45 pages • 1 hour read
Silvia Moreno-GarciaVelvet Was the Night
Fiction | 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 18-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18 Summary
Maite and Rubén drive to the address Emilio gave them, where they meet Lara, a white journalist who covers stories about people disappearing in South and Central America. Lara confirms that Leonora came to see her because she claimed she had a story about the disappearances of activists and phone tapping. Lara thinks it would have been a good story, but Leonora was too scared to give it to her outright. Lara claims that when Leonora left her, she said she’d call back but never did. Lara also tells them that Leonora was dropped off by a man using their very car. From her description of this man, Rubén gleans that it was Sócrates, from Asterisk. Sócrates never told any of the other members of their collective that he was the last one to have seen Leonora.
Chapter 19 Summary
Elvis returns home and goes through the files El Mago gave him. He discovers that the house they visited earlier when tracking Maite belonged to Emilio. After going through Sócrates’s file, though, and learning of his past leftist activity, he decides that he will first interrogate Sócrates. He and El Güero find Sócrates outside of his own apartment and forcibly bring him inside. Under the threat of torture, Sócrates admits that he knows Anaya; when pressed on this, he further admits that he’s the mole in Asterisk who has been leaking information to Anaya. He tells Elvis that he took Leonora to see a journalist the previous week, but Leonora didn’t have the camera with her, because she wasn’t sure if she could trust the journalist. After, he took her to stay with Casimiro Villareal. Elvis accuses Sócrates of handing over Leonora to Anaya, which he denies. He even tells Elvis that he went behind Anaya’s back in helping Leonora: He set up a code with Leonora in the event that she needed to hide. He promised to place an ad in the newspaper that would let her know it’s safe to emerge. Elvis tortures the code out of Sócrates. After he leaves, he calls El Mago to let him know they’ve found the mole.
Chapter 20 Summary
Maite and Rubén return from Lara’s and go to Rubén’s apartment and then to hers. They discuss whether political change for the better is truly possible. Maite finds Rubén annoying but is also fascinated by his passion for his cause.
Chapter 21 Summary
Elvis relieves the Antelope of watching Maite’s apartment. He follows Rubén and Maite when they leave her place, but he loses them in traffic. Frustrated, he goes to see Justo. Justo tells him that El Gazpacho was found in a ditch, strangled to death. This rattles Elvis, in part because El Gazpacho had a bullet wound when he was taken to the doctor. Justo insists that El Mago is behind the murder, but Elvis refuses to believe this. Justo points out that there’s a man in the bar who is watching him. Elvis sees that it’s Arkady. He slips out of the bar through the bathroom to escape.
Chapter 22 Summary
Maite goes to work. After she gets home, she and Rubén go to see Sócrates. They find him murdered in his bathroom, covered in cigarette burns. Maite says that they should call the cops, but Rubén, worried for their own safety, refuses. When they get back to her apartment, Maite receives a phone call from Leonora. Rubén immediately cuts this conversation off, telling Leonora that no one is safe and she should go back into hiding. Maite, driven to her limits by the sight of the murder and the sudden danger she’s found herself in, initiates sex with Rubén. She finds their sex momentarily empowering but soon returns to worrying about what will happen next.
Chapter 23 Summary
Elvis and the Antelope, surveying Sócrates’s building, see Maite and Rubén exit the building in a rush. Curious to know why they’re running, Elvis tails them, but they only return to Maite’s apartment, where the two men meet up with El Güero. The Antelope takes over the job of watching this apartment while the other men go out for food. While Elvis and El Güero are out, they’re followed and attacked by Anaya and his agents. They accuse Elvis of having killed Sócrates, which Elvis denies. He tells Anaya about the existence of a code to draw Leonora out of hiding. Elvis and the Antelope manage to escape when a nearby door to a store is opened; they run through the store and back to the car. El Güero was badly injured by the encounter, so Elvis takes him to the same doctor he took El Gazpacho to. The doctor insists that El Güero needs immediate surgery to save his eye, but Elvis, worried that El Güero might end up dead just as El Gazpacho did if taken to proper authorities, refuses. Elvis tells the Antelope to drive El Güero to a different medical facility; he doesn’t call El Mago with any updates.
Chapter 24 Summary
Maite and Rubén go out for burgers and discuss Rubén’s past time spent in jail for protesting. Rubén tells Maite that when they get back, he’ll teach her how to shoot the gun. Maite notices a strange man by the jukebox watching them both.
Chapters 18-24 Analysis
In this section of the novel, Moreno-Garcia once again finds new ways of using the narrative’s braided structure to create tension—in this case, through the omission of information. In Chapter 19, Elvis’s exit from Sócrates’s apartment is left fairly ambiguous. It’s implied that he and El Güero left the apartment without further harming Sócrates, but the exact mechanics of their exit are vague; Elvis only says in his narration that “he motioned to El Güero, and they went downstairs” (194). Maite and Rubén’s arrival in Sócrates’s apartment in Chapter 22, when they find him murdered, immediately raises questions. It is left intentionally unclear whether Sócrates was murdered in the time after Elvis left or whether Elvis is an unreliable narrator who omitted what really happened. The shift in perspectives allows Moreno-Garcia to create these ambiguities, raising questions that help propel the novel’s plot.
This section of the novel, more than any other, digs into the granular details of the political history of the Mexican Dirty War, illuminating the theme of Surveillance, Power, and Politics. On the way to Sócrates’s apartment, Rubén vents his frustrations with the current political climate: “You hear people saying it’s ‘Echeverría or fascism,’ like there’s no other choice, and you can’t trust anyone these days” (213). Rubén is frustrated by what he perceives to be a false dichotomy between the tyranny of the PRI and the alleged fascism that would come with communist rule. His frustrations raise questions for Maite as she is forced to consider whether these are the only two options available and what other systems of governance might look like. Maite’s desire to navigate the space between these ideological poles is part of what attracts her to Emilio—who claims to espouse a similar desire for more moderate Mexican politics—and is part of what keeps her caught between these warring sides through the rest of the narrative.
As Maite reconsiders theories of governance, this section of the novel also sees her re-evaluating her romanticized notions of what heroism looks like. Maite begins her sexual relationship with Rubén in these chapters, and her newfound sexual interest in the activist spurs her to see him in a new light: “She wondered if she’d been wrong and Rubén night have the raw material to be a comic book hero, after all. ‘Solider’ sounded exciting” (220). Maite enters her relationship with Rubén with clear-cut definitions of what “heroism” looks like; these are the definitions that have been given to her by Secret Romance and similar kinds of media. Maite associates the heroic with power, beauty, and well-mannered grace—the qualities found in men like Emilio. Her attraction to Rubén signals a shift in her conception of what romanticized heroism might look like, illustrating a simultaneous shift in her Aspirations of Class Mobility. The more time she spends with the lower- and middle-class activists, the more she sees the nobility and potential of their work. This, in turn, leads her to expand her notion of what “heroism” might be and identify Rubén as a potential romantic prospect.
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By Silvia Moreno-Garcia
