45 pages • 1 hour read
Silvia Moreno-GarciaVelvet Was the Night
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 25-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary
Elvis and the Antelope obtain weapons from their apartment and tail Maite and Rubén to a restaurant. Elvis admires Maite from afar and begins to fantasize about a reality in which he could approach a woman like her. When Maite and Rubén finish eating, Elvis and the Antelope tail the pair back to Maite’s apartment. Elvis calls El Mago and meets his boss at a nearby intersection. He fills El Mago in on his attempt to flush Leonora out using the code in the newspaper and about El Güero’s injuries. Elvis asks if El Gazpacho can join his team to replace the injured El Güero, which infuriates El Mago. El Mago tells him that Anaya is trying to replace the Hawks and take over the work the Hawks have been doing. He claims that the Hawks’ only chance at staying relevant is getting ahold of the film. Elvis’s trust in El Mago is shaken.
Chapter 26 Summary
Rubén and Maite have sex through the morning. Mid-coitus, Maite knocks over the statue she stole from Leonora. It breaks open, and they discover film canisters inside. Rubén calls Jackie, who tells them to come over at once. When they arrive at Asterisk, Emilio and Arkady are there at Jackie’s request. Rubén and Emilio begin to fight about whether or not Emilio is a traitor. The fight is interrupted by the arrival of Anaya and his agents. Because Anaya bugged Rubén and Maite’s phones, they know that the film is somewhere in the room. As they try to search Maite’s purse, Arkady attacks Anaya. In the ensuing chaos, Emilio pulls Maite from the room and takes her into his car, and they flee.
Chapter 27 Summary
Elvis and the Antelope track Maite and Rubén to the building where Asterisk is headquartered. Upon seeing Anaya and his men enter, Elvis deduces that the film must have been found, so he and the Antelope go in after them. They have a gunfight with Anaya’s agents in which the Antelope is injured, but Elvis makes it to the room where Anaya and Arkady are fighting. Elvis shoots Anaya in the leg, allowing Arkady to kill him. Elvis tells the building’s receptionist to call an ambulance, and he and Arkady take Arkady’s car to the place where Elvis suspects Maite—and the roll of film—have gone.
Chapter 28 Summary
Maite, distressed at having left a potentially wounded Rubén behind, enters Emilio’s home. Emilio says that he’s gotten a reporter, José Hernández, who will report the story of whatever is on Leonora’s film. When José arrives, Maite immediately recognizes him. He’s one of the men from the family photos in Leonora’s sister’s apartment—a man she’d identified as Leonora’s uncle, the former military officer Leonardo. Maite excuses herself and tries to escape through the bathroom window, but Leonardo realizes that she knows who he is and follows her. Convinced that Maite knows more about Leonora’s whereabouts and the contents of the film than she’s letting on, he beats her up while Emilio—who was always in cahoots with Leonardo—does nothing. Before Leonardo can kill her, two strangers burst into the house.
Chapter 29 Summary
Elvis and Arkady arrive outside of Emilio’s house, and Elvis sees El Mago’s car in the driveway. They enter and Elvis sees his boss beating up the woman he’s being tailing. Elvis asks El Mago what he’s doing, and El Mago says that Maite knows where to find his niece. Elvis is blindsided by the revelation that the woman they’ve been searching for has been related to El Mago all this time. El Mago explains that he wanted to save Leonora from becoming too involved with Asterisk, but in placing her trust in Sócrates, she made a terrible mistake because this gave away too much to Anaya. From this, Elvis deduces that it was El Mago who killed Sócrates, which El Mago confirms. Elvis also asks if he killed El Gazpacho, and El Mago replies that he had to because the Hawks were being disbanded, and El Gazpacho knew too much. Elvis kills El Mago with a screwdriver. He and Arkady find that the film canister, tossed to the floor in the scuffle, has been opened, exposing and ruining the film. Elvis leaves Maite with Arkady and leaves the house.
Chapter 30 Summary
Maite visits Rubén in the hospital; he was injured in the gunfight but will ultimately survive. Maite leaves the room to get Rubén flowers, and when she returns, she finds Leonora in the hallway outside. Leonora says she finally came out of hiding when she saw reporting that her uncle was dead. She asks Maite why Maite is here, which surprises Maite, given her newfound romantic connection with Rubén. Maite goes to give the flowers to Rubén and offers to let him stay with her while he recuperates. Rubén tells her that while he appreciates the time they had together, he doesn’t see her as a romantic prospect because he’s decided to get back together with Leonora. Maite, disillusioned, leaves.
Epilogue Summary
Later, Maite takes the bus home and finds a man sitting next to her. She recognizes this man as the one she saw in the café by the jukebox. Elvis introduces himself by his real name—Ermenegildo—and tells her the full truth of how he surveilled her and how he grew to appreciate her taste in music the more he watched her. He asks her if she wants to meet him for coffee and talk. Maite initially refuses his request, but when she gets off the bus and looks to the café where he asked to meet her, she begins to reconsider. She sees him waving at her in the distance.
Chapter 25-Epilogue Analysis
In these final chapters of Velvet Was the Night, Maite and Elvis begin occupying the same spaces simultaneously; because the narrative continues to use both of their perspectives, this means that some chapters move back in time in order to narrate events from the other character’s point of view. Moreno-Garcia uses music, one of the novel’s central motifs, to help keep these timelines straight. Through Chapters 24 and 25, for instance, both Elvis and Maite put music on the jukebox. Even though neither of these characters know each other yet, the presence of the same songs across both of their chapters allows the reader to understand how events across chapters are occurring relative to each other.
In this closing section of the novel, the series of reveals surrounding Maite’s love life offers a double critique of the romanticization of love that comes from narratives like Secret Romance. Maite’s romantic relationship with Rubén begins with a sexual encounter; this being the first step in a relationship would be unheard of in Maite’s pulps, where men and women must first court and develop sexual tension. As their relationship progresses, Maite becomes the more physically assertive of the pair, complicating the theme of Gender Roles in 1970s Mexico; she often initiates intimate contact, figuring, “If she pretended she was bold long enough, maybe she could actually be bold” (245). Maite finds empowerment in performing a kind of femininity that is absent in the romance narratives she consumes—a femininity that is “bold,” self-assured, and willing to reimagine what desirable masculinities might look like.
The reveal that Rubén and Leonora are getting back together completely upends the novel’s anticipated romantic arc. Maite feels deeply spurned in the moment when she understands that she’s misinterpreted Rubén’s interest: “She realized that the person who had been written out of the story was her, not Leonora” (274). Maite’s language here indicates that she is still thinking about her own romantic pursuits through the lens of Secret Romance. Her viewpoint shifted enough to allow her to see herself as the heroine of her own narrative, even though she doesn’t always enact stereotypical femininity. This final revelation, though, forces Maite to consider that maybe none of the elements of romanticized love are true to life. It is only in this mental state—one in which she has given up all of her beloved preconceptions about romance—that Maite is able to entertain Elvis’s invitation in the Epilogue. Velvet Was the Night offers a reconfiguration of the traditional romance arc, one that suggests that the absence or failure of romance can be even more self-revelatory than a relationship.
Maite is not the only character left disillusioned at the end of the novel. Elvis’s final encounter with El Mago in Emilio’s house leaves him deeply disillusioned by his boss’s lies and by Surveillance, Power, and Politics more broadly. This disillusionment unmoors every sense of self and community that Elvis built up until this point in this story. Additionally, the revelation that El Mago is actually Leonora’s uncle—a former military operative who has never had the best interests of the Hawks at heart—develops the novel’s critique of authority. Elvis loses faith in El Mago and everything that El Mago has come to represent: the possibility that violence can accomplish meaningful ends and the legitimacy of a political power that purports to care about those it rules over. He sees that he and all of the other Hawks have only ever been pawns upholding an uncaring political machinery. This ending leaves Elvis unsure of which theories of power and politics he can trust, searching—as Maite is—for alternate ways of existing in this society.
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By Silvia Moreno-Garcia
