Of Women and Salt

“In María Isabel, Antonio had found a way to feel without lusting after other shores […] María Isabel thought it had always been women who wove the future out of the scraps, always the characters, never the authors. She knew a woman could learn to resent this post, but she would instead find a hundred books to read.” 

Not only literature but the very act of reading becomes an escape. Most, if not all, of María’s coworkers are illiterate, which the Spanish government uses against them to suppress revolutionary news. For María, reading takes on a feminist dimension too, as she dreams of being able to author her own books. 

“She thought she was calling him to talk about the raid, the neighbor woman. Turns out she has nothing to say about that. Also turns out: sobriety is a daily exercise, especially at night.” 

This passage connects to the first important quote in that it describes an internal struggle that may be invisible to outsiders. Jeanette’s realization about night being worse means it’s the time when she’s alone with her thoughts. During the day, work and life distract her, but at night, with no other obligations, she must work harder to keep from falling off the wagon. 

“A geography she studied for years and still does not understand: a man who pummels a fist into her side the same day he takes in a kitten found lying in the crook of a stairwell during a rainstorm.” 

Toxic masculinity is present in nearly all the novel’s male characters. Importantly, however, it doesn’t portray them all as horrific and evil but demonstrates a spectrum on which one man can be simultaneously abusive to some and decent to others. A starker contrast comes later in Daniel, who fights for the revolution and adores his daughter yet nearly kills his wife. 

“The women brought me more bird books. They asked visitors to bring them—volunteers and lawyers and, for the lucky ones, family. The women have become my bird family.” 

The novel offers a couple interesting moments involving animal imagery, and this is the first. Birds often symbolize freedom in literature, but here the books about birds also represent family: They serve as a connection to Gloria’s absent daughter, Ana, as well as a form of comradery with the other women in the detention center. 

“[Jeanette would] walk down Kendall Drive […] and men would honk at her, would follow them, would stop to gawk and shout. She liked it. She hated it. Thought it was a fact of life, like waiting for the light to change or taking an umbrella just in case.” 

This moment builds on the earlier passage about the different faces that the male characters put on. In this scene, Jeanette wonders how these same men can go home and act entirely different with their wife and children. In addition, it reinforces not only the pervasiveness of toxic masculinity as part of life but also the complicated way that Jeanette experiences it, alternately enjoying and despising it. A similar cognitive dissonance is evident in “Other Girl” when Jeanette recognizes the signs of Isabel’s abuse yet lusts after Isabel’s husband, the abuser. 

“Jeanette had giggled. Nobody looked more used up than her mother. She’d never have said it to her, but Jeanette knew her mother was just jealous her father didn’t want to use her anymore. That nobody wanted to use her mother. That her mother was useless.” 

Aside from its commentary on how society views women, this passage foreshadows Julio’s sexual abuse and speaks to the complex tension of Jeanette and Carmen’s relationship. It’s unclear here how Carmen views Julio’s attention to Jeanette (or if Carmen’s jealousy is even real, as Jeanette’s claims could be the product of a teen’s imagination). However, the narrative suggests that Carmen’s own insecurities complicate their struggles. In addition, Jeanette is struggling with both the concept of female “use” (value) and the difference between lust and love: “Use” is sexy and desirable but simultaneously represents female objectification. 

“They danced but it wasn’t about sex anymore. It was about the miracle of having a body. The miracle of not understanding a single thing about firing neurons, about the mechanics of moving her ass, but doing it anyway.” 

This description of Jeanette’s dancing at the foam party further develops the novel’s commentary on the complex nature of sexuality. Her experience of dancing goes through several stages: Initially, it’s about sex—an external, interpersonal act. However, after she uses cocaine, dancing becomes something more internal. This change connects to the baser instincts associated with drug abuse. Jeanette says something similar in “Other Girl” about how her heroin high is less about interacting with the world and more about going into herself and feeling safe from the outside world. 

“She didn’t yell or protest. She didn’t say no. She felt the futility of language, that it couldn’t capture the knowledge that what was happening was exactly what she’d expected could happen, that she was disappointed that once again the unexpected hadn’t won out.” 

This passage further develops the idea of cognitive dissonance by showing how one can simultaneously be disappointed but unsurprised—and also still hopeful going into an encounter. In addition, it illustrates the futility of language, a point that returns in other ways. At times, characters struggle to express their feelings, which prevents them from crossing boundaries; at other times, linguistic issues are more literal, such as Ana’s struggles in Mexico as a girl who shares a language but not a dialect. 

“I [Gloria] wondered what [the missionary] had expected: sad poor people being sad and poor at every sad, poor moment of their lives? She mistook happiness for what it was—how we survive and build lives out of the strings we hold.”

Here, Gloria notes how outsiders often come in and project their own ideas on people whose experiences they can’t understand. Gloria suggests here that their material existence is irrelevant—it’s not about being happy in the face of adversity but rather that both adversity and happiness are parts of life. This idea returns in “They Like the Grimy,” Maydelis’s chapter.

“You [Ana] begged to go back to Florida and how could I [Gloria] explain it to you, you so small and full of hope still? That the place you called home had never considered you hers, had always held you at arm’s length like an ugly reflection?”

In this passage, Gloria reflects on how she and Ana struggle to fit in anywhere: Forced to flee El Salvador, they can’t live legally anywhere else; they’re outsiders. Both the US and Mexico want them to leave. Gloria is old enough to recognize this, but the novel highlights the toll this takes on children, who have no way of understanding nationality and legality. Indeed, Ana eventually returns to the US, as it’s the only place that ever felt like home—the rest doesn’t really matter to her. 

“If this makes you [Ana] think to hate the country that birthed you, to hate yourself, remember that the guns bore US seals. That the last man your grandfather saw before a bullet to the face had just returned from a Georgia training camp.” 

Underlying much of the novel is the US’s influence in international affairs, but most of that concerns Cuba-US relations. Here, though, the narrative alludes to the broader scope of US interference, as Gloria reminds Ana of the role the US played in El Salvador’s struggles as well. 

“There are no real rules that govern why some are born in turmoil and others never know a single day in which the next seems an ill-considered bet. It’s all lottery, Ana, all chance. It’s the flick of a coin, and we are born.” 

Much of the novel is about everyday survival. Gloria makes this argument earlier regarding happiness, and here she reiterates that more than anything else, chance governs our lives and situations—where you happen to be born; what happens to be going on while you’re alive. In this novel, force is less about revolution or overturning the status quo and more about finding the means to survive in the face of systemic oppression—while the novel isn’t opposed to the former, the latter is more immediate. 

“But no mother on the outside could possibly know what it was to face a truth like the one she’d been presented with: that it was her own love killing her daughter, that she needed to become stone, marble, not a mother at all, to save her daughter.” 

This passage rehashes the “tough love” argument: Is it better to always be there for someone who’s struggling, or do we sometimes need to step back and let people make their own mistakes? Although Carmen seems to argue for the latter here, by the novel’s end—after Jeanette’s death—her beliefs seemingly reverse. 

“Why dwell, why talk, what good would it do? [Carmen] had mastered a life without unearthing her own horror stories. She wished Jeanette could do the same.” 

Here, the novel connects to larger questions about survival in the face of oppression and aligns Carmen’s thoughts with Gloria’s: Carmen isn’t suggesting that trauma doesn’t happen, but she asserts that what’s important is finding a way to survive despite that trauma. She doesn’t understand why Jeanette instead wants to deal with it and therefore sees Jeanette’s inability to move past it as a personal failure rather than a fundamentally human response to tragedy. 

“Mexico morphed [Ana’s] language. A chele became a güero, a guineo transformed into a plátano. Her Spanish grew stronger than her English again but her accent began to change.” 

Language issues recur throughout the novel (such as the futility of language in the face of violence or to express tragedy and the deplorable lack of deportation documents in a deportee’s language). Here, Ana speaks to a more mundane fact: that sometimes language is literally insufficient even when we speak the same language. In addition, this further deconstructs the portrayal of Latinx people as monolithic, showing that even language can change across borders and regions that share the “common” language of Spanish. 

“If they’re real Americanized, I [Maydelis] sell them nostalgia, postcards of an old La Habana that existed only in their dreams. I sell them misery in the hopes they give me an extra dollar or two.” 

Maydelis’s chapter speaks to how people must often reinvent themselves for others, something that she shares with Jeanette and becomes more prominent in “Other Girl” (when Jeanette is so terrified of Mario leaving that she becomes whoever he wants her to be). Maydelis’s version includes the additional issue of international relations, as who she is depends on a particular tourist’s vision of Cuba, which in turn means that she’s constantly creating and recreating—and even questioning—not only her beliefs but also Cuba itself. 

“What would it take to make a cousin send for me? What would it take to convince her she needs to support me until I can get on my feet in a place like Miami, where there are so many stories like mine? Maybe I could just travel back and forth. Which would require giving more of myself away?” 

Here, Maydelis may initially seem utilitarian and calculating, but as with other characters, this is partly because she feels lost and trapped where she is. She has few options for work, and her marriage has failed. The only possibility she recognizes is escape, although that, too, would mean losing part of herself. Again, however, language fails: Jeanette isn’t even aware that Maydelis wants to leave because Maydelis mostly hides this from her. 

“I [Jeanette] do not know what [Maydelis] means, but she lists kinds of people that exist in Cuba […] and I realize every country is different but the same. Every country has its own lunch tables.”

The novel constantly reinforces differences through similarities, complicating both ideas in the process. In this passage, Jeanette reflects on how Maydelis breaks down Cuban culture into various groups, rejecting a singular vision of what it means to be Cuban, while at the same time conveying just that through stereotypes. Moreover, all this really does is show Jeanette how Cuban culture resembles other cultures in its insistence on breaking people up into types and emphasizing difference over similarity. 

“I [Jeanette] want to love my grandmother, but my mother [Carmen] has poisoned me. She said once my grandmother [Dolores] loved her country more than her blood. She said my grandmother was a murderous devotee of a regime. She said I could never speak to my grandmother.” 

What’s particularly interesting here is how missing memories result in assumptions and half-truths. Everyone assumes—and reinforces throughout—that Carmen is conservative and anti-socialist; moreover, everyone thinks that Carmen and Dolores don’t talk because they disagree on politics. This passage suggests that Carmen dislikes Dolores because she killed in the name of the socialist revolution. How much of this Carmen believes is unclear, but the narrative later shows that Dolores did no such thing: She did kill, but Daniel was the one who fought for the revolution. This may just be a convenient excuse for Carmen, but it’s also possible that over the years fact and fiction became blurred enough that this is how she sees her mother—and that she’s completely forgotten about her father. 

“I [Jeanette] know everyone will say in Miami, Tell me about Cuba. Most of them expecting an answer like, it is hell on earth. Or maybe a few, subversively, will ask me expecting an answer like, It is socialist paradise.” 

This passage reinforces Maydelis’s frustration with tourists who see only what they want to see in Cuba. Interestingly, however, it demonstrates a greater awareness on Jeanette’s part than Maydelis is willing to extend to her: Maydelis previously considered her on par with other tourists, different only because of her relation to Maydelis, but Jeanette demonstrates here that she too is aware that people make what they want out of Cuba. 

“Some men apologized afterward. [Dolores] had enough friends with husbands who ‘got a little out of hand sometimes,’ too, to know as much. […] Daniel spared her that confusion, at least. Hours later, days later, in his sobriety, Daniel would say nothing of his violence.”

This passage speaks to both the extremity of Daniel’s violence and the commonplace nature of domestic violence in 1950s Cuban society. Dolores suggests that such violence is not total but extensive: She has many friends whose husbands abuse them when they get drunk, and it’s conventional enough that they talk about it. However, Daniel’s violence is particularly vicious and cold: Not only does he nearly kill her at one point, but he doesn’t even acknowledge his violence. 

“It’s not that Dolores didn’t want to see the President gone. […] She feared Daniel joining the rebellion not because she disagreed with it in principle but because she had stopped believing any kind of change was possible. She wanted to live. And, even more important, wanted Carmen and Elena to live.” 

This passage reinforces the complex relationship that María and Dolores have with revolution. Both believe in the principles of the revolution, but this idealism conflicts with a nihilistic desire for survival. Here, for example, Dolores reveals that she simply doesn’t think the revolution can succeed, which makes the risk of losing her children too great. It reinforces a belief that survival is paramount. 

“[Ana] reasoned there was no use in dooming herself if another was helping the girl. But there was an ugly calculation in her decision too—she also reasoned that there was no use if the girl couldn’t be helped.” 

This moment is a counterpart to the language of survival evident elsewhere—for example, in the previous quote. Ana reaches for the same kind of logic, likely unaware that Gloria viewed things similarly—it wasn’t that she didn’t want the girl to survive but that she didn’t see the sense in attempting to save the girl if they’d likely both drown. However, Ana recognizes the ugliness in that calculation in a moment that quickly passes but that, in some respects, briefly puts her in opposition to Dolores, María, and her own mother.