Velvet Was the Night

“The alarm clock hadn’t gone off, and she was going to be late, but she had to stop at the newsstand. Would Jorge Luis’s surgery go according to plan?”

At this stage in the narrative, the reader doesn’t know who Jorge Luis is. By having Leonora think about Jorge Luis as though he is a real and important person in Maite’s life, Moreno-Garcia shows the extent to which Secret Romance is important in Maite’s daily experience.

“‘You’ve gotta have some loyalty in this world,’ Elvis said at last. He was looking straight ahead so he couldn’t see El Mago’s expression when he spoke; he didn’t want to see it lest he spot something nasty behind his eyes.”

This passage demonstrates the complexity of Elvis’s characterization. First, it shows that he stands by his principles—like loyalty—even when it’s not easy to do. His fear of El Mago’s reaction, though, shows that Elvis already suspects that El Mago isn’t the sort of man who values loyalty in the same way. Even at this early stage of his relationship with El Mago, Elvis already knows on some level that his boss isn’t entirely trustworthy.

“[S]he watched with indifference as a couple of young men tried to pinch the ass of a teenage schoolgirl, who valiantly warded them off. She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see any of that. There was such ugliness in the world.”

This passage highlights the rampant misogyny of the culture Maite lives in, underscoring the theme of Gender Roles in 1970s Mexico. Maite’s reaction to this scene, though, demonstrates a core part of her character: She doesn’t look away because she’s tired of seeing men act this way; rather, she looks away because scenes like this one shatter the imagined world she wants to live in at all times—one in which “true” romance is possible between men and women.

“A Jesuit. A member of Obra Cultural Universitaria. They are from Monterrey. They were supposed to keep students in check. Instead, some of them are preaching liberation theology and making trouble. Christ was the first communist, they say.”

Father Villareal’s presence in the text speaks to the complicated relationship between religion and the PRI. El Mago repeats the PRI’s stance on the function of religion: It should be an arm of the government used to control the population. In practice, however, religious leaders had complicated relationships with the regime and often saw their faith as an opportunity to effect change.

“He was Elvis’s god, but a dark god. A god of the Old Testament that, as a good Catholic boy, he’d learned to fear.”

Elvis’s characterization of El Mago speaks to the ways in which Catholicism shapes responses to authority. Elvis sees his boss as a “dark god”—a framework that allows him to look past the cruel and violent actions his boss demands of them.

“Sure, she told herself she could save enough money if she was thrifty. But there was an unexpected expense, one thing that led to another, which eventually led to nothing.”

This passage speaks both to Maite’s characterization and to the broader difficulties faced by the lower-middle class of 1970s Mexican society. Maite lives her life knowing that one single accident—like the troubles with her vehicle—could put her on the brink of financial ruin. As a woman trying to live alone, this would have consequences that would severely limit her independence, underscoring the gendered dynamics of Aspirations of Class Mobility.

“In the papers, columnists accused communist foreigners of corrupting Mexico’s youth and attempting to destroy the nation. The cops were innocent, lawful citizens doing their jobs. Perhaps it wasn’t true, but it made Maite’s skin prickle with dread, because no one wanted a repeat of ’68.”

This passage gives an example of how Moreno-Garcia integrates historical context. She offers enough information for the reader to understand the primary conflict of the historical moment, but she doesn’t explain everything. The “repeat of ’68,” for example, references the earlier Tlatelolco Massacre—an allusion that the reader may not be familiar with but that deepens the reader’s understanding of Maite’s perspective.

“The Habana was notorious for that sort of crowd. Cops were always watching the place. It was almost a game; you couldn’t call it government surveillance. More like an old married couple, with the cops eating tortas outside and the reds inside having coffee. A placid relationship.”

The “placid relationship” that Elvis perceives between leftists and the police speaks to how prevalent surveillance had become at this point, illustrating the theme of Surveillance, Power, and Politics. Both parties not only suspect that surveillance is happening—they anticipate it and have accepted that this is how life now works.

“What Elvis had was a decent face for the job. El Mago had once told him that everyone looks like a character in a play or a book, that we are all someone’s doppelganger.”

Here, El Mago suggests to Elvis that he can manipulate other people by changing how he is perceived. The idea that everyone looks like a character in a narrative and that this makes Elvis suited to some jobs brings up the idea that people have set narratives in their minds about how other people act. Elvis learns how to use this to his advantage.

“He pictured two dust motes spinning in concentric circles. Maybe it was like that everywhere, for everyone. There was always someone doing the exact same thing. Like a shadow or a mirror image, like the doppelgangers El Mago talked about. People simply didn’t know it.”

Elvis begins to imagine a kind of kinship with Maite, but the only lens he has to do this with is the one El Mago has given him. This begins Elvis’s arc of finding a healthy, meaningful way of connecting with another person that isn’t colored by his time with the Hawks.

“An activist. That’s a nice way of putting it.”

Here, Emilio is critical of Jackie. His dismissal of her “activism” underscores the varying lenses the public brings to the political conflict. What Maite sees as “activism” Emilio views as revolutionary activity.

“She reminded Elvis of someone. Bluebeard’s wife. Well, the way he pictured Bluebeard’s wife in one of the few books he’d owned as a child, a volume of fairy tales.”

Elvis’s allusion to the Bluebeard fable in describing Maite parallels the way Maite thinks of herself as living in a fairy-tale-like romance. While Maite starts to see herself as the heroine of a romance, Elvis sees her as the protagonist of a horror story. This speaks to the different ways people understand the circumstances of their lives.

“Upstairs, the people were dancing again. The tap-tap-tap of their feet seemed to mark each blow. He couldn’t recognize the music. It sounded distorted, muffled by the radio in the room. Danzón, maybe. For all he knew, a tango. Yeah, probably a tango. He couldn’t dance.”

In this passage, Elvis is being tortured by Arkady. Moreno-Garcia uses Elvis’s hyper-fixation on the sounds above him as a way of showing his slow dissociation from the reality of his situation. His thoughts become increasingly distanced from the present as the present becomes more unbearable.

“Emilio smiled. He had a wonderful smile. Good teeth, like the porcelain in his shop. Good hair, good eyes, good everything. Why can’t the world be full of men like this?”

This passage shows the metrics by which Maite evaluates men at this stage in the novel. She believes Emilio is a trustworthy man because he looks like the hero of a romance novel; the events of the rest of the novel will force Maite to interrogate why she judges people this way and whether or not it is useful for her.

“Youth. All he had was his youth. He wasn’t attractive; he was too hairy for her taste and not nearly as sophisticated as she might have wanted. Still, he’d dated Leonora, and Leonora was beautiful. Maybe that’s how it went for men. It didn’t matter if you were the Hunchback of Notre Dame, you still had a chance to romance Esmeralda.”

This passage speaks to the sexism and power dynamics Maite sees at play in heterosexual romance. The Hunchback allusion once again demonstrates that Maite sees these relationships through the lens of fairy tales.

“Prettiness is currency, she thought. All doors open for you if you’re pretty.”

Here, Maite further examines the power dynamics at work in heterosexual relationships and Gender Roles in 1970s Mexico. Her use of “currency” suggests that she sees male-female interactions as transactional. She also sees herself as being locked out of being able to participate in such transactions.

“Life should be a slow song, affection should be a melody. The word of the day was necrology, and he was thinking about fate and lovers.”

The juxtaposition of imagery in this passage speaks to the fatalistic way in which Elvis thinks about romance. The musical metaphor in the first sentence is the most poetic Elvis has ever been in thinking about romance, but this line of thought is brought about by his ruminations about death notices.

“It was the eyes that did the trick. There was a spark of pain in them, there was shock and something cloudy and lost. As if she’d been dreaming and had suddenly been awoken by the clapping of thunder.”

This passage helps give shape to Elvis’s attraction to Maite. The fact that he’s attracted to the sense of loss and reverie he sees in her speaks to how he thinks about himself—someone who is damaged but dreaming of other things.

“If more people minded their own business the world would be a better place.”

This line from a fight between Maite and Rubén highlights the fundamental difference in their political philosophies. Rubén believes that action and intervention are necessary to create change, while Maite craves isolation.

“She existed in isolation, standing in front of a stark, white background. Some people are made to be lonely.”

In this passage, Elvis creates a romanticized version of Maite. His approach to romanticization is very different from Maite’s: While she models her desire on the fairy-tale hero, Elvis romanticizes her by exaggerating her traits that, in his mind, most align her with him.

“I think this is what I like most about you, Elvis, how you are still at times, capable of being such a child. A big, giant baby. I wonder how you do it, that you can look at the world and manage to think there is a speck of fairness to it when all that the eye can see if garbage from here until forever.”

Here, El Mago chastises Elvis. His “big baby” insult helps demonstrate El Mago’s worldview. He sees the very notion that there should be fairness in the world as inherently childish. This rationale helps him dismiss men like Elvis who demand better treatment.

“The woman’s eyes were huge, and there was blood on her lips. Those were the eyes of Bluebeard’s wife when she opens the door and finds the chamber filled with corpses.”

Throughout the novel, Elvis associates Maite with the Bluebeard fable. The allusion is telling—Bluebeard’s wife is destroyed by her marriage to a murderous, sexist man. The reference speaks to the sense of loss and tragedy that Elvis associates with Maite and also foreshadows the disastrous end of Maite’s relationship with Rubén.

“‘That’s not how it really happened,’ she said.

‘It’s never how it really happened.’” 

Here, Maite and Rubén discuss how El Mago’s obituary doesn’t tell the truth of his death. This quote speaks to the discrepancy between history and reality; the historical record is penned by those with power and not always by those who experienced the events themselves.