The Act of Consumption in Monstrilio: Mourning Through Hunger

What Is the Act of Consumption in Monstrilio?

The act of consumption is the novel’s most visceral expression of grief: a mother’s attempt to take her dead son into herself, literally and metaphorically. In the opening chapter, Magos performs three distinct acts of consumption—licking her son’s ear, licking his blood from her hands, and excising a piece of his lung to keep in a jam jar. Each act moves from tender intimacy to raw ingestion to deliberate preservation, but all share a common logic: mourning is not a mental process but a bodily hunger, a craving to absorb the dead into one’s own flesh.

The motif is introduced when Magos, alone with Santiago’s body, “lies next to him and licks his ear, like an animal would.” This is not a kiss or a caress; it is an animalistic grooming, a way of tasting the child’s skin as if to confirm his physical presence one last time. The act is futile—she notes that “he remains dead”—but it establishes the pattern: grief operates through the mouth, through ingestion, through the desire to make the lost body part of her own.

The second act occurs during the autopsy-like procedure. After cutting open Santiago’s abdomen, Magos smears his blood on her hands and licks them, savoring “a taste of iron and warmth.” She explicitly connects this to a memory of a Lorca play, where a mother licks her son’s blood and declares, “Because the blood is mine.” This allusion frames consumption as a maternal claim: the blood is not just Santiago’s; it is also Magos’s, because she made him. Licking it is a way of reclaiming what is already hers.

The third and most consequential act is the excision of the lung tip. Magos decides that Santiago’s single lung is “the core of his Santiagoness,” the part of him that is “inextricably themselves.” She slices off the downmost tip and places it in a jam jar, intending to keep it. This is consumption as preservation—not eating, but taking into her possession, a physical relic that she can hold, see, and eventually nurture. The act transforms grief from an internal emotion into an external object, one she can control.

Recurrence and Shifting Meaning

The motif recurs within the scene itself, each repetition deepening its significance. The ear-licking is instinctual and almost innocent; the blood-licking is deliberate and ritualistic; the lung excision is calculated and defiant. Together, they trace a movement from passive mourning to active ownership.

The meaning also shifts in relation to Magos’s earlier fantasy of public grief. She had imagined her son dying in a Mexico City mall, where she would become a “Pietà, marble and gorgeous,” surrounded by an audience. That fantasy is about performance and external validation. The act of consumption, by contrast, is private, messy, and unobserved—except by Joseph, who recoils. The contrast highlights the difference between imagined grief (which is clean, dramatic, and socially legible) and real grief (which is bodily, chaotic, and isolating).

The motif also recurs thematically in the novel’s broader exploration of mourning. Magos’s act of taking the lung piece is not an isolated event; it sets up her later relationship with the object, which becomes a kind of surrogate child. While the later chapters are not excerpted here, the opening scene establishes the logic: to consume the dead is to keep them alive, to refuse to let them go. This connects directly to the theme of preservation as defiance, where holding onto the dead becomes an act of resistance against the finality of death.

Character and Theme Connections

Magos: Grief as Bodily Instinct

For Magos, grief is not something she thinks through; it is something she does with her body. She licks, cuts, and tastes because she cannot process loss intellectually. The act of consumption is her way of “learning one last secret from her son,” as she puts it. She wants to know what part of him is most essentially him, and she answers that question by ingesting and preserving. This aligns with the theme of grief as bodily instinct, where mourning manifests as physical hunger rather than emotional expression.

Joseph: The Failure of Consumption

Joseph grieves physically too—he squeezes Santiago, nuzzles him, and grunts—but he does not consume. He cannot take the dead into himself; instead, he tries to hold the body as if to “bear him again.” When he sees what Magos has done, he says, “You’ve destroyed him.” His horror underscores the radical nature of Magos’s act. For Joseph, the body is sacred and intact; for Magos, it is already gone, and only the act of taking can preserve something. This contrast illuminates the solitude of parental grief: even in the same room, the two parents mourn in incompatible ways.

Santiago: The Lung as Identity

The lung is the object of consumption, and it carries the weight of Santiago’s identity. Magos notes that he has only one lung, a “tiny lung that carried her son way past his expected life span.” She loves and hates it, wants to thank it and spit on it. The lung is both the source of his life and the marker of his fragility. By taking a piece of it, Magos attempts to capture that paradox—the thing that made him who he was, and the thing that failed to keep him alive. This connects to the theme of ownership of the dead, as Magos asserts that Santiago is “only hers now.”

Imagined vs. Real Death

The act of consumption also speaks to the theme of imagined versus real death. Magos’s fantasy of a mall death is theatrical and clean; her actual response is visceral and messy. The consumption motif is the antithesis of the Pietà image. Instead of marble and tears, there is blood and a jam jar. The act forces her—and the reader—to confront death not as a dramatic event but as a physical reality that demands a physical response.

Study Questions

1. How does the act of licking Santiago’s ear differ from the act of licking his blood?

The ear-licking is an instinctual, almost animalistic gesture of intimacy—a way of touching the child one last time without any intention of altering the body. The blood-licking, by contrast, is deliberate and ritualistic, explicitly tied to the Lorca play and the idea that “the blood is mine.” It is a claim of ownership and a form of ingestion, moving from simple contact to actual consumption.

1. Why does Magos choose the lung as the part of Santiago she wants to keep?

She chooses the lung because it is the most “inextricably” Santiago—the single organ that defined his life and his identity. Unlike hair or fingers, which she knows well, the lung is a mystery to her, a “tiny lung that carried her son way past his expected life span.” It represents both his uniqueness and his vulnerability, making it the perfect object for preservation.

1. What does Joseph’s reaction reveal about the difference between his grief and Magos’s?

Joseph’s reaction—“You’ve destroyed him”—shows that he still sees Santiago’s body as sacred and whole. His grief is about holding and preserving the body as it was, while Magos’s grief is about taking and transforming it. This difference highlights the solitude of parental grief: even in the same room, they cannot share the same mourning.

1. How does the act of consumption connect to the theme of preservation as defiance?

By taking the lung piece, Magos refuses to let Santiago be entirely lost. She preserves a physical remnant of him, defying the finality of death. The act is not just about mourning; it is about keeping something alive, even if that something is a piece of tissue in a jar. This defiance is central to the novel’s exploration of how the living hold onto the dead.