Of Women and Salt

Mario is Jeanette’s on-again, off-again boyfriend. They meet in rehab, and after Mario’s eviction from a sober-living apartment, he moves in with her. He works in a pain clinic, where he skims opioids and sells them on the side until he’s caught and loses his job. He and Jeanette begin to fall heavily into drug addiction, moving quickly from mild painkillers to Oxy and then to heroin. At one point, he hits Jeanette, and the two break up and become sober. Later, they begin seeing one another again, after which Jeanette eventually falls off the wagon, though it’s unclear if Mario does too.

Carmen is Jeanette’s mother and is a Cuban immigrant. She and Jeanette differ dramatically from one another: While Jeanette is wild and impulsive, Carmen is much more reserved and closed minded. Because of her age and attitudes, Jeanette believes that Carmen was among the wealthy, elite Cubans who emigrated to the US to escape the communist revolution and that the reason Carmen no longer speaks with her mother back in Cuba is that they have political differences. However, toward the end, the novel reveals that Carmen in fact fled Cuba because when she was just a child she saw her mother murder her father—and that Carmen was actually quite poor when she first arrived in the US and was “rescued” by Jeanette’s father, which is why she continued to stand by him despite his abuse.

Though Carmen is ostensibly the antagonist throughout much of the story because of her “tough love” relationship with Jeanette, she’s a much more complex figure than she initially seems. Her politics are one piece of that puzzle: Jeanette believes her to be conservative and bigoted, and while that appears true to some extent, “Prey” reveals that the opinions she expresses to Jeanette with such force are actually things she’s deeply conflicted about. For example, she pushes hard for Jeanette to hand Ana over to the police but two years later is conflicted enough that she calls her niece by Ana’s name—and she later takes Ana in and raises her as her own child. Likewise, the novel reveals that her “tough love” stance comes about largely because she felt that she was coddling Jeanette too much and that she needed a change in tactic, something that her friend Pepe’s criticism reinforces and that she appears to regret after Jeanette’s death. Moreover, much of the tension between Carmen and Jeanette stems not from Jeanette’s substance abuse but from her refusal to be around her father, which Carmen was unable to understand since she didn’t know until after his death that he’d abused Jeanette—and by then, she and Jeanette are apparently unable to repair their relationship.

Gloria was Jeanette’s neighbor in Miami. Toward the start of the novel, in 2014, ICE detains Gloria and takes her to a detention center in Texas, where her daughter, Ana, later joins her after Jeanette hands her over to the police (although Gloria knows nothing of this), and her story picks up from there. Gloria is from El Salvador—she and Ana are the novel’s only major non-Cuban characters. At one point, her brother runs afoul of the local gangs, who rape her in a retaliatory effort to get him to pay what he owes them. As a result, Ana is born; shortly after her birth, the gangs kill Gloria’s brother, so Gloria and Ana flee to the US. Immigration officers deport them, but they manage to return and set up a life in Miami until officials again arrest them. Gloria has no legal assistance, so she agrees to sign expedited deportation papers that she doesn’t fully understand. US officials deport her and Ana but rather than taking them back to El Salvador simply drop them off in Mexico and tell them to find their own way home. Instead, they remain in Irapuato, and Gloria finds work as a housekeeper through a local cousin. She develops cancer and, unable to afford treatment, eventually passes away.

Ana is Gloria’s daughter. She’s just a child when the narrative introduces her, but as it progresses and Ana grows older, their storyline passes from Gloria to Ana. Ana’s story is complicated because of her complex sense of home: Although her only nationality is Salvadoran, she’s spent hardly any time there; she feels much more connected to the US and (to a lesser extent) Mexico but is an outsider in both countries. Nevertheless, she’s tough and wise, as she shows when, at 13, after her mother’s death, she manages to get back into the US and make her way to Miami. Unaware that Jeanette called the police on her as a child, she seeks her out as a familiar face; however, by the time she returns, Jeanette has passed away. Instead, Carmen takes her in, and the novel concludes with Carmen gifting Les Misérables to her.

The first person the novel introduces, María is the ancestor of most of the women it follows. She’s independent and defies social conventions—for example, she’s the only woman who works at her cigar factory, as rolling cigars was typically a male occupation, and she continues to work hard and earn her place despite the abuse—sometimes even physical abuse—and lower wages she receives. She lives with her ailing mother and expresses little interest in marrying.

However, the factory lector, Antonio, becomes enamored with María after mistaking her amusement for romantic interest. After her mother passes away, she decides that Antonio might offer her a more comfortable life and agrees to marry him—but insists on continuing to work in the factory as a point of pride. In addition, María grows more radicalized as Antonio teaches her to read and write and as revolution foments; when the factory owner cancels the readings, effectively firing Antonio, she quits along with him, and they run a rebel reading group in secret for the workers. When she becomes pregnant, though, Antonio bars her from attending the meetings. Government forces kill Antonio while María is home giving birth to their daughter, Cecilia.

Maydelis is Jeanette’s cousin in Cuba. Although she isn’t a major character, the chapter written from her perspective offers an important corrective to the larger narratives of other characters on modern Cuba. Although Maydelis’s husband is a doctor, she sells trinkets to tourists, a job which requires her to put on different faces and be whomever tourists wants her to be: If they want to talk about how hard life is in Cuba, she’ll do that; if they want to hear how it’s a secret socialist paradise, she’ll do that. As a result, she struggles to understand who she really is. The novel suggests that this struggle reflects broader attitudes toward Cuba—that outsiders tend to make various assumptions about the country but that the conversation frequently excludes the voices of actual Cubans. However, Jeanette’s chapter—which immediately follows Maydelis’s—suggests that Maydelis is, likewise, guilty of making assumptions about the US: As Maydelis tires of Jeanette’s questions and ideas about Cuba, Jeanette tires of Maydelis’s questions about the US, the place from which Jeanette is trying to escape. In a way, then, the two represent their larger countries and populaces—each seeing only what they want in the other to serve their own ends.