What happens in Chapter 20 of Bless Me, Ultima?
Chapter Twenty ("Veinte") approaches the novel's heartbreaking conclusion. Antonio comes back home from his stay at his uncle's farm only to find the world he once knew further unraveling. Narciso has already been laid to rest, and the community's grief and suspicion continue to fester around Tenorio Trementina. Antonio goes to school and church, but the rituals feel increasingly empty in light of the violence he has witnessed. The chapter delivers its most devastating moment when Tenorio, driven by revenge after his daughters' deaths, finds and shoots Ultima's owl—the very creature that embodies her spirit and power. As the owl falls, Ultima herself weakens, her life force fading away. Antonio rushes to her side, witnessing her final moments. Before she passes, Ultima tells him to bury the owl near the river and to return her medicines to the earth, maintaining the sacred bond between her curandera wisdom and the land. She dies peacefully, leaving Antonio to fulfill her last wishes alone, the weight of her loss settling into him like an unshakeable burden.
Analysis
Anaya shapes Chapter Twenty as a controlled elegy, showcasing craft through restraint. The owl dies just moments before Ultima, creating a cause-and-effect relationship that feels more like myth than mere coincidence, blurring the lines between human and spirit that the novel has skillfully maintained. Tenorio's bullet, aimed at the owl, targets everything Ultima embodies: indigenous healing knowledge, feminine strength, and a worldview that challenges the Church's claim on the sacred. This act is not just murder; it's an attempt to erase an entire way of knowing.
The burial instructions Ultima gives Antonio represent the chapter's most deliberate craft choice. By asking him to return her owl and herbs to the earth, Anaya turns death into a cyclical, ecological act—a return rather than a conclusion. This reflects the novel's recurring river motif: the llano and the river as contrasting legacies (the Márez wildness versus the Luna rootedness) are momentarily reconciled in the soil that embraces Ultima's remains.
Antonio's inner thoughts are strikingly sparse throughout. Anaya removes the usual lyrical richness from the prose, allowing silence to convey meaning. The boy, who has spent the novel grappling with profound questions about God, sin, and fate, now simply acts—he buries the owl and scatters the herbs. This shift from questioning to action signifies his transition into a grief too vast for words and marks the novel's final tonal movement: not resolution, but acceptance.
Key quotes from Chapter 20
“Take the owl and bury it. Then scatter my medicines to the four winds. Return everything to where it came from.”
Ultima's dying instructions to Antonio, distilling her entire philosophy of reciprocity with the natural world into a final command.
“The owl had been Ultima's spirit, and with the owl gone Ultima could not live.”
Antonio's understanding of the moment Tenorio's shot connects, articulating the novel's central fusion of human and animal soul.
“I had seen many things in my short life, and I had survived.”
Antonio's quiet reckoning near the chapter's close, a statement of endurance that replaces the theological certainty he once sought.