Similar vignettes propel the story in both the movie and the book – hiding in makeshift foxholes, the classroom antics, the operation to transform Maria’s cleft pallet….
The book is divided into three parts. The movie roughly corresponds to the first part. In the second part of the book, a teen-aged Ladydi takes a job as a nanny for a fabulously wealthy family in Acapulco. The third part takes us to Mexico City.
The book offers much deeper understanding of the characters. Ana/Ladydi’s mother Rita is a complex character being crushed by the burdens of poverty and crime.
Although unintentional on Rita’s part, she adds humor to their absurd and near hopeless situation. “Get down on your knees and pray for the fly swatter!” she demands. In the book, Rita is radically amoral – she steals from everyone in the village, she curses quite artistically, she collects opium as a day laborer for the cartels, she despises forgiveness and instead pursues creative retribution.
When I got back home, my mother was in a frenzy killing flies with a flyswatter. The weather had been so hot over the past month there was an epidemic of flies.
These were the fat, juicy kind of flies, with spiky fur on their backs. When this fly bites it leaves a big red welt that hurts for days. There were black, bloody specks all over our kitchen table and floor. Get down on your knees and pray for the flyswatter, my mother said. Who left the goddamned door open? You know, I said. My mother gave me a look, a nasty look, and continued to swat at the flies. I recognized the flyswatter she’d stolen from the Reyes’ house at least two years ago. Pray for the flyswatter, she said. My mother hated those flies but she loved to kill them. It was a happy bloodbath in that small kitchen. She knew, what we all knew, the flies always win.
Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement Chapter 10 > Page 82
In the book, there are no redeemable men. They all succumb to greed, lust, and avoidance of responsibility. In the movie, the male teachers are heroes from the outside world; in the book, they are closet pedophiles and lazy grifters.
My mother said that she believed in revenge. It was a threat over my head, but it was also a lesson. I knew she was not going to forgive me for anything, but it also taught me not to forgive. She said that this was why she no longer went to church, even though she did have saints she loved, but she did not like all the forgiving business. I knew that much of her day was spent thinking about what she’d do to my father if he ever came back. I watched my mother cut the tall grasses with her machete, or kill an iguana by breaking its head with a large stone, or scrape the thorns off a maguey pad, or kill a chicken by twisting its neck in her hands, and it was as if all the objects around her were my father’s body. When she cut up a tomato I knew it was his heart she was slicing into thin wheels. Once she leaned against the front door, pressed her body against the wood, and even that door became my father’s back. The chairs were his lap. The spoons and forks were his hands.
Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement Chapter 2 > Page 18
That day marked the beginning of her anger. Her fury was a seed and it had been planted on that afternoon. By the time she shot Maria that seed had grown into a large tree that covered our lives with its shade of bile.
Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement Chapter 10 > Page 95
In the movies, my mother would have had a huge realization after shooting Maria, which would have made her quit drinking.
In the movies, she would have dedicated her life to helping alcoholics or battered women. In the movies, God would have smiled at her repentance. But this was not the movies.
Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement Chapter 10 > Page 98
The movie and the book are perfectly paired. Different but similar. Some of the scenes in the movie make sense only in the context of the book. For example, when Ana experiments with lipstick, her mother flies into a rage. Initially when watching the movie, I thought it was simply an example of Ana’s mother’s instability and need for control. Through the lens of the book, I realized that Rita was consumed with protecting her daughter from the traffickers, and something as simple as playing with makeup would endanger her daughter’s life.
The fear of kidnapping is much more pervasive in the book. All the village girls are raised as boys from infancy, and are intentionally made to look grotesque by their mothers. It reminds me of the stories of the European girls and women at the close of World War II who would rub their faces with a mixture of sand and kerosene to induce small pox like blisters, to repel the opportunistic men.
