The Last Gaze

A white sheet stained with red in a room in a whorehouse somewhere in the Mexican desert. Somebody is walking away. A year earlier. Homero, a very successful artist in Querétaro, finds out when he’s 48 years old that he has inherited from his father a strange form of blindness that will cause him to gradually lose the three light colors, red, blue and green, and eventually his sight. Homero understands that fate exists but resists to lose what has given a direction to his life: art and beauty. While trying to stay connected to the world while his blindness progresses, he adopts a stray dog, visits prostitutes and falls in love with Irma, a nun who helps him memorize texts to pretend he can still read to his blind father. In a parallel story, Mei, a 17-year-old girl, arrives at The China Galleon, an old railway station that has been converted into a whorehouse in the Mexican desert. Before leaving for the US, her mother, a famous prostitute, leaves Mei to work as a servant in exchange for food and lodge for her and her old grandparents. Mei becomes friendly with the prostitutes, falls in love with a young store clerk and raises moths to copy as embroidered works of art to sell for extra cash. Homero and Mei fight to survive in their new realities: Homero in his blindness and Mei in the whorehouse while their lives touch each other but never cross. When Homero is about to become completely blind, a taxi driver offers to take him to a whorehouse with beautiful Chinese girls. He takes him to The China Galleon where by chance or fate, Homero’s and Mei’s paths cross in a room in a whorehouse somewhere in the Mexican desert.