Capítulo 7: July/ Julio

This chapter focuses on the return of Tita!  After her long period of silence, Tita was 'brought back to life with some homeade Ox-Tail soup from her home.  A few key things happen in this chapter, Tita started talking again.  John asks for Tita's hand in marriage, and Tita accepts.  The ranch back home is attacked by a group of bandits and Mama Elena, while trying to defend herself and the workers, becomes a paraplegic due to being hit in the spine.  All of this culminates in Tita returning to the ranch to care for Mama Elena.  This does not help their relationship; not one bit.  Tita is brought back into her old ways of cooking and taking care of her mother.  However this time, Mama Elena wants nothing to do with her daughter who has changed so much with  her new found independence.  Mama Elena refuses Tita's cooking and subsecuently (with a little help from some emetics she had been taking every night), Mama Elena dies in her bed at the end of the chapter.  After her mother's death, Tita uncovers a dark secret of Mama Elena's past.  This secret, which I won't give away, makes almost everything Mama Elena does throughout the novella very hypocritical.  The reader can easily pick up on the pent up feelings that Mama Elena herself carries around in her life.  If Mama Elena has been un-happy her whole life, why would she force the same love-less future on her own daughter?  For me, Mama Elena is an interesting character to study.  Not to say that I like her at all... because I don't; I think she's awful to Tita.  I would hate to have her as a mother.  But what I am saying is that maybe Mama Elena has her own reasons as to why she is the way she is.  It makes me feel sorry for her.