Characters

characters Alfredo Salazar - son of Don Julian, a more than 30 years old man and a bachelor. He is engaged to Esperanza but him still fleeting to Julia Salas. Esperanza - wife of Alfredo Salazar. She is a homely woman, literal minded and intensely acquisitive. She is one of those fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly beauty. Julia Salas - sister-in-law of Judge Del Valle. She is the other girl of Alfredo Salazar that remains single in her entire life. Don Julian - an old man, a father of Alfredo Salazar and Carmen. Carmen - sister of Alfredo Salas. Judge Del Valle - brother-in-law of Julia Salas. Donna Adella - sister of Julia Salas. She is small and plump, a pretty woman with a complexion of a baby with a expression of a likeable cow. Calixta - note-carrier of Alfredo Salazar and Esperanza. Dionisio - husband of Donna Adella. Vicente - husband of Carmen. Brigida Samuy - She is the illusive woman whose Alfredo is looking for settings house of Don Julian house of Judge Del Valle house of Don Julian in Tanda where there are coconut plantation and a beach Church of Our Lady of Sorrow Calle Real Sta. Cruz particularly in Calle Luz, hometown of Julia Salas The time of the story is the Lenten Season because they are celebrating the holy week proven by the procession they made with the Our Lady of Sorrow. summary The story opens with Jimmie, at this point a young boy, trying to fight a gang of boys from an opposing neighborhood all by himself. He is saved by Pete, and comes home to his sister Maggie and toddling brother Tommie, and a brutal and drunken father and mother who terrify the children until they are shuddering in the corner. Years pass, the father and Tommie die, and Jimmie hardens into a sneering, aggressive, cynical youth. He gets a job as a teamster. Maggie begins to work in a shirt factory, but her attempts to improve her life are undermined by her mother's drunken rages. Maggie begins to date Jimmie's friend Pete, who has a job as a bartender and seems a very fine fellow. He takes her to the theater and the museum. One night Jimmie and Mary accuse Maggie of "Goin to deh devil." Jimmie goes to Pete's bar and picks a fight with him (even though he himself has ruined other boys' sisters). As the neighbors continue to talk about Maggie, Pete and Mary decide to join them in badmouthing her instead of defending her. Later, Nellie, a "woman of brilliance and audacity" convinces Pete to leave Maggie, whom she calls "a little pale thing with no spirit." Thus abandoned, Maggie tries to return home but is rejected by her mother and scorned by the entire tenement. In a later scene, a prostitute, implied to be Maggie, wanders the streets, moving into progressively worse neighborhoods until, reaching the river, she is followed by a grotesque and shabby man. The next scene shows Pete drinking in a saloon with six fashionable women "of brilliance and audacity." He passes out, whereupon one, possibly Nellie, takes his money. In the final chapter, Jimmie tells his mother that Maggie is dead. The mother exclaims, ironically, as the neighbors comfort her, "I'll fergive her!".