The rest she can't hear or understand. We know what he's saying, because we have the benefit of the subtitles, but for all she knows it's just sex talk -- his dick, her cunt -- just talking about how attractive she is. But that's not what he's saying. "Here," he's saying, "You don't do what you want. Here," he says, "You do what I say." She's into it, as he fucks her way too hard. Show me: show me what I need to see. Her affect goes dead. She thinks she's on top; there's something coming toward the top, though, that tells her something else.

He speaks in English: "You don't dictate the terms of this arrangement. Okay?" Here becomes everywhere, and she realizes, too late, that she should have fought, should have forced him to kill her. He is on top. He was on top and she didn't even know it; she thought it was control and pain and a reconnecting, a re-linking, okay, to something that once made her happy, and powerful, and the safest woman in all of NAFTA, but that wasn't what it was at all. She has been raped. It wasn't a fall, and it wasn't a leap either. It was a robbery, and it was the truth.

And when he looked down, her back didn't have anything tattooed on it, because he didn't need to imagine anything at all. He was on top, and he knew it. And all the facts about men and women, their power and the way it cancels out, the way she's on top or he is, sometimes one then the other, sometimes neither, sometimes both: they stopped mattering. She thought it was a tunnel, if you will: she thought if she could dig down underneath his machismo and his essential heartlessness, if she climbed inside the cage with that tiger and said, "I am a woman, and I am the mother of our son. Your only son, after two daughters. I carry life and I create life, and it is mine to do with as I will. Make the decision, because I am not owned."

But she is. She wasn't white and she wasn't a woman and she wasn't the wife and she wasn't a mother. She was the knocked-up puta whore, and he needed her to understand it. Now she does. She doesn't move as he zips up, she doesn't move as he adjusts his tie, she doesn't move as he slaps her ass. Their love began with a spanking; it ends with one too. He vanishes and Cesar enters; she's still tits down on the table, panties around her knees, legs splayed out awkwardly, too stunned and horrified to move. She breathes, but that's all.