Opening
Chapters 16–20 plunge Marcos Tejo to his lowest point and crack his armor of numbness. Grief erupts into action, tenderness wars with brutality, and the book’s social satire sharpens as the story moves from the plant and the barn to the glossy, terrified suburbs.
What Happens
Chapter 16
Cecilia calls for the first time since she left. On the video screen, Cecilia looks ravaged and distant; she says she isn’t ready to come home. Marcos begs to visit, says, “I lost him too,” and then the call ends in tears and silence. He knows she is unreachable.
Memories flood in: the injections and hope, the shared fantasies of a child that once softened the daily violence of his work. The tone turns brutal as results sour, questions mount, hormones wreck Cecilia’s body, and debt piles up. The arc compresses to a single, devastating line—“the pregnancy, the birth, the euphoria, the happiness, the death”—cementing the novel’s core of Grief, Trauma, and Desensitization that defines him.
Chapter 17
Marcos gets home late and finds the female (Jasmine) asleep in the barn. In a grief-fueled trance, he drags Leo’s cot outside, chops it apart, douses it with kerosene, and watches it burn while he drinks. Hand-painted animals curl and blacken as the night sky presses down with what he calls an “appalling beauty.”
Jasmine watches from the doorway, uncomprehending or entranced. Marcos staggers toward her with the ax, thinking he can do anything to her—kill, slaughter, make her suffer—an embodiment of Dehumanization and Objectification. Instead, he lifts the blade and cuts her tether. He falls into the grass, empty, and drifts off as he imagines she is crying—his own sorrow projected onto her face.
Chapter 18
At dawn, the ashes of the cot are cold. Jasmine hasn’t fled. She’s curled beside him, breathing evenly. Marcos studies her without touching: the brand on her forehead, the curve of her body, her smell—musky, floral, human. Desire and tenderness flicker; he panics, marches her back to the barn, and locks the door.
A nightmare frames his morning: his catatonic father stares; a wolf eats his son; a coworker slices Marcos’s chest; Sergio eats his heart; Cecilia’s face shifts into Spanel, who places a heavy black stone in his chest and stuns him. To stamp out what he felt by the ashes, he drives to Spanel’s butcher shop and has violent, impersonal sex in the back room—an attempt to reassert control through brutality, as if reenlisting himself in numbness.
Chapter 19
On the drive home, Marcos takes a call from his sister, Marisa, and she pressures him into lunch. He claims he’s off meat for “health,” though it’s grief that shut his appetite down. Her neighborhood gleams with sterile comforts: virtual pets, pristine lawns, “air umbrellas,” and a drumbeat of virus warnings that keep everyone docile.
Marisa scolds him for not carrying an umbrella, parroting state alerts about a bird-borne plague. Marcos understands it as social control; she treats it as common sense. Their dynamic exposes suburban complicity—the polished face of Complicity and Moral Corruption—and the way euphemisms sanitize atrocity: the soothing narcotic of The Power of Language and Euphemism.
Chapter 20
Lunch feels off-kilter from the start. The twins, Maru and Estebancito, whisper in their private code and then unveil their game: “Exquisite Corpse,” where they guess how people taste. “We’re trying to guess what Uncle Marquitos tastes like,” Maru says. Marisa snaps; a kitchen knife slams into the tabletop as she screams at them for being “savages,” the veneer of civility cracking in an instant.
Marisa retreats and returns blaming social media, but Marcos turns the game around, calmly describing the twins’ imagined flavors—rancid pork and strong salmon—until their bravado wavers. The hypocrisy peaks when Marisa asks if the plant sells “head” to individuals for home-raising. Marcos shames her for ignoring their father and leaves. At the curb, he takes her offered umbrella and drops it into a trash can, rejecting the props of her fear-fed world.
Character Development
Marcos’s grief stops being background noise and detonates. He smashes the relic of fatherhood, frees the being he’s supposed to treat as stock, and then tries to cauterize tenderness with cruelty. At lunch, he finally refuses the family’s script.
- Marcos
- Destroys Leo’s cot, signaling a violent break with hope.
- Frees Jasmine, then recoils from the intimacy that follows.
- Chooses brutality with Spanel to suppress emerging empathy.
- Confronts Marisa and symbolically rejects her worldview.
- Jasmine
- Stays after being freed, suggesting attachment, fear, or calculation.
- Becomes a person in Marcos’s perception—beautiful, scented, and singular—rather than mere property.
- Cecilia
- Remains unreachable, a living wound whose absence governs Marcos’s every choice.
- Marisa
- Embodies suburban denial and status anxiety; her knife-thrust outburst exposes the strain of maintaining a euphemistic life.
- Spanel
- Serves as Marcos’s conduit for violence-as-coping; intimacy is replaced by shared, transactional depravity.
Themes & Symbols
These chapters braid private sorrow with systemic rot. The personal collapse—infertility, loss, sexual self-punishment—opens a fault line where tenderness breaks through and is immediately attacked by habit and fear. Marcos teeters between the urge to feel and the survival skill of going numb, the essence of grief’s feedback loop in a desensitized world.
At the same time, the suburbs display how atrocity thrives behind pretty words and safety props. Euphemism doesn’t just hide violence; it licenses it. The twins’ game makes horror ordinary; Marisa’s outrage targets the naming of cannibalism, not the practice. The social order depends on silence, and speaking plainly threatens it.
Symbols to watch:
- The cot: a shrine to lost fatherhood, obliterated in a ritual of mourning and self-annihilation.
- The dream’s stone: the weight of grief replacing a heart; a body that lives while feeling is petrified.
- The umbrella: a talisman of manufactured fear and compliance; Marcos’s trash-can gesture rejects the spell.
- “Exquisite Corpse”: childhood play retooled into normalized cannibalism, proof of a culture that has trained its young to metabolize atrocity.
Key Quotes
“I lost him too.” Marcos’s plea to Cecilia tries to bridge distance with shared grief. Her silence confirms the irreparable break and traps Marcos alone with a loss that defines him.
“The pregnancy, the birth, the euphoria, the happiness, the death.” The telescoped sequence transforms years of hope and agony into a single, fatal cadence. The rhythm mimics a heartbeat that stops, distilling the novel’s emotional core into one breathless line.
He can kill her, slaughter her, make her suffer. This interior monologue lays bare legal ownership turned absolute power. The pivot to cutting the rope instead exposes the knife’s edge between dehumanization and a first, dangerous mercy.
The sky has an appalling beauty. Beauty coexists with ruin as the cot burns. Marcos stares upward to escape the ash at his feet, but the grandeur only intensifies his void.
“We’re trying to guess what Uncle Marquitos tastes like.” The twins’ play collapses taboo into pastime. Their words indict a society where language has smoothed horror so effectively that children repeat it as a game.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This sequence marks a hinge in the novel. Marcos stops drifting in muted misery and acts: he mourns through destruction, grants a freedom he isn’t sure he wants, and then tests whether he can still feel by trying to beat that feeling back down. Jasmine’s continued presence alters his household’s moral gravity.
By expanding the frame to Marisa’s suburb, the book exposes how a whole culture keeps atrocity running: fearmongering, euphemisms, consumer comforts, and cultivated denial. Marcos’s final refusal—the umbrella in the trash—signals the start of a break not only from his family’s script but from the social contract that demands silence.