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From the beginning, I felt it, snug inside my heart, the pearl of great price. No one had to tell me to believe in God or to love everything that lives. I did it automatically like a shoot inching its way towards the light.
This quotation comes from the beginning of Chapter Four, as Patria describes her deep, intuitive Catholic faith. She evokes the biblical parable of the pearl of great price from the Book of Matthew, which compares the Kingdom of Heaven to an exquisite pearl that a merchant would willingly sell all his wares to purchase. By saying she is born with this pearl in her heart, she emphasizes how naturally faith comes to her, which we see throughout this chapter. However, by invoking the parable of the merchant who gives up everything just to purchase a single pearl, she also foreshadows the great loss to come in her life.
I turned around and saw the packed pews, hundreds of weary, upturned faces, and it was as if I’d been facing the wrong way all my life. My faith stirred. It kicked and somersaulted in my belly, coming alive. I turned back and touched my hand to the dirty glass.
In this quotation from the end of Chapter Four, Patria describes how her faith returns to her, albeit forever changed, during the pilgrimage to Higüey. Instead of feeling Mary’s presence by looking toward the altar, she finds it by looking at the other worshipers, symbolic of the people of the Dominican Republic. Implicitly, she finds Mary here because Mary is the Republic’s patron saint. Patria describes her faith coming alive like a pregnancy, cementing that her faith is rooted in motherhood, Mary, and the people, as opposed to the patriarchal aspects of the church.
Coming down that mountain, I was a changed woman. I may have worn the same sweet face, but now I was carrying not just my child but that dead boy as well.
In Chapter Eight, Patria narrates her emotions after witnessing the massacre of young rebels on the fourteenth of June while on the faith retreat with Padre de Jesús. Seeing the death of a boy no older than her daughter radicalizes Patria. By stating that she’s carrying the dead boy along with the child she is pregnant with, she implicitly takes responsibility for all children of the Dominican Republic, vowing to fight for them. For Patria, motherhood is a position of strength, the role of protector.
Oh my sisters, my Pedrito, oh my little lamb!
My crown of thorns was woven of thoughts of my boy. His body I had talcumed, fed, bathed. His body now broken as if it were no more than a bag of bones.
“I’ve been good,” I’d start screaming at the sky, undoing the “recovery.”
In Chapter Ten, Patria mourns the arrest of her family members, particularly her son Nelson. Although this loss doesn’t shake Patria’s faith, it does solidify her distrust in God the Father. In describing the torture of Nelson’s body as her crown of thorns, she compares herself to Jesus, whose crown of thorns symbolizes His suffering and humiliation on the cross. This metaphor echoes throughout the chapter in her repetition of Jesus rising from the dead on the third day. Unlike Jesus’s acceptance of His suffering, Patria rages. Despite being “good”—that is, following the prescribed path for a Catholic woman—she is not rewarded with stability but loss.
I guess I saw it as a clear-cut proposition I was making El Jefe. He would ask for what he always asked for from women. I could give that. But there would be no limit to what our Lord would want of Patria Mercedes, body and soul and all the etceteras besides.
This quotation from Chapter Ten highlights how Patria has formed her own modified, radical Catholic faith. In traditional Catholicism, martyrdom is a holy calling, whereas sacrificing one’s chastity (in this case, marital fidelity) is not. However, Patria recognizes that if she were to die, she would not be able to care for her and her sisters’ children. She views her role as mother and caretaker as ultimately more important than something like chastity. Her conflation of God the Father with Trujillo again highlights her rejection of a patriarchal Catholicism.
