You have to listen to women

The expression “You have to listen to women” is a warning Oscar Fate recalls while traveling with Rosa toward a prison where a suspected killer is about to appear. Remembered as advice from Fate’s mother or her neighbor, the deceased Miss Holly, it becomes a moral counterweight to the killings and fears that others neglect. The warning’s force lies in its plainness: listening is not an abstract virtue here, but a response to danger that has already been allowed to go unheard.

The remembered warning

Fate recalls that, when he was a boy, his mother or Miss Holly used to say something like that one should listen to women and never ignore their fears. The memory is not presented as a certain, formally preserved quotation: Fate remembers its substance, but cannot settle which of the two women said it. That uncertainty keeps the advice rooted in lived recollection rather than turning it into an authoritative maxim detached from its speakers.

The line returns in a present charged with the consequences of not listening. Fate is on the road with Rosa, accompanying Guadalupe Roncal toward the prison as the suspected killer is brought out. His memory gives their journey a moral frame: the women’s fears and accounts deserve attention even when institutions and the surrounding world fail to grant it.

Images of erosion and disorientation

The remembered principle is accompanied by Fate’s vision of scales like those of Blind Justice, but with bottles in place of the usual platters. One bottle holds desert sand that leaks through several holes; the other contains acid that eats through its sealed container from within. The image sets two kinds of loss beside each other: what escapes openly and what is destroyed from inside. Against the scene of women’s fears being ignored, the scales suggest not a functioning balance but a measure of erosion.

The highway deepens that instability. Traveling toward Tucson, Fate no longer recognizes the things he saw a few days earlier on the same road in the opposite direction; what had been on his right is now on his left, and he feels that all reference points have been erased. At a highway diner, he also cannot be sure whether the thought that no one pays attention to the killings, and that the world’s secret is hidden in them, came from Guadalupe Roncal or Rosa. The uncertainty does not resolve into a new claim; it shows how readily speech and memory blur in a landscape where attention is already failing.

The warning at the prison

As footsteps approach, Fate imagines a giant coming. Guadalupe Roncal seems close to fainting, but instead clings to the prison official’s hand and lapel; he puts an arm around her shoulders rather than pulling away. Fate feels Rosa beside him as voices, laughter, pleas, and calls to order rise from the prison. A song begins, and Rosa identifies its language as German. The scene makes the warning immediate without explaining away the fear: the women are physically present, their reactions visible, while the person being brought forward remains indistinct.

The expression’s narrative significance rests in that contrast between a clear instruction and an uncertain, darkening scene. Fate’s mother or Miss Holly offered a simple rule, but the journey supplies no assurance that anyone will act on it in time. The recollection therefore connects personal memory to the larger crisis of violence against women, insisting that fear is information to heed, not something to dismiss.