Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories: Eyes of Zapata Summary & Analysis

As she watches her lover—Emilano Zapata—sleep in her bed, a Mexican woman named Inés reflects on their relationship, the history of the Mexican Revolution, and her relationship with her parents. Zapata is a revolutionary leader fighting for agrarianism in the Mexican Revolution, and before he can wake up and rush away once again, Inés seizes the opportunity to observe him, studying his clothes and body. In the past, he has told her that he doesn’t sleep well anywhere but in her bed. Knowing that the war is going badly, she is aware of the fact that Zapata has grown nervous and skittish; as his men begin to fear him and the enemy looms large, he worries that his vision of land reform and prosperity for peasants will die with him whenever he’s killed. As she watches him sleep, Inés wishes she could “rub the grief” from him.

Inés, whose two children—Nicolás and Malena—also belong to Emiliano, reveals to readers her ability to rise like a bird over the town. From her high vantage point, she surveys the village and the land surrounding her home, the sound of her “wings” beating in the air. Inés believes that, though she can “abandon” her body whenever she wants, humans never “free [themselves] completely until [they] love.” She explains to readers that her father has disowned her because of her relationship with Emiliano; he begs her to reconsider her love, and when she won’t do so, says, “Well then, God help you. You’ve turned out just like the perra that bore you.” She never feels more alone than after this conversation, packing up her belongings and leaving her father’s house forever, though she wants to return and sleep once more against the “cane-rush wall.”

Emiliano hates talking about Inés’s father. Inés thinks these two men make such “perfect enemies” because they’re so much alike. The only difference, she notes, is that her father has always been a terrible fighter, even when he’s enlisted to help the government fight off Pancho Villa, yet another revolutionary leader. Her father is injured while fighting and never fully recovers, living the rest of his life with a strange hole in his back that gasps with air as he breathes; when he finally dies, calling out his wife’s name, “the syllables came out sucked and coughed from that other mouth, like a drowned man’s, and he expired finally in one last breath from that opening that killed him.”

Inés continues to tell the story of her relationship with Emiliano. Upon returning from fighting with the cavalry (years ago), Zapata stays with Inés and leads her to believe that he has forgotten about politics, but within the year he gets involved in the governor’s campaign. Around this time, he gives Inés a wedding gift of two gold earrings, but reiterates to her that he hasn’t agreed to actually marry her. Now, as he sleeps in her bed, she wonders, “What am I to you now, Miliano? When you leave me? When you hesitate?” She admits that she never voices these thoughts aloud because she knows he will tell her “these aren’t times for that,” insisting that she should wait to bring such things up in conversation. “But, Miliano,” she writes, “I’m tired of being told to wait.”

Overtime, Inés has learned there are women in other villages that Zapata loves, too. One of them is María Josefa in the nearby Villa de Ayala. During the daytime, Inés finds it easy to cope with this knowledge, since she can distract herself with chores. But at night she finds herself distraught at the idea that Emiliano might be with another woman, and one evening she lifts out of herself and flies over the town, eventually spying Zapata sleeping next to María Josefa, who she now reveals is his true wife. Shocked that María Josefa isn’t what she imagined, Inés flies close and studies her carefully until María Josefa makes a small noise and Emiliano gently—lovingly—pulls her toward him, at which point Inés feels “a terrible grief inside.” 

Inés says that people believe she is the reason María Josefa’s children have all died. Apparently certain neighbors think she cast her jealousy and pain onto the children, who perished before even stopping breastfeeding. “You married her,” Inés, writes, “that woman from Villa de Ayala, true. But see, you came back to me. You always come back. In between and beyond the others. That’s my magic. You come back to me.” Still, she wonders what Emiliano has told María Josefa about her. She imagines her lover saying, “That was before I knew you, Josefa. That chapter of my life with Inés Alfaro is finished.” Nonetheless, she doesn’t allow her confidence to be shaken, saying, “But I’m a story that never ends. Pull one string and the whole cloth unravels.”

Since the war, Inés explains, she and her children have grown accustomed to sleeping in hills and forests to escape Zapata’s enemies. These enemies even burn her house one night while she’s weak with a fever. Hearing a commotion outside, she puts Malena on her back and sets off toward the hills, hardly able to support herself, let alone her daughter. When she returns in the morning, the village looks completely different, and their house is gone. Apparently, Emiliano’s enemies have razed everything because, in their words, “Even the stones here are Zapatistas.” In response, Inés’s neighbors point their fingers at her, saying it’s her fault the soldiers destroyed the village. “Then I understood how alone I was,” she writes.

Inés relates another tale of similar hardship, this time drawing from her childhood. When she was a small girl, it’s rumored she “caused a hailstorm that ruined the new corn.” To take revenge, the fellow villagers murdered her Inés's mother, returning her corpse to Inés on her parents’ front door. Shunned, she and her father went to live with her aunt, Tía Chucha, who slowly took on the role of her mother. In fact, Tía Chucha is the one who taught her how to rise into the air and look around at hidden things happening far away. Apparently Chucha’s own mother taught her how to do this, and now Malena is capable of these powers, too, since Inés has taught her. 

As their strange relationship continues, Inés explains to readers, Zapata continues to come and go as he pleases. Eventually he takes their son Nicolás with him, right after the boy loses his first tooth. After leading the boy into battle, though, Zapata quickly brings him back, terrified because Nicolás was captured by the enemy and only narrowly avoided death before Emiliano was able to save him. At this point, Inés’s attention strays from this story, and she decides to accept the idea that she might be a witch; “If I am a witch, then so be it,” she tells herself, resolving to eat only “black things.”

As Zapata’s revolutionary successes rapidly decline, Inés tries harder and harder to understand the nature of their love. “Are you my general?” she asks. “Or only my Milianito? I think, I don’t know what you say, you don’t belong to me nor to that woman from Villa de Ayala. You don’t belong to anyone, no? Except the land.” Rising once more above the village into the black night’s sky, she sees her future and her past, sees her mother's violent death, watching as male villagers rape her in a field of flowers until finally her lifeless eyes stare into the sky, her braids taken out, a sombrero perched on her head, and a cigar fixed into her mouth.

Looking into the future, Inés sees that Malena has two female twins who will never marry, instead spending their lives selling herbs in Mexico City. She also sees Nicolás as an adult, a man who disgraces the Zapata name by quarrelling with the government because he thinks he deserves a larger portion of land due to his father’s prominent reputation. Returning to the present, Inés looks once again at Emiliano as he sleeps, disappointed because the sun has risen, meaning he’ll soon leave her. She remembers the first time he kissed her, a beautiful moment under her father’s avocado tree. “My sky, my life, my eyes,” Inés writes fragmentarily. “Before you open those eyes of yours. The days to come, the days gone by. Before we go back to what we’ll always be.”