Florita Almada meets Sergio Gonzalez when he travels to Hermosillo to interview her about the killings of women in Santa Teresa. The meeting brings a reporter who cannot yet write a coherent account face to face with a woman whose own account is tentative, figurative, and difficult to verify. Rather than identifying a killer or resolving a case, Florita gives Sergio a language for the killings as a recurring, collective burden: something that leaves an image too heavy to dissipate and carries sorrow on a scale beyond ordinary measure.

The reporter’s search

Sergio goes to Channel 7 because, despite not believing in seers, he has decided to seek Florita out. Her friends, as her associate Reinaldo explains, protect her privacy; he presents them as a human shield around La Santa. Sergio assures him that the interview will respect that privacy, and Reinaldo arranges a meeting that night. The approach is already uncertain: Sergio has gone to Hermosillo to investigate, but when he returns to his hotel and tries to draft an article about the killings, he finds he cannot write anything.

The route to the interview is mediated by other people. Sergio takes a taxi after asking the driver to circle the center first, then meets Reinaldo and Jose Patricio, Florita’s lawyer, at a bar. Sergio initially lets them believe he works as a crime reporter in Mexico City; he then admits that his actual assignment is on the arts page and offers only a general explanation of how he came to write about the killings. The meeting therefore begins with competing kinds of authority—journalistic, legal, and spiritual—and with Sergio’s own uncertain position between them.

At Florita’s home

Jose Patricio and Reinaldo drive Sergio to Florita’s house. She is older than Sergio expected. Her small living room contains two armchairs, a television, and black-and-white photographs; one shows Reinaldo and other men gathered around her, a composition Sergio reads as resembling a sect around its priestess. These details frame Florita as someone surrounded by a protective circle, but they do not establish what she knows or whether her visions are supernatural.

Offered tea or beer, Sergio chooses beer and asks whether she can see the deaths in Santa Teresa. Florita hesitates and answers cautiously. Sometimes, she says, she sees things, though they may be imaginings rather than visions; such things can arise in anyone’s mind. What has been coming into hers lately is the killing of women. Sergio privately weighs his skepticism against the endurance her answer seems to suggest, but he does not convert her account into proof. Her uncertainty remains part of the scene’s meaning: she speaks about what she pictures, not as an investigator presenting established facts.

Images of serial violence

Florita distinguishes the killings from what she calls an ordinary murder, while also denying that any murder is truly ordinary. In her imagery, an isolated murder settles into a liquid image, like a lake or well that becomes calm after disturbance. The serial killings in the border city instead produce a heavy, metallic or mineral image, as if it were smoldering. It burns curtains, yet grows darker as it spreads through the rooms or outbuildings where the killings occur. The contrast does not explain the crimes’ causes; it describes their repetitive, accumulating force.

Asked whether she sees the killers’ faces, Florita says that sometimes she does, but forgets them on waking. She describes them as ordinary faces, though somehow large, swollen, or inflated—not disguises or masks. Asked if the people seem sick, she refuses certainty: it depends on how one sees them. She thinks they consider themselves healthy, but insists that no one knows anything for sure. This account offers neither an identification nor a usable description. It instead unsettles the expectation that a killer must look visibly different from everyone else.

Florita also says she has heard the killers speaking once or twice. Their speech sounds like mixed-up Spanish: not quite Spanish, not English, and perhaps a language she cannot name, though she recognizes some words. The limits of her understanding echo the limits of the interview itself. Sergio asks for information that might clarify the crimes; Florita can give him only partial images and fragments of sound, and her claims remain inseparable from the uncertainty she openly acknowledges.

The scale of sorrow and the meeting’s limits

When Sergio asks why she recognizes these as the killings in Santa Teresa, Florita answers that they form a burden and come one after another. She describes the killers’ joys and sorrows as immense, even though she cannot understand their words. Her final emphasis is on scale: their feelings are huge. Asked whether that means they know they are beyond the law, she rejects the explanation. Their sorrow, in her account, is not simply a sign of criminal impunity.

The conversation ends without a revelation that solves a case. Sergio refuses another beer, says he is tired and needs to return to his hotel, and promises to send Florita the article he plans to publish, though he knows he will not send it. At the door, Florita presses the one thing she says she understands: when people speak, their joys and sorrows show through, at least partly. Sergio leaves with an image of a heavy, recurring grief, not a suspect’s name or a verified account of the crimes.

Narrative significance

The meeting places Florita’s figurative testimony beside a surrounding record marked by unidentified victims, stalled inquiries, and missing or withheld evidence. Earlier cases include victims whose names were never learned and investigations in which physical evidence or identification failed to produce resolution. Florita’s account does not repair those gaps, and the narrative does not present her visions as forensic findings. Its importance lies in the contrast between the partial legibility of feeling and the continuing inability of institutions and reporters to establish a complete, dependable account.

Sergio’s inability to write, followed by his encounter with a speaker whose descriptions cannot be translated into proof, makes the interview a scene about the difficulty of representing the killings as well as about the killings themselves. Florita gives the serial pattern a form—the smoldering image that darkens as it spreads—while leaving its agents and causes unresolved. Her final measure, sorrow too large to fit within ordinary explanation, does not answer the case; it marks what an answer would still have to confront.