53 pages • 1-hour read
A Place Where the Sea Remembers
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Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Rosario ‘Chayo’ Rodriguez del Marroquin, La Ramilletera (The Flower Girl)”
Chapter 13 comes full circle, bringing the narrative back to Chayo and Candelario, although this chapter focuses on Chayo’s perspective. The chapter opens with Chayo on the beach selling her paper flowers. Her son Tonito is with her, selling Chicklets. When it begins to rain, they take refuge in the shelter of a building under construction, where they meet the birdman, Justo Flores. Justo reveals that his dog Yoyo has died. He gives Tonito a small piece of paper with a fortune printed on it, but Chayo dismisses it as “absurd” and throws it away.
At home Chayo prepares the mole sauce for Esperanza and Rafael’s wedding. Marta comes to the door, begging once again for Chayo’s forgiveness. Chayo refuses, saying, “For what you did, there is no forgiveness” (151).
At the wedding, Esperanza and Rafael dance and celebrate before boarding a bus to Guadalajara. After the wedding, doña Lina will travel to Veracruz to live with her eldest son Tomas. Marta’s friend Luz becomes romantically involved with César Burgos, the fisherman. Fulgencio Llanos is the wedding photographer. As they walk home, Marta’s son Richard asks to sleep over with his cousin Tonito. Chayo agrees.
It begins to rain, and the arroyo that flows past Chayo’s house fills with water, bringing with it a foul odor. Early one morning, her neighbor Santos knocks on the door; there is a pig trapped in the flooding river. Eager to have roast pig for dinner, Santos and Candelario try to pull it out of the river. It is trapped against a toppled lime tree, which has partially fallen into the rushing water. They are unsuccessful, and the pig floats away in the current. Chayo suddenly notices a small boy standing too close to the water’s edge. She screams, thinking it’s Tonito. The ground gives way beneath his feet, and the current sweeps him out to sea. Only then does Chayo realize that the boy is not Tonito but Marta’s son Richard.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Remedios”
Remedios crouches by the water’s edge with her swordfish beak, waiting for the sea to deliver Richard’s body to her. She had foreseen the boy’s fate four years ago when his mother made her deal with el brujo, the sorcerer, to trade the life of her sister’s unborn child for her own freedom. Marta regretted the choice and sought Remedios’s help to reverse el brujo’s curse, but the damage was done. Now, Remedios, Marta, and her sister Chayo wait together for the body to wash ashore in the exact spot Remedios knows it will. Marta vows once again to travel to El Paso, Texas, after Richard is buried. Remedios looks out across the water and announces, “The boy nears” (163).
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
The final two chapters echo the first two, providing important details about two of the novel’s central characters: Chayo and Remedios. In Chapter 1 Benitez introduces Remedios, who waits on the beach, swordfish beak in hand, for a body to wash ashore. The chapter is brief and cryptic, asking more questions than it answers. Chapter 13 reveals the who and the why of this mystery. While in Chayo’s care, Marta’s son Richard slips into a rain-swelled arroyo and is swept away. All of the anger and betrayal that has simmered between Chayo and Marta is finally undone by a single, tragic act of fate, one foreseen by Remedios years before, and one that all of Remedios’s magic is powerless to change. By circling back to Chayo and Remedios at the end of the novel, Benitez provides necessary exposition, but more importantly, she hints at another central theme underlying the narrative: how the cycles of nature and the inevitability of life and death dominate the lives of the people of Santiago. Even four years of Chayo’s anger and rejection is not enough of a price for Marta to pay. Nature exacts a final, bitter toll, and although the tragedy seems to draw the sisters closer together, the price is steep indeed.
The tragedy of Richard’s death comes on the heels of Esperanza and Rafael’s wedding, a decidedly happy occasion. The proximity of these events suggests that life doesn’t care about the happiness of the prior moment. It doesn’t care whether you’ve had time to enjoy it or had time to prepare for heartbreak. Death is potentially around every corner, and it is only with the support of community that people weather these storms.
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