Prayers for the Stolen

Ladydi recalls that one of her earliest memories is her mother saying to her, “Maybe I need to knock out your teeth” (4). Although this seems brutal, and Rita decides not to do it, it is one of many strategies devised by the women in her village to make their daughters ugly and protect them from the attentions of the drug traffickers. One of the first of these is to disguise them as boys. As Ladydi explains, her mother told everyone that she was a boy when she was born. She and Paula “used to go to church on Sundays dressed up like boys” (6). She was even given the name “Boy,” while Paula was called “Paulo.” When the girls started to reach puberty and this ruse could no longer be maintained, the strategy changed. Instead, the mothers used black or yellow marker pens to make their daughters’ teeth look rotten. Paula’s mother also dressed her “in dresses stuffed with rags to make her look fat” (6) and “rubbed Paula’s skin with chili powder so it would have a permanent red rash” (20). Finally, the women dug holes in the ground so that the girls could hide in them when the traffickers' vehicles were heard approaching.  

However, while ingenious, these tactics are also doomed to fail. It is not just that they exact a large price in terms of the freedom and welfare of their daughters, but they also run against the powerful forces implicit in nature and culture. This is especially the case with Paula. As Ladydi says, “at eleven, Paula was still thin and stringy, but her beauty was there… everyone could see what was coming” (33). Despite her mother’s best efforts, Paula’s beauty and sexuality cannot be concealed indefinitely. As she develops, these things will become ever more conspicuous and attempts to disguise them, more futile. The same is true of the effects of culture. As Ladydi explains, growing up, “on television I watched girls getting pretty, combing their hair and braiding it with pink bows or wearing makeup” (3). She is subject to media influences that associate femininity with self-aestheticization and being seen. Thus, it will be difficult to make her do the exact opposite. Her own mother also reinforces this association. When her father was returning from work, Ladydi “watched her put on some lipstick and change into a clean dress” (40). Likewise, in the beauty parlor Rita asks for “the reddest color you have” (24) for her nails. Ladydi imitates her and views having her own nails painted as a defining moment for her femininity. In such a context, parental edicts and warnings lose their force. As the girls become teenagers, the desires to be considered attractive, comply with cultural standards of female beauty and be seen start to outweigh the reasons behind remaining “ugly” and invisible.

Further, all these forces are brought to a head with the arrival of the new teacher. The previously inchoate desire to be seen is exacerbated and given form by the arrival of a handsome, cultured young man from the city. As Ladydi says, “When Jose Rosa arrived it was as if a large mirror had fallen into the jungle” (49). Suddenly, the male perspective, which had previously been only vaguely felt and implicit, becomes explicit and visceral. This provokes the mothers in the village, starved of the male presence for so long because the men have emigrated to find work, to rush to Ruth’s beauty salon. There, they have their hair transformed and cover themselves in makeup, tacitly reinforcing the idea for the girls that this is what women do.

Meanwhile, as Ladydi says, “This was the time when Paula, Maria, Estefani and I first protested against being made unattractive or dressing like boys. We wanted Jose Rosa’s eyes to look at us as women” (46). Jose’s presence disrupts the carefully organized concealment and avoidance of attention on which femininity in the village was previously based. Symbolically, it exposes the village in the eyes of the wider world, especially the urban one, as somewhere strange, unsophisticated, and—as Ladydi feels about herself—“born from the jungle” (48). Jose’s conversation with Rita also highlights this when he criticizes the village’s absence of drinking glasses and the fact that the people there live on dirt floors.

Symbolically, the contradictions implicit in attracting the male gaze also reach a climax when Jose sees Paula naked. After her dress is covered in the toxic Paraquat, her friends take off her clothes in the school bathroom to wash her, and Jose accidentally observes this. The same night, Ladydi and her friends menstruate for the first time. Ladydi links the two events: “At that moment we became one woman and it was as if he’d seen us all” (58). Jose seeing Paula’s unconcealed beauty thus cements her and her friends’ statuses as women. At the same time, and for the same reason, the event exposes them as targets. The tricks they’ve used to be invisible to the male gaze can no longer protect them. The desire for beauty and for the attention of desirable men are inextricably linked to the dangers of being noticed by dangerous men and being stolen, so that becoming a young woman means being a target of rape and kidnapping. It is impossible for the girls to fully embrace becoming women, because merely existing in their female bodies endangers them. This is why the event is described as an “omen” (58). It tragically prefigures both the capture of Paula by the traffickers and the destruction of Ladydi’s childhood world.