The book’s title story is told not by a character but by a third-person narrator who has access to its central character’s thoughts and feelings and presents them in that character’s inner language. Thus readers can observe Cleófilas through what other characters say about her (the women going to her wedding and Graciela), but also—and mainly—through her own thoughts and observations. What we learn is that she is a conventional young woman who possesses a certain depth of character that she herself discovers only when she is tested.
To begin with, Cleófilas seems rather shallow and unobservant. She knows how characters on soap operas dress and behave, but she agrees to marry a man she scarcely knows; Juan Pedro is a nonentity, but he lives and works across the border in Texas, he has a nice truck, and he has selected her as his bride, all of which makes him acceptable as a husband. She sees it all through a haze of telenovelas and romance novels; the creek, as she first crosses it, is “full of happily ever after.” Only after she has married does she actually look at the man and begin to muse upon the fact that she has promised to spend her life with him.
At first she is simply stunned, not only by his physical violence but also by his manners, his selfishness and crassness, and his friends. He hurts, offends, and bores her. She is married to him, however, so she accepts her life like the conventional, well-brought-up girl she is. But as time goes by, rather than becoming inured to her situation, she becomes more observant, and what she observes is violence against women as a way of life—casual, accepted, part of the language. It is as if the part of her mind that was filled with fluff is now free to take in reality. At the same time, she must try to survive her situation: dependent, friendless, responsible for her child, and in mortal danger. This effort brings her perilously close to “the darkness under the trees”; suicide and infanticide are never named in the story but are always there in her ideas of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman who drowns her children.
The apparent turning point for Cleófilas is an “accident”—she reveals her problem to a nurse, who enlists a friend to help. But we know that there has been preparation for this, for Cleófilas doesn’t begin to lie to the nurse (as she has told her husband she would) and has managed to save enough money to buy her own bus ticket home. The conscious turning point comes in Felice’s pickup truck. Until this moment, Cleófilas has assumed that because she is a woman she must be passive, react rather than act (as “La Gritona” must either be angry or in pain); now the realization that she can be in charge of her own life enters her, and it comes in the form of a laugh that feels to her like a freeing of water.
