Cities of the Plain

Magdalena is a young woman who has lived a tragic life. Her depiction in the novel casts her as a victim. She lives and works in a brothel as one of the favorites of the brothel owner Eduardo. Magdalena’s illness informs her character. She has epilepsy and suffers from regular and painful seizures. These seizures mean that she struggles to live like other people. Even something as innocuous as a funeral procession can trigger a seizure so powerful that Magdalena must go to the hospital. The condition forces her to depend on others. She relies on the people around her to place something between her teeth during her seizures to prevent her from biting through her tongue or choking. Her seizures make her vulnerable and reliant on her abusers to keep her alive when she has no control or agency over her own body. Magdalena’s epilepsy feeds into her feeling of helplessness. Like the other tragedies in her life, she is made to suffer through no fault of her own. The happenstance of biology and chemistry renders her helpless at inopportune moments and makes her even more vulnerable to abuse and coercion. She cannot even rely on her own body for support, and her feelings of helplessness seem justified.

John Grady means so much to Magdalena because he does not want anything. The tragedy of her life means that she has been abused by everyone she ever trusted. She has been taught to distrust and fear institutions and anyone who wants to help her. Even a man like Eduardo, who claims to love Magdalena, abuses and sexually exploits her for his financial gain. However, when she meets John Grady, she meets someone who feels nothing other than sincere affection and genuine empathy. He does not want to help her to benefit himself but because he is a good person. For the first time in her life, Magdalena experiences real love. However, her experience does not last long before she is murdered brutally and senselessly. Despite Eduardo’s claims of affection, he has her killed to make a point about his status. Her murder reduces her to the role of a ritual abuse victim, killed to send a message to the other sex workers and John Grady. Even in death, her memory is abused for the benefit of others. The true tragedy of Magdalena’s life is that she was barely permitted to have a life at all. For a brief moment, she enjoyed a glimmer of optimism that she might escape with John Grady, only for it to be cruelly snatched away by the people who made a career out of abusing her and others like her. 

Eduardo operates the White Lake brothel in Juarez. He begins the novel as a seemingly simple man: an immoral capitalist who exploits women for financial gain. As the narrative develops, however, Eduardo becomes a more nuanced antagonist. He occasionally eschews violence, such as the time Billy visits him in his office, because he has a greater understanding of the systemic, institutionalized way in which he can maintain his grip on power and ensure his future profits. Eduardo is the boss of the brothel precisely because he understands that money is more important than anything else. Money is more important than love, so he murders Magdalena to warn the other sex workers. Money is more important than violence, as it can be used to bribe the police officers to ignore his illicit operations and the brutality he employs. Finally, money is more important than any personal relationship, as he kills the woman he supposedly loves to safeguard his future profits.

While Eduardo is introduced as a brutal and violent man, he is gradually shown to possess a more human aspect to his character. John Grady eventually learns that Eduardo loves Magdalena, just like him. They share affection for the same woman, which binds them together. How the two men express their love for the same woman shows they are diametrically opposed. While John Grady wants to lure Magdalena away with love and affection, Eduardo seeks to dominate her with threats and violence. Their showdown in the book’s closing chapters is not just a fight between romantic rivals: It is a battle between ideologies. Eduardo’s belief in the necessity of violence contrasts with John Grady’s more empathetic, caring view of the world. Eduardo’s character—more nuanced than Tiburcio—is still reduced to violence because he knows no other way to express his affection.

Eduardo’s proclivity for violence is a product of his environment. In the final fight, he positions himself to embody a Mexican ideal that opposes John Grady and the United States. Eduardo believes that he is defending his country from the American invaders who travel south to take advantage of Mexico and Mexicans. This belief imbues his actions with a higher purpose, providing him with an ideological excuse for his relentless and ruthless pursuit of profits. To Eduardo, violence, murder, and sex work are part of a war he is waging in the name of his homeland against his enemies to the north. He is not just defending himself and his profits; he is defending his country. However, like most ideologies in the novel, Eduardo’s beliefs are a fading force. His arrogance blinds him to John Grady’s sheer force of will, a determination emboldened by the kind of love that Eduardo will never truly understand. Eduardo’s insistence that he embodies an entire country illustrates the same arrogant attitude that prevents him from understanding the world. He wanted to understand love and convinced himself that he was working for more than just profit, but his proclamations ultimately are proved hollow. In the end, he does nothing to protect or save the country he claims to represent.

Throughout Cities of the Plain, Billy reaffirms his love for his lifestyle. He cannot imagine being anything other than a cowboy, and he tells John Grady as much during one of their rides. The constant affirmation of this love hints at a justified fear in Billy’s mind. He knows that the world is changing and that men like him, John Grady, and Mac will not have a place for very long. Billy feels the need to tell people how much he loves his lifestyle because he is afraid of losing what he has. He embodies the cowboy spirit as he has spent his life working in the industry and building his familiarity with the culture, but he is aware that the world is transforming. The people he once knew are now replaced by tattered sheets of plastic, caught on the abandoned wire fences that are scattered across the plain. Billy has seen his world end, and he is forced to reckon with the changing world.

Like his friend John Grady, Billy Parham is a character from another novel. He was originally the protagonist in The Crossing by McCarthy, in which he travels to and from Mexico with his brother. Billy is not the protagonist in Cities of the Plain. Much like his role in the society depicted in the novel, he exists within someone else’s story. Billy is a loyal friend and a dedicated cowboy, but increasingly, he feels like he is living in someone else’s world just as, in a narrative sense, he is placed in another person’s story. The focus that was once on Billy and his fellow cowboys has shifted. During the events of the novel, he is pushed to the fringes. When he takes over the narrative during the epilogue, he exists on the periphery of society. He is homeless, jobless, and has nothing but his memories, in which he desperately tries to find meaning. Billy himself is an epilogue for the history of the cowboys. His life is an attempt to make sense of the rapidly changing world, and his tragedy is that he must witness the loss of everything he loves.