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Marital love doesn’t always lead to happiness.
Don Serafín tells Cleófilas that he will never abandon her. As she reflects on her father’s words, Cleófilas considers that the romantic love between a man and a woman might not endure and could become toxic. It contrasts with “a parent’s love for a child, a child’s love for its parents,” which is a more enduring type of love.
Cleófilas’s marriage is a good example of this. The man she believes to be the love of her life becomes someone who beats her, yells at her, and isn’t interested in traditional romantic signs like music, telenovelas, roses or moonlight. Cleófilas suspects Juan Pedro of infidelity, not coming home some nights and leaving traces of another woman being in their home in her absence. Cleófilas thinks of La Llorona when she sits by the creek, another example of love gone sour. When her husband abandoned her, La Llorona killed their children and drowned herself. Now, she haunts bodies of water, calling to other unhappy brides and mothers.
Cleófilas’s neighbors also exemplify soured marriages. Soledad considers herself a widow but people are unsure if her husband died or if he simply abandoned her. Maximiliano drinks each night and stumbles home drunk and alone. Rumors say that he “killed his wife in an ice-house brawl.”
The only example of good marriages hinted at in the story are Cleófilas’s parents and Dolores and her husband. Don Serafín and his wife never hit each other. However, readers do not learn his wife's name or know what has become of her. They know only that Cleófilas is without her mother’s advice and guidance at the start of her marriage. Dolores’s grief and devotion to her husband suggest that she also had a good marriage.
Escaping domestic abuse can be difficult.
Juan Pedro begins physically and verbally abusing Cleófilas soon after they wed. Until that moment, she had lived a sheltered life. In her own childhood, her parents “had never raised a hand to each other or to their children.” In the telenovelas Cleófilas has watched, the women did not stand for abuse. They fought back or ran away. But when it happens to her, Cleófilas is left stunned and numb.
Cisneros is realistic in showing that women who want to leave an abusive marriage cannot always do so easily. Cleófilas feels hopeless, as she thinks there is “no place to go.” She cannot drive and she dismisses the idea of fleeing to her neighbor’s homes most likely because they cannot protect her. She considers suicide by drowning, like La Llorona. She fears dying at Juan Pedro’s hand, like the women she reads about in the newspapers. She feels the suffocation of hopelessness closing in on her and cannot see a positive solution. However, when a real chance for escape comes, Cleófilas takes it. At a prenatal doctor’s visit, she breaks down. Instead of lying about the abuse, she lets her bruises speak for themselves. Graciela’s words suggest that she has seen this abuse often and that Cleófilas cannot rely on the police or social services.
There are two keys to Cleófilas’s escape. One is the community of women, Graciela and Felice, who show Cleófilas real-life strength and independence. The other key is money. Graciela tells Felice that Cleófilas has “got her own money” for the bus to Mexico. Since she and Juan Pedro are poor, Cleófilas must have been saving up, little by little, without her husband noticing. She can return to her father, who would never abandon her.
The patriarchy is a negative force in women’s lives.
Cleófilas comes from a strictly patriarchal culture. Although Don Serafín loves his daughter, he still controls her. She cannot marry without his permission. He stresses his role as protector, telling Cleófilas that he will never abandon her. And yet, he hands his control of her over to Juan Pedro, a man he hardly knows. When Cleófilas finally does escape her abusive husband, she retreats to her father’s home.
Juan Pedro controls Cleófilas through both verbal and physical abuse. She comes to view him as her keeper, lord, and master. He isolates her from others. She stays home and tends to their baby and housework. She is not able to drive. Juan Pedro doesn’t let her call or write to her family in Mexico. The foul, drunken friends with whom Juan Pedro associates laugh together about the idea of assaulting women. Maximiliano jokes about having killed his wife for attacking him with a mop. Cleófilas reads newspaper stories of other women killed by the men in their lives. The implied threat is that women must submit to their men or possibly die.
Cleófilas’s female neighbors live alone, yet they still live in the shadows of the men in their lives. Soledad’s husband has either died or left her. Dolores mourns the deaths of her sons and husband. Both women are “too busy remembering the men who had left” to do much more than garden and watch telenovelas. Without the men in their lives, they are isolated, lonely, and unhappy.
In contrast, Graciela and Felice are the only women in the story who are not dominated by men. Graciela is either a doctor or nurse, both esteemed professions. Felice is unmarried and drives a truck that she chose and pays for herself. These women help Cleófilas escape her dominating and abusive husband and show her that women can control their own lives.
