Carlos Fentanes

Conversations with Virgin Mary

Wednesday, September 22

You sit with the remote in your hand; you think you have the power to choose any channel. But you don’t. You just keep watching the same channel. Even when you already know the story, the same story with different characters. You’re hooked on that soap opera.

The same betrayals. The same resentments. Your brother who wronged you fifteen years ago. Your sister who never apologized. The parent who favored someone else. You know every line of this drama. You could write the next season yourself.

And still you watch.

Mindset, this is not background noise. Belief shapes the body. Your grievances live in your muscles, your breath, your heart. Ask any cardiologist: emotions can stop a heart mid-beat. Broken Heart Syndrome isn’t poetry—it’s diagnosis.

You have the remote. So why do you insist on the same story? Why choose martyr when you could choose silence?

This week’s messenger will be painful: someone from your old drama will appear. Watch what you do. Do you press play again, or do you finally change the channel?

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It was a brutal letter—the kind that lands like a slap. When I read it aloud to Jorge, he flinched.

“Whoa, I can hear Bruce Springsteen complaining ‘fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on” I said, “What if most of my channels are repetitions of similar dramas? I need to dig deeper to find a good one”.

Jorge looked at me and started to talk as if I needed an explanation. “I was angry at… at everything. At not knowing what the letters meant. At feeling they weren’t helping me. But remember, I didn’t write them. They were dictated by Virgin Mary. I’m just the transcriber.”

I reread the letter. I scribbled questions in my notebook. Then I asked Jorge the one question I couldn’t shake.

“Did the messenger arrive?”

He looked at me for a long moment, as though deciding whether to hand me the remote to his soap opera. Then he began fiddling with the bougainvillea bonsai on the table—a nervous ritual. He brushed off dry leaves. Lifted the roots. Realigned the soil. His eyes fixed on the plant, almost ignoring me.

Then Virgo appeared from nowhere and jumped onto his lap meowing, as if she was telling him something, “OK Virgo, I’m going to tell him.”

“I hadn’t talked to my sister in twenty years,” he began. “One of those stupid family fights. Money. Responsibility. I tried to help them. They ruined me. My savings were gone. And after that… nothing. Silence.”

He took a sip of tea. His hands trembled.

“But the day after this letter arrived—the very next day—I got an email from her. She blamed me for… everything. Her marriage, her kids, my parents, the universe. You name it.”

He paused. His voice thinned.

“I don’t remember the exact words in the email. But Virgin Mary’s messenger was there, what she said about soap operas repeating themselves. I didn’t expect the timing to be that… precise. I reread it, and something clicked. I decided not to answer the email, close the chapter and go on, I haven’t heard from her since then. And I started researching the placebo effect. You know, you give half the patients the real pill, half a sugar pill, and some in the sugar-pill group still get better. Why? Because their belief altered their physiology. Belief is chemistry wearing a disguise. What channel I needed to tune into to make my Parkinson’s… maybe not cured, but at least bearable.”

He looked out the window, eyes wet. Virgo jumped down.

“I don’t want to talk about me,” he whispered. “Let’s change the subject, let’s switch the channel.”

It was the first time I’d seen Jorge so exposed. And it made me wonder: what channel am I stuck on?

“It’s hard to hear that” I finally said, “I have my own problems with my former sister,”

“Former sister? I thought you only had two brothers living abroad, You never told me about your sister.”

“Not even my son knows that I have a sister, or better say, I had a sister.”

We sat in silence for a moment. Virgo had left. Jorge refilled his tea. Then I couldn’t help myself—I had to push back.

“I can understand that a mindset can make physiologic changes in your body, maybe that’s how you tamed your Parkinson’s but how the mind can convince a judge about selecting an artwork for an art show? Telepathy? That’s absurd, I don’t buy that magic of the “law of attraction.”

He looked at me then—really looked at me—squinting the way people do when they suspect you’ve missed the entire point. The silence that followed felt unreasonably long, as if he were giving me one last chance to catch up on my own. Finally, with an exhale that sounded like disbelief made audible, he spoke.

“No,” he said. “Your mindset isn’t going to magically convince the judges to accept your work. That’s not how this operates. But your mindset can convince you to reframe the story you’re telling them. The work is the work—it doesn’t change. What changes is the lens. They need to borrow your glasses to see it.”

He tapped the table lightly, as if setting the rhythm for a lesson.

“Maybe after you shift your mindset,” he went on, “you’ll stop saying, ‘This artwork doesn’t need explanation; it speaks for itself.’ Because it doesn’t. Nothing speaks for itself. You’ll tell your story again, but this time through the eyes of the curator. That’s how it works. It’s never about them. It’s about you—about how you learn to rediscover yourself through your own work.”

In that moment I realize how I reframed my own story, that soap opera that I have chosen to watch every time: My mother’s decline, 3,000 miles away. My father’s dead, but I keep him alive in every conversation as the demon who made us flee. The string of rejections from art shows that I check compulsively, replaying each one.

I wanted to tell Jorge these weren’t choices—they were just reality. But even as I thought it, I could hear the letter’s question: What part of this drama am I choosing to watch? Not the Parkinson’s itself, but my helplessness about it. Not my father’s bipolar disorder, but the villain story I’ve constructed.

I didn’t know how to switch the channel. But I was starting to see that I’d been holding the remote all along.