Across A Hundred Mountains

One day, Adelina visits Diana in the hospital, shortly after Diana attempted to kill herself. Diana says to Adelina, “‘What do you know about pain? You don’t know what it’s like to be responsible for a child’s death. You don’t know what it’s like for me when night comes, when my body yearns for rest and my guilty conscience can’t let it sleep’” (221), which makes Adelina cry. Adelina decides to tell Diana her story.

When Juana gets back to the apartment after failing to cross the border, the other women tell Juana that Gerardo killed Adelina. Juana steals Adelina’s birth certificate from her drawer and decides to assume Adelina’s identity in order to travel to the United States.

After getting off the bus in her mother’s village, Adelina, whom the reader now knows is Juana, takes a taxi to the place where her family’s shack once stood, but where a brick and concrete house now stands in its place. Adelina observes, “This was the house her father had once dreamed of” (226). Sandra, Doña Martina’s granddaughter, now lives in the house. Sandra welcomes Adelina and tells her that her mother is dying in the prison’s clinic.

Adelina takes a walk around the village and runs into the young man from the bus and Doña Matilde, Don Elías’s husband.