45 pages • 1 hour read
Silvia Moreno-GarciaVelvet Was the Night
Silvia Moreno-GarciaFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Leonora doesn’t return when she said she would, which annoys Maite. She receives a call from Leonora asking her to meet her at a particular address with her cat and a box of her belongings. Maite, now more annoyed, agrees and takes the cat and box to a printing shop, where she meets a young man, Rubén Morales. Rubén knows Leonora, but he wasn’t told that she was coming to his shop. When Leonora doesn’t show up when she says she would, Rubén directs Maite to Leonora’s sister, Cándida, who also doesn’t know where Leonora could be. Cándida tells Maite that Leonora is involved with the student protestors and is Emilio’s ex-girlfriend. Cándida refuses to take the cat, so Maite is left with Leonora’s possessions.
Chapter 6 Summary
Elvis meets El Mago for coffee. His boss tells him that he and his unit have a new job: tracking down Leonora Trejo and getting a camera and film from her. He’s also directed to interrogate Father Villareal, a leftist Jesuit priest and teacher who has been in contact with Leonora. Elvis is nervous about potentially physically assaulting a priest, but El Mago reminds Elvis that he was recently promoted to a new position of authority and needs to prove himself. El Mago also lets him know that El Gazpacho is no longer one of the Hawks.
Chapter 7 Summary
Maite returns to the printing shop the next day. Rubén doesn’t have time to speak to her but tells her he’ll come to her apartment later. Maite returns to her apartment, where she reflects on her financial troubles and how caring for Leonora’s cat only adds to her burdens.
Chapter 8 Summary
Elvis, El Güero, and the Antelope break into Leonora’s apartment and, finding nothing, head to Father Villareal’s. The priest admits to knowing Leonora but denies knowing where she is or having seen a camera. Villareal points them to a woman named Jackie who runs Asterisk, a leftist art collective that Leonora is a part of. Elvis directs El Güero and the Antelope to brutalize Villareal; then, they leave.
Chapter 9 Summary
Rubén comes to Maite’s apartment later that night, and they head to a coffee shop where he tells her that he spoke to Jackie, a mutual connection he has with Leonora, who is his ex-girlfriend. Jackie told him that Leonora called her and told her that she has information on the Hawks. The two discuss the political ramifications of the Hawks’ attack on the recent student protests, the blowback of which resulted in the ousting of the Hawks’ political leader, Alfonso Martínez Domínguez. They speculate that violence against the student protestors might have been orchestrated by someone else in the government—possibly even President Echeverría—who had a dispute with Martínez Domínguez.
Maite tells Rubén that Emilio came to Leonora’s apartment looking for the camera. Rubén suggests that Maite get in contact with him to see if he has information about Leonora; Leonora left Rubén for Emilio, so the two men are not on good terms. Maite returns home, puts on music, and prepares to call Emilio.
Chapter 10 Summary
Elvis meets with El Mago and tells his boss about the information he got out of Villareal. El Mago encourages Elvis to pursue the Jackie lead; he knows a man named Justo who can get Elvis into Asterisk. El Mago also tells Elvis that he needs to look into Maite Jaramillo, a neighbor of Leonora’s who seems to have connections to Leonora. Elvis breaks into Maite’s apartment. While he doesn’t find anything of interest, he is impressed by her vinyl collection. He decides to put the Antelope and El Güero on her while he looks into Justo.
Chapter 11 Summary
Maite, at work, phones Emilio but gets only an answering machine; she leaves a message. She’s visited by a man named Mateo Anaya, who works for the government. Anaya questions her about her connections with “subversive elements” like Leonora and Rubén. Anaya becomes aggressive with Maite after she insists that she only knows both Leonora and Rubén because she’s watching Leonora’s cat. Anaya leaves when the other secretaries come back from lunch. Maite heads home early, where she receives a call back from Emilio asking her to meet him at his place the next day.
Chapters 5-11 Analysis
Moreno-Garcia continues to use perspective shifts throughout this section. Here, though, the oscillation between Maite and Elvis offers different perspectives on the political and social instability of the historical moment, deepening the novel’s exploration of Surveillance, Power, and Politics. The opening section of the book narrates the protests through Elvis’s point of view; because Elvis is directly involved in the violence that marks these protests, this section gives the impression that the protests are directly affecting all citizens of Mexico City. From Elvis’s perspective, they are of tantamount importance. This section, though, offers Maite’s perspective on the protests. When she’s asked about them by Cándida, Maite’s narration reveals that she’s avoided all coverage of the protests because “[a]ll that talk of secret groups of hired thugs and communist plots made her nervous” (64). Maite’s chapters reveal a very different aspect of the cultural response to the protests: Her reticence to even read headlines about them speaks to the reality that the political dissatisfaction motivating the protests hasn’t yet penetrated all segments of Mexican society. Maite wants to see herself as apolitical, untouched by the increasingly public and violent clashes between governing ideologies. As the narrative progresses, though, even she is embroiled in this momentous historical moment.
Maite’s plotline is concerned with narratives of romance, focalized through her favorite serialized romance pulp, Secret Romance. In this section of the novel, Moreno-Garcia begins to craft meta-commentary on romance narratives. Prior to this section, every Maite chapter ends with Maite reading (or fantasizing about) an issue of Secret Romance. The final chapter of this section shifts this pattern. Just as Maite is about to pull out a copy of the pulp, she receives a call from the dreamy Emilio. This plot development creates what would be, in the world of Secret Romance, the beginning of a romantic arc between Maite and Emilio; indeed, with Maite as a lower-middle-class worker and Emilio as a dashing, wealthy womanizer, they are primed to play characters in a classic rags-to-riches romance. This shift in the novel’s narrative structure that appears to signal the start of a romance subplot acts as a red herring; as Emilio’s true motivations are revealed and Maite’s expectations shift, Moreno-Garcia begins to comment on romance as a genre in the novel’s later sections.
Maite isn’t the only character in this section who brings unfulfillable aspirations to a relationship. This section also develops the psychology behind Elvis’s relationship with El Mago. Illustrating the theme of Aspirations of Class Mobility, Elvis longs to model the type of masculinity that he sees El Mago successfully performing. This section, though, reveals that Elvis’s yearning for his boss runs deeper than this: Elvis responds vehemently to the accusation that he really wants El Mago to adopt him, saying, “That was a crock of shit—first of all because Elvis was a grown man, and second because he’d never particularly missed his stupid father” (72). The possibility of El Mago acting not just as a model of masculinity for Elvis but also as a father figure to him sets up a potential trajectory for their relationship over the course of the novel. Moreno-Garcia establishes this potential paternal relationship in order to create surprise later in the narrative as El Mago, much like Emilio, is unmasked.
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