4 ideas
Damaris, a childless Afro-Colombian woman near forty on Colombia's Pacific coast, adopts an orphaned puppy and gives it the name she had saved for a daughter. Damaris's tenderness hardens into resentment, and she finally strangles the dog with a rope.
When love is placed on a stand-in for something the lover lost or never had, it depends on the stand-in staying obedient to the role. Once the substitute shows its own nature, by running away, being fertile, or refusing to mother, it stops confirming the fantasy and instead exposes the lack underneath. The lover then feels this as betrayal and can turn to hatred.
In a poor village where a woman's worth is measured by motherhood, infertility becomes a public identity and a private shame. Folk cures, failed treatments, and the gaze of neighbors all feed it. Seen this way, Damaris's violence grows out of a social script that gives her no other valued role, not only out of individual cruelty.
As a young girl, Damaris was with the Reyes family's boy, Nicolasito, when a wave swept him off the rocks and he drowned, and she carried the blame into adulthood. That early death makes caretaking a test she has already failed once. Every later loss of control over someone in her care reopens that guilt and turns care into anxious, punishing control.