Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

Finding that she had lost everything, she looked for the culprit. To say that one is guilty, one is guilty. Her first husband was guilty. This manly man who was not in love with her, she quietly told him to be careful, but he just didn't listen to her. Her second husband was also guilty. He dragged her away from Prague to this provincial town. When he saw a woman, he chased her and made her eat endlessly Vinegar. She had no way to meet these two men. The only hostage that belongs to her, who won't slip away from her and can make up for all this, is Theresa.

Indeed, was she not the principal culprit determining her mother's fate? She, the absurd encounter of the sperm of the most manly of men and the egg of the most beautiful of women? Yes, it was in that fateful second, which was named Tereza, that the botched long-distance race, her mother's life, had begun.