81 pages • 2 hours read
Bless Me, Ultima
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Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Antonio again dreams about his brothers, this time following them across the river to Rosie’s brothel. He sees a naked young woman through the doorway, who is soon joined by María. León and Eugene enter the brothel, but Antonio refuses, protesting that a future priest cannot think sinful thoughts. Andrew agrees to wait outside the brothel until Antonio loses his innocence. Antonio replies that innocence is forever, but María tells him that innocence comes from ignorance, and Antonio already knows too much of “the flesh and blood of the Márez men” (71). A priest appears and reassures Antonio that once he takes communion, he will understand good and evil.
Finally, Ultima appears and points Antonio toward his birthplace of Las Pasturas, indicating that his innocence was left behind there. Antonio wakes to find his brothers in the midst of an argument about leaving the llano. Gabriel wants them to work on a highway crew and then come with him to California, and María wants them to stay on the llano to farm. María observes that the Márez restlessness has driven her sons away from home, destroying Gabriel’s dream.
León and Eugene depart the following morning, but Andrew stays, wanting to make María happy. Andrew muses that the war made him mature too quickly, and neither he nor his two older brothers are capable of fulfilling either of their parents’ dreams.
At school, Antonio learns to read and write, excelling so quickly that he is allowed to skip the second grade. A rumor goes around the school that the world will soon end in a biblical apocalypse, but when it doesn’t come to pass, the rumor dies out.
On the last day of school, Antonio goes fishing with a boy named Samuel. Antonio knows that catching a carp is bad luck, but he doesn’t know why. Samuel tells him an old Aztec legend: When the first people settled the llano, the gods gave them a fertile valley in exchange for the promise never to fish the scared carp. A 40-year drought descended on the valley, and as all the other food sources died out, the valley people caught and ate the carp. The gods were angry and wanted to kill the people, but one kind god persuaded them to show mercy. The valley people were instead turned into carp themselves and sent to live in the river forever. The kind-hearted god then became a golden carp and joined his people in the water so he could watch over them.
Antonio wonders, “if the golden carp was a god, who was the man on the cross?” (81). Samuel reassures him that a boy from town named Cico will show Antonio the golden carp in the coming summer.
Chapter 10 Summary
Summer comes to the llano, and Antonio is invigorated by the beauty of nature. He continues to wonder about the golden carp and eagerly awaits meeting Cico. Gabriel is still upset about his sons leaving, and María is unhappy because her brother Lucas is on his deathbed after a long bout of illness. She believes that he has been hexed by an evil witch, one of the daughters of the local saloon keeper, Tenorio Trementina. No doctor can cure Lucas, and even the local Catholic priest fails to exorcise him. Finally, the Lunas ask Ultima for help. Ultima agrees but warns them that tampering with someone’s fate can set off an uncontrollable chain of consequences.
Uncle Pedro returns to the llano and reports on Lucas’s curse: Lucas was out one night chasing after his stray cows when he followed them into an ominous cottonwood forest. There, he saw three women transforming into moving fireballs. The fireball-women began performing a satanic ritual, and when Lucas stepped forward to stop them, he recognized them as the Trementina daughters, locally rumored to be witches. One of them cursed Lucas as he fled. Tenorio denies the accusation and has threatened to shoot the Luna men if they retaliate.
Ultima insists that Antonio accompany her on her healing errand. In El Puerto, she takes him with her to confront Tenorio. Tenorio calls her a witch and denies that his daughters are evil. Ultima asks the daughters to lift the curse, and when they refuse, she warns that she must now utilize “the magic beyond evil, the magic that endures forever” (94). Having tampered with fate, the Trementinas will suffer harsh consequences.
At the Luna house, Ultima bathes Lucas and feeds him an herbal medicine. Antonio is not afraid of the curse because he knows that good is stronger than evil. During the night, malevolent spirits appear at the door in the form of animals, but Ultima’s owl drives them away. As Antonio falls asleep, he feels his body and spirit merging with that of his uncle, and he experiences his uncle’s pain. He realizes that they are sharing in the struggle against evil.
When Antonio wakes up, Ultima tells him that they have defeated death but not evil. She makes clay figures of the three Trementina sisters and has Lucas breathe on them, whereupon they come to life. Ultima then stabs each doll with a pin and gives Lucas another round of medicine, whereupon he vomits a ball of hair. His condition begins to improve immediately, and Ultima declares that he will live.
The Lunas gather to thank Ultima and declare that they are forever indebted to her though some other townsfolk still call her a witch. Ultima takes the hair to the evil cottonwood forest and burns it.
Chapter 11 Summary
One day while he fishes in the river in El Puerto, Antonio is approached by Cico. Cico asks if he wants to see the golden carp and then asks whether he believes the carp is a god. Antonio replies that he is a Catholic and so can put no other god before the Lord. Still, after the Catholic God failed to cure Lucas, Antonio wonders whether there might not be other gods in existence.
Antonio takes an oath never to harm any carp, whereupon Cico leads him to the hut of Narciso, a man from town with an alcohol addiction. Narciso keeps a flourishing garden, which Cico attributes to his own form of magic. They continue on toward the creek, passing the local gang of boys on the way who heckle Antonio about Ultima, calling her a witch.
Cico leads Antonio to a creek called El Rito. He points to the water, and the golden carp passes by. Antonio is profoundly moved, and “a sudden illumination of beauty and understanding” (114) enters him, the feeling he’d hoped to achieve at his first communion. Yet he worries that he has sinned by perceiving this god.
As Antonio contemplates, a huge black bass appears in the water. Cico throws his spear but misses. The carp returns, and Cico explains that not everyone can see it. Then he tells Antonio of the golden carp’s prophecy: If the residents of Guadalupe continue to live in sin, the weight of their sins will sink the town into the water, drowning everyone. He warns Antonio to “sin against no one” (119).
Returning home, Antonio asks Ultima if he should believe the story of the carp, and she tells him that he has to define his own beliefs as he grows into a man. That night, Antonio dreams that the residents of Guadalupe have drowned in the water of sin. Gabriel and María argue about what fills Antonio’s veins: the water of the moon, binding him to the Catholic church and the Lunas, or the salt water of the golden carp, binding him to the Márez. Antonio worries that their struggle will destroy the world until Ultima appears to tell them that both kinds of water are one and the same, part of “the great cycle that binds us all” (121).
Chapter 12 Summary
Over the summer, Gabriel drinks heavily to cope with the loss of his dream. María is sad and withdrawn, and Antonio feels closer to Ultima than to his mother. They spend long afternoons gathering plants for her cures, and she tells him of his family’s history.
One day, Antonio sees the three clay dolls of the Trementina sisters in Ultima’s room. She warns him not to touch them and to look out for Tenorio, giving him her scapular necklace to protect him until he can receive his own at communion.
Old vaqueros from Las Pasturas come by El Puerto and discuss the past, telling stories of the first cowboys on the llano after the land was taken from the Indigenous inhabitants. Gabriel is happy during these visits.
One night, Narciso arrives at the house, frantic. He warns Ultima that Tenorio is drunk and coming for revenge: One of his daughters had just died, and he suspects Ultima cursed her after finding her bag of herbs under the deceased daughter’s bed. Tenorio and a mob of townsmen carrying makeshift crosses soon arrive at the door, claiming that Ultima must be killed for her sins.
One of the men has his lip pierced with two needles which have been blessed by a priest to ward off evil. Narciso fashions these needles into a cross and places it in the doorway. The men agree that no evil witch could cross under such a holy symbol, and if Ultima can walk under the needles, they will never absolve her of witchcraft. Ultima appears in the doorway and confronts Tenorio. As he accuses her of being a bruja (witch), her owl attacks him and tears out his eye. At the same time, Ultima walks through the door, proving to the men that she is innocent of witchcraft.
Tenorio backs down but swears revenge for his injury and promises that he will kill Ultima and Narciso one day. As the chaos fades, Antonio notices that the holy needles are on the ground. He wonders whether the cross was broken or if it just fell.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
In these chapters, Antonio’s inner conflict transitions away from his parents’ conflicting dreams and toward the larger concepts of sin and forgiveness.
Antonio’s dream in Chapter 9 illustrates the growing conflict between his maturation and his desire to remain innocent in the eyes of the church. The dream takes place at Rosie’s brothel, a site Antonio believes to house evil women who deal in temptations of the flesh. A naked woman in a suggestive position appears in his dream, and his brothers insist that even a priest must be “fulfilled by woman” (70). Here, the Márez boys model an image of masculinity that both fascinates and terrifies Antonio. Like most children approaching puberty, he is curious about sexuality, but this natural curiosity becomes an object of fear when he considers the threat of sin and eternal damnation.
The appearance of María in a sexualized vignette in Antonio’s dream highlights his confusion: His relationship with his mother represents a pure and innocent connection between the masculine and the feminine, but in this dream, he embodies her fear of corruption.
Though Antonio tries to delay losing his innocence by staying outside the brothel, María laments that he is already marked by the sin of knowledge inherited from the Márez men. Due to the sins of the father, it is evidently too late to salvage Antonio’s innocence. He is placed in an impossible situation, too much of a child to understand the ways of men, but too much of a man to ever retreat back into naivete. The dream-priest suggests that Antonio’s only chance at salvation now is to take communion, which will both instill the knowledge he desires and purify his sins.
Again, Ultima presents an alternative viewpoint by telling Antonio that his innocence lies in the llano. Dream-Ultima indicates that he has not been innocent since birth, but in waking life, Ultima stresses that innocence is not the ultimate good of life. Rather, she encourages Antonio to seek out new knowledge and alternative viewpoints that will expand his understanding of life.
In addition to experiencing his coming-of-age struggles, Antonio undergoes several spiritual revelations in these chapters. The first occurs when he witnesses Ultima curing Lucas with a mixture of herbalism, traditional Indigenous medicine, and folk magic. The cracks in his faith are widened by this experience, and he questions why Ultima’s powers succeeded where the Catholic priest failed.
While visiting El Puerto, Antonio also learns more about local spirituality. The Trementina witches, with their transformations and curses, are figures in a belief system that lies outside of the church, stemming instead from traditional mythology and storytelling. While Ultima cures Lucas, Antonio encounters yet another kind of power. He feels a connection to his uncle that transfers Lucas’s pain to his own body—this is his first experience with the healing abilities granted by empathy.
The second revelation occurs at the creek with Cico. Witnessing the carp fills Antonio with the kind of enlightened bliss that he hopes to receive at communion. In the context of the hero’s journey, this moment can be seen as the belly of the whale, the separation between the hero and all that he knew to be true. It is a moment of annihilation, symbolically or literally destroying the hero before his rebirth. Seeing the carp destroys Antonio’s conviction that Catholicism is the only valid belief system.
Antonio’s momentary joy is followed by fear when he remembers the commandment, “thou shalt have no other gods before me” (107). His hopes are further dashed when he learns that, like the Christian God, the carp punishes sin with death. He has now encountered two punishing masculine gods, and because he believes all men are sinful by nature, Antonio fears a divine apocalypse, feeling “weak and powerless in the knowledge of the impending doom” (118).
Antonio’s second dream in this section again reflects internal conflict about his future. His parents argue about the makeup of his blood, debating whether the fundamental nature of his being is Márez or Luna. Once again, Ultima mediates, explaining that the waters of the sea and the waters of the moon are all part of the same cycle. Here, Ultima lays out the cyclical, harmonic nature of all things. This idea of cyclical connection will become increasingly important throughout the narrative, as Antonio learns to accept change as part of a greater universal harmony.
Tenorio emerges as a primary antagonist in these chapters, ironically accusing Ultima of the witchcraft practiced by his daughters. His ability to easily gather a mob of vigilantes illustrates the power of the Catholic church and the danger of culturally deviating from the norm, lending context to Antonio’s fears. The mob of men is calmed when Ultima passes under the cross-needle; their faith supersedes their doubts about Ultima. This seemingly exonerates her from the accusations, but Antonio’s discovery of the broken cross-needle casts doubts on this conclusion. Leaving the matter ambiguous invites the reader to speculate on the nature of Ultima’s power while illustrating that, ultimately, it does not matter. Whether or not Ultima’s powers are analogous to witchcraft, she uses them for good. This plays into Antonio’s eventual consensus that moral independence and the choice to be good are more important than the type of religion one practices.
In this section, Anaya continues to describe time in visual terms. As more time goes by, the descriptions of the passing seasons begin to recur. This pattern feeds into the idea of time as cyclical, bolstering Ultima’s belief that everything is connected through a grand cycle. Ultima notes that by saving Lucas, she has meddled with this cycle and potentially started “a chain of events […] over which no one will have ultimate control” (85), a statement that foreshadows the string of tragedies in the coming chapters.
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