CHARACTER
Tender Is the Fleshby Agustina Bazterrica

Jasmine

Jasmine

Quick Facts

Who They Are

Jasmine is the novel’s most devastating paradox: a person seen only as product. She arrives as inventory and ends up occupying Marcos’s bed, his grief, and his hopes for a new son. Because her vocal cords have been removed, her silence becomes a screen for Marcos’s projections—he names her, narrates her feelings, and scripts her role as companion and mother. The book’s tragedy is that the “humanity” she’s granted is never hers to keep; it’s a temporary privilege bestowed by ownership and withdrawn the moment she fulfills her function.

Personality & Traits

Jasmine’s character is revealed through behavior, small choices, and the way her body is managed and perceived. Even without speech, she challenges the system simply by being present, learning, and eliciting conflicted desire.

  • Fearful, conditioned submission: Introduced naked with a rope around her neck, she trembles, urinates in fear, and avoids eye contact—automatic responses drilled into her at the breeding center.
  • Curious and adaptive: In Marcos’s home, she learns to watch TV, recognizes the danger of fire, and eventually accepts clothing. These shifts mark her capacity for learning despite lifelong conditioning.
  • Tenacious will: Her initial refusal to wear clothes—stiffening, resisting, needing time—signals an intact will beneath the training, a friction that unsettles Marcos.
  • Affectionate attachment: Over time she greets Marcos with hugs, leans into his presence, and seeks comfort from him, which he receives as intimacy but also uses to justify control.
  • Silent so others can speak for her: Her inability to speak keeps her inner life inaccessible and allows Marcos to supply it for her, creating a one-sided relationship in which his desires overwrite her subjectivity.
  • Marked, commodified beauty: Branded “FGP” and first assessed as “gorgeous” but “useless” to taste, her body is cataloged like premium livestock—beauty that accrues value only in the eye of the owner.

Character Journey

Jasmine’s arc unfolds entirely through Marcos’s gaze. She arrives as an unwanted “problem,” a female he intends to slaughter. After Marcos burns his deceased son’s cot, he cuts her rope; she doesn’t flee. That choice becomes the hinge of her provisional personhood. He bathes her in the rain, names her for the “wild and sharp, vibrant” scent he perceives, and begins sleeping with her. In the second half of the novel, domestic routines and pregnancy recast her from product to partner to mother. Yet the arc snaps shut the moment their child is born: Marcos stuns and drags her to be butchered, revealing that the “humanity” he offered was a private fiction—useful for soothing his grief and restoring a family, then revoked when she had served her reproductive purpose.

Key Relationships

Marcos Tejo: For Marcos, Jasmine becomes an emotional prosthesis—an object onto which he projects purity, solace, and control. He treats her tenderness as proof of mutual love, but possession structures the entire relationship: he renames her, restricts her choices, and ultimately values the child more than her life. His final act exposes his internalized logic of the system: even his “rebellion” remains a form of compliant ownership that ends in slaughter.

Cecilia: When Cecilia discovers a “female” in her bed, she recoils, seeing Jasmine as an animal intruding on marital space. During labor she shifts into practical caretaking, but her parting question—“She could have given us more children?”—collapses any illusion of shared humanity. To Cecilia, too, Jasmine is a vessel; the scene crystallizes complicity and moral corrosion even in intimate domestic spaces.

Defining Moments

Even small gestures carry moral weight in Jasmine’s story, because each one tests whether she will be treated as a person or a product.

  • Arrival as a “gift” (Chapter 4): Delivered from El Gringo’s breeding center, Jasmine enters as inventory. Why it matters: It establishes her legal status as property and frames Marcos’s initial rage as logistics—disposing of a burden—rather than ethics.
  • Cutting the rope after the cot-burning: Marcos severs her tether; she stays. Why it matters: Her decision to remain signals attachment and agency, while Marcos takes it as license to “humanize” her on his terms.
  • The bath in the rain (Chapter 23): He washes her, names her Jasmine, and initiates intimacy. Why it matters: A charged “baptism” that reframes her as companion, yet still within the owner’s power to define.
  • Domestic learning: She navigates TV, fire, and clothing; she greets Marcos with trust. Why it matters: These everyday skills read as personhood, but their recognition depends entirely on Marcos’s gaze.
  • Pregnancy and birth (the final chapter): Labor brings hope and terror; a healthy son is delivered. Why it matters: The birth fulfills the role others have assigned her—breeder—and sets up the novel’s cruel revelation.
  • Slaughter: Immediately after the delivery, Marcos stuns and drags her to be butchered. Why it matters: The mask drops. Affection was conditional; the system’s language—female, product—dictates the ending.

Essential Quotes

The man tugs on the rope around her neck because he doesn’t know what to do. The female moves submissively. This opening image compresses the whole system into a gesture: uncertainty resolved through force, and a human described only as “female.” The syntax (“the man,” “the female”) enacts objectification, reducing Jasmine to a function that invites handling rather than empathy.

He can smell her. She has a strong smell because she’s dirty, but he likes it, thinks of the intoxicating scent of jasmine, wild and sharp, vibrant. His breath quickens. Something about this excites him, this closeness, this possibility. Desire here is inseparable from naming and control. Marcos converts dirt and fear into a romantic metaphor and christens her accordingly, turning a sensory reaction into a story about purity and promise—one he authors, and she cannot contest.

Jasmine is only able to stretch out her arms desperately toward her son. She tries to get up again but is cut by the pieces of glass on the floor from the broken lamp. In labor’s aftermath, the prose shifts to raw physicality: arms, glass, blood. The image underscores both her maternal instinct and her vulnerability; even in her most human, urgent moment, the environment is arranged against her.

As he drags the body of the female to the barn to slaughter it, he says to Cecilia, his voice radiant, so pure it wounds: “She had the human look of a domesticated animal.” The line fuses tenderness and atrocity. Marcos’s “radiant” voice and aesthetic judgment reveal the final logic of the system: humanity is an appearance that can coexist with slaughter. By calling her “the female” even in death, the narrative language completes the re-objectification he always had the power to enact.