Not only did you refuse to see the miracle, replies MD, but you despised me, you humiliated me, you hounded me almost to the point of death –

No, interrupts Vic, I never never wanted you dead –

But María isn’t finished: You made sure I couldn’t get work. If it hadn’t been for Alonso, I’d have been begging in the street. You lost your daughter the moment you caused me harm:
Tengo gradabos en mi alma cada uno de sus insultos, de sus sarcasmos, de sus bofetadas.
(Every one of your insults, every one of your sarcastic remarks, every one of your slaps is etched in my soul.)
And now, she adds, knowing that you are my mother, they hurt a thousand times more.

And all Victoria can do is answer tearfully:
Mi hija, mi pequeña María, perdóname – no sabía lo que había.
(Daughter, my little María, forgive me – I didn’t know what I was doing.)

I’m not your daughter, answers María. I refuse to be.

Let’s check back in with abuelita. Bernie’s got herself good and wound up. She’s hurling curses at Victoria and asking God why he has abandoned her when he should be punishing Victoria. JP is appalled at her blasphemy in praying for another’s punishment. She doesn’t give a rat’s patooty. And for his impertinence in questioning her, she slaps him hard. How dare you, she says. I’m your mother.

Yes, says PJP, precisely. And just look at all the harm you’ve done – You’re on the road to hell!

That observation earns him another hard slap. And then a third! Don’t threaten me with hellfire, she snarls. If that woman hadn’t seduced you, I wouldn’t have been forced to go down this path.

But finally JP seems to be coming out of his 145 episode stupor because he answers: You were already a sinner before I was born.

Here Bernarda covers her face with her hands. Look at me, insists JP:
I know perfectly well what you did to my father and to that woman who died in the flames!

Bernie shakes her crazy head. They had to pay, she says: Your father betrayed me – he seduced me and abandoned me when I had a child on the way. I had no choice.

A small light bulb goes on over JP’s head. Not a halo, friends. Now he gets it – that’s why Demente condemned Victoria and María. They reminded her of herself!

Well now she is beyond his help, or anyone’s. All that is left for her is prayer. And repentance. Set aside the arrogance and accept that you have sinned, he advises. That’s the only path to God’s forgiveness.

Message not received. Sigh. She runs from the room screaming curses. Poor JP sinks to the floor and weeps. He prays.

Back in the balloon room in Acapulco, Nati is Romancing the Stone. Use your imagination. Or not. Pillow talk: He tells Nati that his boss wants him to take a two-month training course out of the city. Will she go with him? To the end of the earth, answers our girl who should be giving seminars in making silk purses out of sows’ ears.

As for the mother-daughter reunion in the vecindad – well, if Victoria is the Titanic, María ya no D is the iceberg. Vic deserves to be rejected, her daughter tells her. Her apologies have come too late.

Vic, frantically rearranging the deck chairs, tries to make María understand how threatened she was by María’s friend, Linda. That woman was trying to destroy Victoria’s marriage, her very life. What would María have done if another woman had tried to destroy her relationship with Max?

Uh oh. Wrong question to ask. Cuz that’s pretty much what Vic has been hell-bent on doing – destroying María’s relationship with Max.

In Casa Sandoval, Max doesn’t understand how Victoria eluded the search party. Why didn’t the troika of Heri, Leonela and Os catch up with her? Os explains that by the time they realized she was gone, she already had a head start on them. Max decides to follow the trail back to the vecindad. Maybe María knows what’s going on.

Meanwhile María has the exquisitely bitter pleasure of spitting Victoria’s own words back in her face:
Yo la tolero pero no la quiero.
(I can tolerate you but I don’t like you)

Victoria begs her to forget the past hurts.

You think it’s so easy to forget? answers María. Have you forgotten Linda?

Anyway, says María, it’s not just one thing. You say Bernarda didn’t let you and my father decide for yourselves. Well you did the same thing to me when you forced Max to marry Ximena.

Again Victoria cries out: My little María, can you forgive me?

María’s reply: Forgive you? Would you forgive my grandmother, Bernarda de Iturbide?

No, never, says Vic. She’s the cause of all my suffering.

And you, rejoins María, are the cause of all mine.

Vic claims it’s different – María is sangre de su sangre. But Bernarda is also sangre de su sangre, María reminds her. And besides, she’s been much more of a mother to her than Vic has. (Ouch!) In her very strange way, she adds. How does Vic have the nerve to come here and expect to make everything better just by saying “I’m your mother”? After all her cruelty?

Vic tries again. She was wrong, confused, her pride as a woman (dignidad de mujer) was wounded.

María is adamant. She tells Vic to leave. She never had a mother, she says, and now she knows she never will.

Now Vic is kneeling at her feet: Is this what you want? she asks. To see me on my knees, pleading for mercy, defeated?

María kneels down and takes Victoria’s hands. Mother and daughter face one another.

At Bernie’s house, the air is filled with blasphemous rants and threats. She shakes her fist at the crucifix on the wall and vows never to forgive that damned Victoria for coming between her and her son. She’ll never let Vic and her daughter be together. They’ll never be happy.
A bell tolls ominously. For whom? For youm, Demente, for youm.

And in the vecindad it’s clear that María’s not in a forgiving frame of mind. Not just yet. Señora, levántese, she says formally. Throwing yourself at my feet accomplishes nothing. You think I’ll forget every blow, every insult, every humiliation? You think I’ll forget how you kept me and Max apart? If our love hadn’t been strong enough, Max wouldn’t be in my life now.

She rejects Victoria’s supplications. Some things can’t be fixed, she says. She wishes her words had moved her but she feels only hatred and scorn:
I don’t love you. You’re a stranger to me – you’ve caused me more suffering than anyone else in my life. You have only one daughter and her name is Fernanda. Your little María is dead. Now leave!

Victoria, stricken, puts her hand on her heart and walks slowly to the door. María turns away and is wracked with sobs.

Instead of sweet William, we get the Alonso mortuary montage. Bummer.

Labels: triunfo