4 ideas
When a stranger, Felipe Hurtado, arrives, time literally halts for one night so that Julia can escape with him. Rosas then takes Isabel Moncada as his mistress. After her brother Nicolás is executed in a failed plot to shelter a hunted priest, Isabel is turned into the stone that now holds the town's memory.
The novel treats history as a machine that seizes up. The Revolution's promise of change stalls into a new occupation that repeats the old violence under new uniforms, so the town is caught in a loop instead of moving forward. Its stopped clocks, frozen nights and petrified woman are the jam made literal: when power blocks every future, time stops advancing and only circles.
The town itself narrates the story, from a vantage that looks like a stone. It recalls events that none of its inhabitants witnessed and the living have forgotten. Seen this way, memory is a property of a shared place rather than of individual minds, which lets a community's trauma outlast every person who lived through it.
Julia's escape shows that a woman's freedom requires time itself to break. Isabel's fate shows the opposite, a woman who chooses the enemy being frozen into a monument of guilt, so both paths deny women any ordinary passage through history.