Living оnly оne Love Story even after the Death

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Living оnly оne Love Story even after the Death

The departing from Pedro, and even more the departing from the adopted son, will prepare the foundation for the future, real depression which flickering softly, has started from the childhood (in the absence of mother’s love) and it deepens because of the forbidding to realize her love with Pedro. The real culminating point is the dead of the nephew. Most interesting is that Laura Eskivel with her method for making doubles of characters, after the passing of the nephew, creates for Tita the helpless little pigeon as a compensation for the missing object to feed by which she expresses her essence of the Big Alma Ata.
(In this function the motherly and erotic function are subtly connected, because Tita like Nacha earlier, is a nourishing mother, but at the same time she is a seductress with the virtuously prepared food, as a love discourse.)
In the narrative sequence of breast-feeding, Pedro reacts softly to the view on Tita’s breasts, like a pater familias, not erotically (Tita was embodiment of Serres herself, the goddess of food. Pedro was not surprised, nor he asked for explanation. Delighted and smiled, he approached, leaned and kissed her forehead. Tita took the baby off her breast, because he was fed. Then Pedro’s eyes have seen what they were seeing earlier just through the blouse, Tita’s breasts. She tried to put her blouse on and Pedro gave her a hand silently and very gently. While they were doing it, they were overwhelmed by whole range of feelings: love, zeal, softness. Fear… That they might be discovered.)
It seems that with this sequence the text reveals another power of love, that for transformation, for a new manifestation. In lovers self-sacrificing, in their growing with love (although it is more obvious in the female, passive principal), we read the distinction of Baudrilliad: “the seduction is pagan, the love is Christian” (Baudrilliard: 86).
Laura Eskivel in her novel introduces the portrait of the doctor John Brown as a double to Pedro. In his characterization are visible the attributes that we read in the melodrama as a genre (he is a remedy for the broken hearth, the strong shoulder for crying), but the portrait of John Brown is a generator of several important aspects of the narration. He with his attributes, beside the possibilities for reading in the melodramatic code, possesses the objectively curing attributes (that we read them within the code of the traditional psychological novel) with which he will help Tita in her emotional crisis, in the most difficult phase of her depression, in her emancipation from the mother’s authority. The authority of mother Elena will be shattered after Tita’s shouting that she is responsible for the death of the nephew, but the true emancipation from it will come when Tita will say loudly that she hates her mother and when after her death she will admit that she does not feel any sorrow. After the death of her mother Tita will discover the only human place in her mother – she will reconstruct the secret love affair of her mother with the mulatto with whom the luscious daughter Gertrude is born. From this episode we get implicitly the information for possible justification for the behaving of mother Elena to her youngest child: Tita was born as a last child with the lawful husband, after the unlawful daughter Gertrude, so it is logical that the family tradition for the youngest daughter to take care for the mother will be intensified because of the mother’s unfortunate destiny.
The doctor Brown, regarding his curing function, makes a pair with the portrait of his grandmother, the Indian “The down light” who besides the objectively given attributes of exotic stranger and marvelous healer, has a therapeutic effect on Tita, because of her resemblance to Nacha. (It is interesting that the characters-pairs in the novel almost regularly mirror themselves in another kind of paired relation, and these relations in the network of the characters are perceived as clear quadrangles.
In chapter VI, June, Laura Eskivel has written as a subtitle: “A mixture for making matches”. This chapter is situated in the middle of the text and is important for the plot is because John Brown is telling the story about his grandmother’s theory which has anticipating function for the proceeding of the fable: we all are born with box of matches in our pocket and we are not able to light them without the help of oxygen and a candle. But in this case the oxygen must come from the breath of the loved one, and the candle can be some favorite food, music, kindness, word or sound which will light up one of the matches. Every person must find out his lighter in order to live, because the flame that burns provides the soul with energy. In other words, this fire is food for a soul. If a man does not discover his lighters on time, the box of matches will get wet and he will never be able to light any of them. If it happens, the soul leaves the body, wanders through deepest darkness and tries to find fulfillment by itself, but in vain, unaware that only the body, left unprotected and filled with coldness, can make it possible. It should be paid an extra attention that the matches are lighted one by one. If, due to very strong feeling all of them are lighted at once, then such a blinding shine emerges that it enlightens what we can not usually see and then in front of our eyes appears a shining tunnel that shows us the way we have forgotten at the moment of our birth, and invites us to find again our divine origin. The soul wants to connect with its place of origin, and it leaves the body empty.
The Tita’s silence is a reaction of the pain, she does not want her words to express pain. Her answer to John’s question why she does not talk: “Because I don’t want to” is the first step to healing and to freedom, which Laura Eskivel has to associate it with the aspect of food. The soup of beef tails is the remedy that the maid-servant from her mother’s property will bring to her, and with her the unavoidable, motherly figure of Nacha occurs: “At the first swallow, Nacha sat besides Tita, cuddled her on the head as she had used to when Tita was a girl and sick, and kissed her oh her forehead.

AuthorJadranka Vladova
2018-08-21T17:24:05+00:00 April 1st, 1998|Categories: Reviews, Blesok no. 02, Literature|0 Comments