Monday, September 17, 2007

Amor Divino

I find interesting that a vicious cycle has been created in Yolanda’s family. Every girl named Yolanda will have the same destiny of the grandmother. Yolanda, the protagonist of the story, has been cursed by the grandmother when she threw rice at her and already knew that her marriage was going to be unsuccessful. This is why when Yolanda sees the little girl, she’s like looking at herself in a mirror, the same grey eyes, the same curly hair. She feels pity for that little girl who doesn’t know how her life will be. Probably when Yolanda will be old, she will attend to the little girl’s wedding and will curse her so she will have the same unsuccessful marriage that she had.

We can observe that Yolanda identifies herself with her grandfather who is mourning because of his wife’s death. We can say that according to Yolanda, John is now death, because he is going to be an “absence in her life”.

By generalizing every character’s life and feelings, the author has managed to predict that everyone will have a difficult marriage. Maybe the author wanted to say that everyone will lose loved ones sometime, either because of divorce or death. The author is also analyzing if love is always the most important thing in marriage. I think that Yolanda loves John, but she doesn’t know it and now that she’s losing him, she finally realizes what she feels.

The story is very depressing, the main theme is the feeling of losing somebody we love. “Amor divino tesoro, ya te vas para no volver”: love, divine treasure, you’re now leaving never to return. Yolanda wants to forget everything, to lose her memory as her grandfather did, because it is very hard for her to lose someone that she loved and with whom she shared a part of her life. “Momentarily, she wishes for that blessed blank in the grandfather’s head – not to feel the pain of what is gone, never to return.” There’s a whole dilema in Yolanda’s mind, she knows that the best thing to do is to get divorced, because the only reason she married him in the first place was because of her family’s expectations. But at the same time, she’s afraid of change, of losing someone she loved, of taking the wrong decision.

I think that maybe what will happen after is that Yolanda won’t get divorced, because she “has found love’s divine treasure buried deep in her grandfather’s memory”. This means that the grandfather, even if he fought a lot with his wife and never agreed with her, he still loved her, this is why he wishes to hear someone speak in English at night, because deep inside him, he remembers her. Probably he is trying to aware Yolanda not to lose her husband, he’s trying to remind her that deep inside her, she loves him too.

I also find interesting that it is always at night that people think a lot and remember everything they miss. The grandfather remembers his wife every night and Yolanda remembers how her marriage use to be: “that night she lies awake, remembering other nights from her childhood. She wants to keep her memory busy so she will not think of his body tucked in the hollow her body makes, his breath in her hair.” Even if she gets divorced and tries to get him out of her life, the memories will always hunt her at night.

In addition, I like how the grandfather is compared to a child. “Let him be a little boy. A playmate for his great-granddaughter.” “In the bedroom, all is quiet now. The little night lamp glows so peacefully that Yolanda wonder if she hasn’t stepped into the wrong room in the compound. Maybe she has been misled into a child’s bedroom?” This makes us think that when we get older, we return to our childhood.

Do you think that Yolanda is going to divorce John in the end?

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