58 pages • 1 hour read
Everything Here Is Beautiful
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Part 2, Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Lucia”
Chapter 5 begins with Lucia, Essy, and Manny arriving at the home of Manny’s family in a small rural village in Ecuador. Essy and Fredy become friends quickly as Lucia is shown around the house by Mami, Manny’s mother. That weekend, Manny’s parents host a welcome party for Manny, Lucia, and Essy. They invite a large number of family members and neighbors. Mami and Papi surprise Lucia and Manny the next morning with a small “casita,” a home built with dirt floors and a tin roof. Lucia suddenly realizes the permanency of her situation, and she becomes uncomfortable. Nevertheless, she is grateful to Manny’s parents for their gift and thanks them. She notices that there is no outhouse, and Manny assures her that he will build one later. After Manny’s parents leave, Manny promises that this home is temporary, and he will build them a good house later.
In the morning, Lucia makes breakfast with Mami and some of her sisters. They discuss Fredy and his condition. Tía Camila asks Lucia when she will be having another child; Mami tells her that she’s running out of time. Lucia diverts the conversation to the topic of dinner. In the following weeks, Lucia quickly falls into a routine of housekeeping and childrearing. She thinks about what her mother would say about her new life as she notices her hands have become rough and cracked. One night, Lucia asks Manny what he thinks about moving to Martez, a city that is a few hours away from the village. Manny laughs her off and dismisses her suggestion of starting a laundry service, asking what the women in the city would do if they had no laundry to focus on.
Lucia becomes resentful toward Manny as she believes he is watching her constantly to make sure she’s taking her medication. One afternoon, Manny, Lucia, and Essy travel to Cuenca, a town that is an hour and a half away, to refill Lucia’s prescription and do some shopping. While there, Lucia enters an internet cafe and responds to her emails, not having been able to do so until now. She responds to several emails from Miranda, who is worried about her lack of communication. Next, she responds to Nipa, who tells her that she is divorcing her husband. As she readies to leave, Lucia notices that the woman behind the counter looks a lot like Susi, and she begins to wonder what really happened to her. When she asks Manny, he does not answer.
Lucia suggests that Essy attends a school so that she has something to do. After Essy tears apart some of the mosquito netting that surrounds their bed to make herself a pair of wings, Manny reluctantly agrees. Essy adapts to her new routine quickly, and Lucia finds herself finishing her housework much more quickly. Lucia asks Manny when he will build their outhouse, and he tells her he will get to it later. Manny shows her how to kill a chicken, and she wonders why she feels no remorse as she watches it die. She thinks about a song that she and Miranda would sing when they were younger about the bones in the body, and she realizes she misses that version of Miranda; Lucia wonders what her sister is doing now.
One day, Mami gifts Lucia a sewing machine. She quickly makes a new dress for Essy, but Essy refuses to wear it and throws it into the dirt before running off. Manny tells Lucia he will go get her, but the pair don’t return home for hours. Later, Lucia travels on her own back to Cuenca and ends up responding to her emails again in the internet cafe. There, she runs into a young man named Jonesy, who she met during her trip to Quito in the summer of her sophomore year of college. He tells her that he has a friend who oversees an English newspaper, telling Lucia he’ll put her in touch with him. She contemplates it for a moment, knowing that the commute is too long, but she takes his friend’s phone number anyway. She believes this is a sign that should not be ignored.
Lucia brings the job up to Manny, and the two argue about the commute and money. In the end, Manny gives in and tells her to do what she needs to do. Lucia begins to commute to her job three days a week; she loves the people that she works with and the curiosity they show for her life back in America. After a month, Lucia is exhausted. Jonesy offers Lucia a small apartment above a cafe in the city, and she takes it, deciding that this way, she will be happy and well-rested when she is home. This time, Manny doesn’t put up a fight. When she returns home after her three days away, she finds that the sopa de pollo that she’d made for her family has been left untouched. She discovers that one of Tía Camila’s daughters has taken over her job doing daily chores.
Lucia tries to focus on Essy, pushing down her resentments over the reality of life in Ecuador, particularly the way other people treat her. One day, Mami asks Lucia why she chooses to leave her family every week. The other women remind her that she is no longer in America and that Essy misses her. The next day, she asks Manny if she can take Essy with her into the city to go to a school there. Manny becomes angry, stating that Essy should be with her family; she is happy and safe at home, which is what Lucia wanted. Lucia doesn’t argue, realizing that Manny is right.
Once she’s back in the city, Lucia returns to the internet cafe and reads an email from Miranda. She finds herself becoming annoyed by Miranda’s message and sends her a short, straightforward response. Lucia returns home frustrated, realizing that nothing in the campo, Manny’s village, is hers. Her resentment toward Manny grows. One night, while Manny watches futbol with his cousins, she becomes frustrated by the fact that he still has not built them an outhouse. She storms outside and begins to dig a hole in the ground. Manny is quick to follow her and tells her she needs to take care of herself. The words remind her of Miranda, and she becomes angry. Manny continues, reminding Lucia that they don’t have the same resources in Ecuador to help her as they do in America. Lucia throws the shovel down and storms off.
A few days later, Manny confronts Lucia about neglecting his family, stating that she doesn’t appreciate them. He tells her that she should help with the cooking when she is at the campo. Lucia feels ashamed and embarrassed. Later, when she is back in her apartment in the city, Lucia begins to obsess about coincidences and signs. She begins to hear about a curandero, a traditional healer, everywhere she goes. She decides to visit him, stating that three coincidences must be a sign. The curandero tells her over the course of several visits that she is unhappy; she needs to let go of some of the ties that bind her and that all of the negativity that she keeps inside is hurting her.
Lucia spends a while thinking about the curandero’s words, and she realizes that she has never loved Manny. She thinks about Yonah and how she traded her love for him for a child. She can’t help but feel regret even though she loves her daughter. Lucia tries to call Yonah’s old phone number, but she never is able to get through to him.
Time passes, and one day, Yonah answers the phone. He tells Lucia that he is in New Jersey. Lucia tells him that she will come for a visit, and he seems excited by the idea. Lucia decides to take Essy with her back to America, but she realizes that Manny is not going to just let her take Essy. She realizes that she will have to leave her daughter, but internally promises to come back for her.
On her way back to the city later that week, Lucia is robbed on the bus. The robber steals her backpack while holding a knife in her face, and all Lucia can think about is Essy. Unscathed, she makes it to her apartment in the city. She thinks about how Mami and the others would react if she told them, but she knows they’d ask how she’d expected any different. She takes her medication and an anxiety pill and goes to sleep. She wakes up believing that time has stopped; she wonders what she would do if she had this ability elsewhere. She thinks about the robbery on the bus and decides that it is a sign that she can’t leave Essy behind.
Lucia creates a plan to take Essy with her back to America without telling Manny the truth. Upon finding out she requires his signature for permission to take Essy out of the country alone, she decides to lie to him. Lucia tells Manny that she will take Essy to visit Miranda in Switzerland for a month. Manny signs the forms, believing Lucia. Days pass as Lucia prepares to leave Ecuador with Essy. On the night before they are supposed to leave, Lucia is in her apartment in Cuenca when she hears a knock on her door. She opens the door and finds Miranda, who knows about Lucia’s plan to take Essy back to America. Miranda confronts Lucia, and Lucia becomes agitated and frantic. The altercation becomes physical, and Lucia hits Miranda on the head with a lamp. She yells at her, telling her to get out of her life, before sitting in a corner and burying her face in her knees.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Manuel”
Manny contemplates when Lucia began to act differently, realizing it began several months ago. He states that she hadn’t acted “crazy,” just different and easily agitated. Manny thinks about how easily he has fallen back into his routine now that he is home with family. He works with his father on the farm and spends time with Essy; when she asks to paint their new house, which he has not yet built, Manny compromises and helps her paint the casita. When Lucia begins to work in Cuenca, Manny tells himself that she is “cured,” and has sexual relations with his cousin Yasmin’s friends while Lucia is away.
Lucia becomes unpredictable and tired. Monthly, Manny checks Lucia’s medication bottle and refills it when it is almost empty. He keeps extra medication in a small tin box in a drawer. He knows that Lucia knows about this, but she doesn’t say anything to stop him. He remembers fighting with her about the outhouse and how she’d stormed away after he questioned her health. Shortly after being intimate with one of Yasmin’s friends, Manny can’t help but think of his daughter. He decides to “try” for Essy.
One day, Manny goes to the internet cafe after opening a bank account in Cuenca. He sees a young woman who looks remarkably like Susi and remembers his time with her vividly. He approaches the young woman and discovers that she is Susi’s younger sister; Susi is living in Esmeraldas. Manny leaves, deciding not to tell Lucia about the encounter, and he decides not to pursue the matter any further.
After Lucia asks him about taking Essy to Switzerland, he calls Miranda, asking if she spoke to Lucia recently. He tells her that Lucia is excited to bring Essy to visit her in Switzerland, and Miranda asks if Lucia is taking her medication. He says he believes she is, but he can’t be certain since Lucia lives away from home three days a week. Miranda says that if Lucia isn’t acting “right,” he needs to take her to a psychiatrist; Manny begins to feel exhausted.
When Lucia returns, no longer going to Switzerland, she announces that she is not going to be returning to her apartment in Cuenca. Afterward, Manny notes that she seems different, ignoring him but enjoying her time with Essy. Mami notices Lucia’s change in attitude and brings her soup, asking her what’s wrong. Lucia tells them that “they” are always whispering about her and mistakes Mami for her own mother. In the following days, she either sleeps all day or wakes up early, keeping Essy home from school.
One day, Manny returns home to a large pot that caught on fire from being unattended on the stove. Manny yells at Lucia, and he tells her that she should go to the doctor. Lucia becomes enraged, and Manny and Essy leave to go to Mami’s house. Lucia continues to act recklessly, convincing Essy that spies are after them, scaring her. When Manny goes to talk to his mother about Lucia, he discovers that his mother has become ill with worry. His Tía Camila dismisses him, saying he does not know what it is like for a woman’s son to be unable to control his wife, calling it a disgrace.
Manny is livid for the rest of the day. When he arrives home, he sees Lucia in the kitchen cooking so much food that every surface in the kitchen is covered by it. Manny becomes enraged and punches a wall. He tells Lucia he is going to call Miranda. Lucia grabs the pot of boiling water off of the stove and throws it at him in response.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Miranda”
Manny tells Miranda about the incident with the boiling water; the water only hit his ankle as he jumped out of the way. She apologizes to Manny, unsure of what to say to him, and she asks again if Lucia is taking her medication. Manny tells Miranda that he needs her help. She thinks back to the night when she’d confronted Lucia weeks prior. She fought with Lucia to take her medication. Lucia attacked her, forcing her own pills in Miranda’s mouth. After Miranda threatened to tell Manny about her plan to take Essy, Lucia took her medication and threw a lamp at Miranda. Lucia told her to get out of her life.
Miranda contemplates returning to Ecuador to help care for Lucia. She begins to feign illness to avoid spending time with Stefan’s family, and after a week, she discusses with Stefan if she should go back to Ecuador. Stefan, who is now her husband, tells her that Lucia has to want to take care of herself, and Miranda can’t make her. Miranda becomes angry, feeling that Stefan doesn’t care about what’s happening with Lucia. The couple continues arguing until Stefan asks Miranda about helping herself and her own life. Miranda storms off angrily. Later, she tells Stefan she has to go back. He reminds her of the family events she will be missing if she goes: an awards banquet for Stefan and his niece Sophie’s communion. He asks her to think about Sophie, his sister’s daughter; this enrages Miranda, who feels he doesn’t care about Essy, her sister’s daughter.
Miranda calls Manny to tell him that she will be coming, but he explains to her that he has begun to put Lucia’s pills inside of her tea, forcing her to take them. He tells her that she’s been to a doctor and she seems calmer; he apologizes to Miranda, saying he wasn’t sure what else to do. Once she realizes Manny doesn’t need her to come to Ecuador anymore, she hangs up the phone, grateful.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Manuel”
After Manny begins to hide Lucia’s pills in her tea, she seems to become calmer and resumes her work at the newspaper. She only commutes to Cuenca once every other week.
Several years pass uneventfully, and Essy turns nine years old. One afternoon, Fredy and Essy are playing by the river, and Fredy falls into the rapids. Manny pulls him from the river and sends Essy to run and get help. Manny’s father arrives first and begins performing CPR on Fredy, who is not breathing. Mami arrives and watches in horror as she holds onto Fredy and whispers the name of his deceased brother, Alamar. Thankfully, Fredy begins to breathe on his own again, and the family rushes home. At home, Lucia rushes inside with the curandero she’d been seeing before. Mami asks Lucia to send the man away, and Manny explains that he is the man who claimed that a child like Fredy is a “curse.” Lucia apologizes, and she begins to cry. Manny holds her, realizing that he truly does love Lucia.
The family sends Fredy to Quito to see a specialist for his condition and to determine how much his life-saving operation would cost. While they are away, Essy asks Manny if Fredy is going to die. Manny tries to distract her by taking her to a candy shop. When the family returns, they confirm that there is a procedure that could save Fredy’s life, but it is too expensive. Lucia asks Mami how much the procedure costs, stating that she has money, but will need to get it from Miranda. Once the money is transferred, Fredy receives his procedure, and the family throws a small party to celebrate. The whispers about Lucia have finally stopped.
Later, Lucia discovers that she is pregnant again and the entire family is ecstatic. Manny worries about Lucia’s ability to care for another baby, but she reassures him that she is taking care of their baby. The pair agree to get married, and Mami happily shares the news. Manny feels like he’s looking at the Lucia he’d met all those years ago and feels content. Nine weeks after discovering her pregnancy, however, Lucia experiences a miscarriage. They do not speak about having more children or getting married after. Lucia is deeply saddened, staying in bed all day and refusing to eat.
Later that year, Manny begins construction on their new house. On occasion, Lucia helps to shovel or mix mortar with Essy. One day, Lucia teaches Essy how to sew a curtain, and Manny listens to them laugh happily. One day during the dry season, Lucia tells Manny that she is going back to America for a few weeks to visit a friend who is dying. Manny drives her to the bus station in Cuenca so that she can get to the airport in Quito. On his way back home, he thinks about his life in America and wonders about Susi, fantasizing about spending his life with her in the same way he’d done with Lucia.
Several weeks later, Manny finds himself in Esmeraldas. He remembers the neighborhood where Susi’s sister told him Susi lives, and he finds Susi at a diner there. He watches her from across the street, realizing that she has a child. He wonders if the child could be his son, and he follows them home. In the morning, he follows the young boy to school, contemplating what to do. As he watches the child return to Susi’s diner in the afternoon, he realizes that he is not going to do anything and cries.
Days later, after Manny has returned home to the campo, Manny enjoys spending time with his daughter. However, he is worried about Lucia. Weeks later, he receives news about Lucia and tells Essy that her mother is not going to be coming home.
Part 2, Chapters 5-8 Analysis
Part 2 opens in Lucia’s perspective: this time in a third-person limited point of view. This mirrors the somewhat detached POV of Chapter 3, in which Lucia experienced an “episode.” The POV change tells the reader that something is not quite right and foreshadows Lucia’s gradual progression into another “episode.”
While the first several months of Lucia’s time in Ecuador seem to pass peacefully, she quickly notices changes in Manny and how he acts around her and his family. One day, Manny makes several misogynistic remarks, which startles Lucia and forces her to question what she really knows about Manny: “Now she wonders: Who is this man? It’s the first time she’s thought of him simply as a full-grown man, not a guy, a novio, one of the Vargas boys” (212). Manny, now back home with his family in Ecuador, has been released from several of the burdens he carried when he was living in America. No longer constantly asked to marry Lucia for his brother’s sake or looking over his shoulder in fear of being discovered as an undocumented immigrant, Manny becomes more confident, and Lucia no longer recognizes the father of her child. Manny shifts his focus from family obligations to his own desires, and it changes him, representing the impact of prioritizing the self over responsibility. These early scenes also represent a cultural shift that Lucia is not prepared for; she is unused to the family dynamics she has been brought into, and she is uncomfortable when her desires and perspective clash against those of the people around her.
As the story progresses, Lucia becomes increasingly disillusioned with her life in Ecuador with Manny and his family. All of the heaviness and negativity that she has ignored bubbles to the surface:
She is not resentful by nature. She does not complain. She has never complained. Not about the flattened cardboard they must lay on the floor of the casita when it rains too hard […] She does not complain about the trash […] She does not complain about the men who hiss like snakes as she walks down the street […] She does not complain when Tía Camila or Tía Alba or Tía Paula poke and prod with the same questions about her personal life […] (233-34).
Lucia’s frustration builds the theme of Perception Versus Reality. She decided to go to Ecuador because of her fond memories from staying there during the summer in college. Lucia believed it would help her get away from many of her problems, but in reality, it has created new ones and done nothing to stop the old ones. Life in Ecuador is not the beautiful fresh start she imagined; instead, it is a shocking cultural shift that causes a change in the father of her child and leaves her feeling out of place and unsupported.
Lucia becomes more volatile toward the end of her life in Ecuador. In her apartment in Cuenca, she wakes up and “feels something inside her like a venom, a flare in her chest, a burning sensation just beneath her skin. The serpents. A thought flickers. She extinguishes it. When she slows her breath to listen, the air is quiet. It is only her” (240). The serpents represent Lucia’s understanding of her own mental illness. The serpents’ reappearance clues the reader into the fact that Lucia is beginning to experience an “episode.” As she listens for the serpents and realizes it’s “only her,” Lucia is relieved to know her thoughts are her own—however, previous chapters have established that Lucia cannot always tell the difference between perception and reality, which casts doubt here. This mirrors thoughts that Miranda and Manny have later in the novel Lucia, and the way she thinks and acts when she has an “episode”: “Later, in hindsight, they would come together on this: to wonder when it had become impossible to distinguish which parts of Lucia fell under her own jurisdiction and which belonged to her illness” (273).
This theme continues as Lucia realizes she gave up love, with Yonah, for the chance to have a child, all on the suggestions of the “serpents”: “I don’t love him. I have never loved him. And love is everything. […] I gave up love for a baby, traded my soulmate for a child” (245). The “serpents” convinced Lucia that there was “a baby, trapped inside [her] ovaries” (180), which pushed Lucia to have a child—not any particular desire to build a family. Looking back on it, Lucia can see how her perception was influenced by her schizophrenia. However, this realization is complicated by her love for Essy, as well as the impending mental health crisis on the horizon. This moment acts as a turning point for Lucia: She decides to return to Yonah and forms a plan to take Essy with her without telling Manny. To Lucia, in this moment, this is the ideal reality, one that allows her to have true love and her family all at once. Lucia does not take familial obligation into account, as she has become disillusioned with and resentful toward both Manny and Miranda.
Miranda, after receiving a call for help from Manny about Lucia, contemplates leaving Switzerland for the second time within a month to go to Ecuador to care for Lucia. The theme of Balancing Self-Care and Family Obligations emerges here; Stefan advocates for Miranda to focus on her own well-being, saying, “What about your life Miranda?” (290). Miranda is unable to answer that question. Throughout the novel, Miranda’s relationship with Stefan pushes her to think beyond her family obligations. This question is representative of the conflict that drives Miranda’s character arc throughout the entirety of the novel, and though it challenges her to prioritize herself, it also puts a strain on their relationship.
After Lucia’s plan to take Essy is thwarted, Manny reconsiders his approach to Lucia’s care. The question of autonomy versus reduced harm arises as Manny begins hiding Lucia’s medicine in her tea. In doing so, Manny ensures that Lucia takes her medication and enables her to live a peaceful life with his family; however, he does this at the cost of Lucia’s freedom to choose. Lee does not claim that any particular method of caretaking is better than another; however, through Lucia and those around her, she brings light to the decisions that must be made to ensure happiness and safety. The ending of Chapter 8 vaguely introduces Lucia’s death, where this question will once again come into play.
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