Cecilia

Quick Facts

• Role: Wife of protagonist Marcos Tejo; former nurse; estranged after the death of their infant son, Leo
• First appearance: Off-page presence early in the novel; first direct contact in Chapter 16
• Turning point: Returns during a medical crisis and helps deliver a baby in Chapter 19
• Key relationships: Marcos; Leo (deceased son); Jasmine and her newborn

Who They Are

Boldly spare and devastating, Cecilia is a woman hollowed by grief and then refilled by desire. For most of the novel she exists as an absence—sequestered at her mother’s house, speaking in strained calls that mark her as unmoored and unreachable. The text gives only glimpses of her body—“haggard” in a first call; later “covered in sweat,” hair a mess, radiant after delivering a baby—but those snapshots mirror her internal state: first drained by mourning, then alight with a purpose that has shed its moral guardrails.

Personality & Traits

Cecilia’s inner life is defined by a single rupture—the death of Leo—and by what grows around that void. Her grief isolates and immobilizes her; yet under pressure, her training as a nurse resurfaces, and with it a pragmatic streak that turns terrifying when coupled with her longing to mother again.

• Grief-stricken: Her speech “became black holes,” a metaphor that shows how loss consumes her language and, by extension, her identity.
• Withdrawn: She removes herself to her mother’s home, telling Marcos, “I need to be alone,” a coping strategy that deepens their estrangement rather than healing it.
• Fragile: Marcos remembers her as irreparably “broken,” suggesting grief has not transformed her into a moral beacon but shattered her capacity to engage with the world.
• Morally corrupted: By the end, her desire for a child eclipses ethical limits—she condones murder and claims the baby—embodying the theme of Complicity and Moral Corruption.
• Pragmatic and capable: In crisis she acts decisively, safely delivering Jasmine’s baby, proof that professional competence can coexist with ethical collapse.

Character Journey

Cecilia’s arc is mostly off-page, but it shapes the story like a gravitational force. She begins as a ghost in Marcos’s life, her absence symbolizing a marriage smothered by shared loss. Early calls reaffirm a portrait of someone “not well,” sunk in a grief that seems bottomless. Her return during Jasmine’s labor flips the trajectory: she recoils from the taboo, then snaps into caregiver mode, and the newborn’s arrival detonates a conversion. The need that grief once made inert becomes active, predatory. By the end, her sorrow doesn’t ennoble her; it curdles into a chilling, utilitarian love that sacrifices empathy, sharpening the novel’s meditation on Grief, Trauma, and Desensitization.

Key Relationships

• Marcos Tejo: Their marriage fractures under unequal modes of grieving—Marcos numbs himself; Cecilia withdraws. When she embraces the baby and accepts the violence that makes that possible, the couple is re-bound not by healing but by shared secrecy and brutality, a new intimacy built on denial and blood.
• Leo: Leo’s death is the axis of Cecilia’s character. His absence creates a hunger so vast it redefines her ethics; the desire to fill that void becomes more powerful than the memory of the person lost, driving her toward choices that betray the very tenderness that grief once signified.
• Jasmine: Cecilia first sees Jasmine as contaminating and subhuman, a sign of Marcos’s moral slide. After the birth, Jasmine becomes only a means—useful for producing a child, disposable afterward—culminating in Cecilia’s cold acceptance of her death as the price of a restored maternity.

Defining Moments

Cecilia’s scattered appearances crystallize her transformation from shattered mother to participant in atrocity.

• The phone call (Chapter 16): Her first contact since leaving is clipped and pained—“I’m not well... I can’t take any more.” Why it matters: It establishes her as emotionally inaccessible and signals that grief has become an end-state, not a passage.
• The return and the birth (Chapter 19): She initially condemns Marcos’s transgression, then commandeers the delivery with clinical focus, emerging elated. Why it matters: Competence plus euphoria reveals how maternal desire can override standing moral disgust in an instant.
• The final moral choice: After Marcos incapacitates the newborn’s mother, Cecilia’s response is purely pragmatic, even acquisitive. Why it matters: This is the moment her love becomes predation; her acceptance of murder secures the child and completes her ethical collapse.

Essential Quotes

After what happened with the baby, Cecilia’s words became black holes, they began to disappear into themselves.
This image compresses grief into physics: her language collapses under its own weight. The metaphor signals not catharsis but implosion—communication, intimacy, and moral reasoning vanishing into silence.

“I can’t take any more.”
A plainspoken limit that functions as a thesis for her early arc. It justifies withdrawal, but it also foreshadows a later tipping point where “taking more” becomes “taking” by any means necessary.

“Are you crazy? Do you want to end up in the Municipal Slaughterhouse? How could you have been with a female? You’re sick.”
Her initial outrage aligns with societal taboos, showing she still recognizes boundaries. The speed with which she abandons this stance after the birth exposes how fragile—and conditional—those principles are when pitted against desire.

“Why?” she yells. “She could have given us more children.”
The most chilling line: the plural “children” reframes the mother as a resource, not a person. It reveals the calculus of her new morality, where reproductive potential trumps empathy, legality, and life.