"She was closed up like a fist. In her very own memory, not theirs, her very own real and terrible and lonely and dark memory."
Ursa has been so profoundly influence by the stories of the sexual abuse which her female ancestors have suffered that she has closed herself off to romance and intimacy. She doesn't want it because to her it can only bring pain. This leads her to struggle with intimacy in any relationship, and she becomes unbearably lonely by her middle age.
“It was as if she had more than learned it off by heart. Though. it was as if their memory, the memory of all the Corregidora women, was her memory too, as strong with her as her own private memory, or almost as strong. But now she was Mama again.”
Ursa's mom has had an even more intense experience with the family legacy, having heard the stories directly for her own mother, one of Corregidora's victims. These stories have become so deeply interlaced into her memories that she feels as if they must be her own. To her they are real experiences which she has witnessed, even though she has not actually experienced them. Ursa notices this deep identification of her mother's and is concerned about the implication it has for her own psychology being influenced by her mother at a young age.
“I wanted a song that would touch me, touch my life and theirs. A Portuguese song, but not a Portuguese. song. A new world song. A song branded with the new world. I thought of the girl who had to sleep with her master and mistress. Her father, the master. Her daughter's father. The father of her daughter's daughter. How many generations. Days that were pages of hysteria. their survival depended on suppressed hysteria.”
Ursa finds the inspiration for her songs in the stories of her grandmother. These stories have been rehearsed for her continually throughout her life so that she knows them by heart. In the absence of a daughter to whom she can pass on the family legacy, she decides to tell them through her songs. Thus begins the formidable process of songwriting from the heart.
"I lay on my back, feeling as if more than the womb had been taken out."
After her ex-husband pushes her down the stairs, Ursa must have a hysterectomy to deal with the injuries. She's crushed because she's been instructed since childhood to do her duty and have daughter onto whom she can pass her grandma's and her great-grandma's stories. Now she feels as if her ex has robbed her not only of children but of her destiny in some way. She doesn't know how to move on from such a tragedy.
