Maria del Mar Enciso Monies and Miguel Montes’s romance

Maria del Mar Enciso Monies and Miguel Montes’s romance is an enduring but unresolved attachment, known first through letters and then through Harry Magana’s visit to Chucarit. Maria del Mar, Miguel’s sixteen-year-old cousin, has loved him since she was twelve. Her hope that he might return persists even after he has left the town and no one can say where he is; the relationship’s last word is not reunion but her insistence that she deserves him.

Letters and the Search

One of the letters Harry and Demetrio Aguila read while investigating Miguel’s life comes from a girl in Chucarit, in southern Sonora. It is a love letter: she says she will wait, that she is eager to see Miguel, but that he must take the first step and she is in no hurry. Demetrio recognizes the familiar tone of a hometown girlfriend. Harry connects the letter to Chucarit, and the exchange turns a place name into a lead in the search for Miguel.

Before the year ends, Harry travels there and finds the writer. Maria del Mar asks why he wants to see her cousin. Harry presents himself as a friend and mentions money Miguel once lent him, allowing him to meet the family without disclosing the full purpose of his inquiry. The letter has made her a trace of Miguel’s past; the visit reveals that the affection behind it is personal, longstanding, and bound up with a family history Harry has not yet heard.

Maria del Mar and Her Family

Maria del Mar is sixteen and has been in love with Miguel since she was twelve. She is described as very thin, with chestnut hair lightened by the sun. She introduces Harry to her parents, who keep a small grocery store and sell salted fish. They travel along the coast to buy fish from local fishermen, then return to Chucarit to salt it themselves. Harry likes them and stays for dinner, receiving a welcome that contrasts with the uncertainty surrounding Miguel’s absence.

Before dinner, Harry drives with Maria del Mar to look for a small gift for her parents. The only place he finds something is a bar, where he tries to buy wine while she waits outside. When he comes back, she offers to show him Miguel’s house. Her decision takes their meeting from the ordinary hospitality of her family into the still-unsettled story of the cousin she loves.

The Abandoned House

At the edge of Chucarit, Miguel’s old home stands in the shade of trees. Maria del Mar says no one lives there anymore. Harry sees a pigsty, a corral with a broken, rotting fence, and a henhouse. Inside, the neglected rooms and the accumulated signs of abandonment frame the account she gives of the family’s dispersal: Miguel was the first to leave; then his mother died, and his father remained alone for a year before disappearing. Maria del Mar has heard two explanations for the father’s fate. Her mother thinks he killed himself; her father thinks he went north to search for Miguel.

The family history extends beyond Miguel’s departure. His parents had other children, but they died as babies. Maria del Mar says her own older brothers and sisters also became ill and died before reaching six, leaving her an only child. Her disclosure places her attachment to Miguel within a life marked by absence on both sides of the family. The novel does not establish that this history caused her devotion, but it gives her hope a stark context: the person she waits for belongs to a chain of departures and losses that no one in Chucarit can resolve.

Waiting Without an Answer

After leaving the house, Maria del Mar points out the star-filled sky. Harry asks whether she hopes Miguel will come back. She does, though she admits she does not know whether he will. Asked where he might be, she says she does not know; when Harry suggests Santa Teresa, she reasons that if Miguel were there, Harry would not have come to Chucarit. Her answer shows how little certainty either of them has, and how the search itself exposes the distance between Miguel’s present whereabouts and the life she has preserved for him in her letters.

Before they leave, Harry takes her hand and tells her that Miguel does not deserve her. Maria del Mar smiles and replies that she deserves him. Harry counters that she deserves much better. The exchange does not break her loyalty or produce new information about Miguel. Instead, it makes the imbalance in their attachment explicit: Harry sees the costs of her waiting, while she treats her love as a claim on him, not a judgment of his worth. After dinner with her family, Harry heads north again, carrying no answer about whether Miguel will return.

Narrative Significance

The romance is presented indirectly, through a letter, the investigator’s visit, and Maria del Mar’s memories of an abandoned home. Miguel is absent from the encounter, so the reader sees the relationship chiefly through the person who continues to wait for him. The letters first suggest a conventional hometown courtship, but the revelation that Maria del Mar is his cousin and has loved him for four years gives that waiting a more specific and complicated history.

The scene also intersects with Harry’s investigation without reducing Maria del Mar to a source of information. She helps him approach Miguel’s past, but the visit gives her family, her own losses, and her unresolved hope space in the narrative. Her final declaration preserves the romance as an open-ended bond: she does not know where Miguel is, and the book offers no reunion here, yet she continues to imagine his return as possible.