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Cleófilas’s and Juan Pedro’s wedded happiness is short lived. Juan Pedro starts physically abusing her “when they were barely man and wife.” Before he raised his hand to her, Cleófilas had always believed that she would fight back against any man that dared hit her. Her mother and father had never hit each other or their children, so it comes as a shock to Cleófilas when it happens to her. She is stunned, unable to fight back, cry, or run away. She is “speechless, motionless, numb.” Later, Juan Pedro cries “tears of repentance and shame,” but Cleófilas continues to live in a seemingly never-ending cycle of abuse and short-lived remorse.
Cleófilas accompanies Juan Pedro to the ice house, an open-air bar where he drinks with his friends while she sits silently, bored, and wishing to leave. These long nights are as likely to end in drunken tears as they are in fistfights. As the initial excitement over their marriage fades, Cleófilas must remind herself that Juan Pedro is the man she loves, for whom she keeps house and whose child she cares for. She puts up with his physical and verbal abuse because she loves him and believes he loves her. But she begins to suspect that he is unfaithful, even bringing other women into their home while she is at the hospital delivering their child, Juan Pedrito.
When Cleófilas thinks of leaving Juan Pedro, she imagines the shame she would feel returning to her hometown with one child, pregnant with her second, and without her husband. In Monclova, people gossip every Sunday after church, while in Seguin they gossip every night at the ice house. Cleófilas becomes isolated, unable to leave even if she wanted to. No place in Seguin is within walking distance, and she is unable to drive. Cleófilas is warned not to leave the house after dark because something bad might happen to her and the baby if she does.
Instead, she sits beside Woman Hollering Creek and listens to the call of La Llorona, the legendary weeping woman of Latin American folklore who drowned her children and was then condemned to wander, weeping and searching for them. Cleófilas is trapped in an abusive and loveless marriage and she fears losing her sanity and facing a fate similar to La Llorona's.
As she washes dishes in her home, Cleófilas overhears “the foul-smelling fool” Maximiliano in her yard, making crude comments about women, to the laughter of the neighborhood men, including Juan Pedro. He boasts of killing his wife in an ice house brawl, also evoking laughter from the men. Cleófilas shudders with dread as she thinks of other women killed by the men in their lives.
At times, Cleófilas reads romance novels and watches telenovelas at Soledad’s house. The books and TV programs show her how far her life is from the one she had always dreamed of. She wishes she could change her name to something more poetic, since all good things happen “to women with names like jewels.” Instead, she stays Cleófilas, who gets only abuse.
