Remedios the Beauty (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
November 8th 2006 01:02
***
"Actually, Remedios the Beauty was not a creature of this world. Until she was well along in puberty Santa Sofia de la Piedad had to bathe and dress her, and even when she could take care of herself it was necessary to keep an eye on her so that she would not paint little animals on the walls with a stick daubed in her own excrement. She reached twenty without knowing how to read or write, unable to use the silver at the table, wandering naked through the house because her nature rejected all manner of convention."
***
"Until her last moment on earth she was unaware that her irreparable fate as a disturbing woman was a daily disaster. Every time she appeared in the dining room, against Ursula's orders, she caused a panic of exasperation among the outsiders... What no member of the family ever knew was that the strangers did not take long to realize that Remedios the Beauty gave off a breath of perturbation, a tormenting breeze that was still perceptible several hours after she passed by... On the porch with the begonias, in the parlor, in any place in the house, it was possible to point out the exact place where she had been and the time that had passed since she had left it."
***
"One day, as she began to bathe herself, a stranger lifted a tile from the roof and was breathless at the tremendous spectacle of her nudity. She saw his desolate eyes through the broken tiles and had no reaction of shame but rather one of alarm.
'Be careful,' she exclaimed. 'You'll fall.'
'I just wanted to see you,' the foreigner murmured.
'Oh, all right,' she said. 'But be careful, those tiles are rotten.'
The stranger's face had a pained expression of stupor and he seemed to be battling silently against his primary instincts so as not to break up the mirage. Remedios the Beauty thought that he was suffering from the fear that the tiles would break...
...
Then, while she was drying herself, the stranger begged her, with his eyes full of tears, to marry him. She answered him sincerely that she would never marry a man who was so simple that he had wasted almost an hour and even went without lunch just to see a woman taking a bath. Finally... the man... took two more tiles off in order to drop down into the bathroom.
'It's very high,' she warned him in fright. 'You'll kill yourself!'
The rotten tiles broke with a noise of disaster and the man barely had time to let out a cry of terror as he cracked his skull and was killed outright on the cement floor. The foreigners who heard the noise in the dining room and hastened to remove the body noticed the suffocating odor of Remedios the Beauty on his skin. It was so deep in his body that the cracks in his skull did not give off blood but an amber-colored oil that was impregnated with that secret perfume, and then they understood that the smell of Remedios the Beauty kept on torturing men beyond death, right down to the dust of their bones."
***
"… until one afternoon in March, when Fernanda wanted to fold her Brabant sheets in the garden and asked the women in the house for help. She had just begun when Amaranta noticed that Remedios the Beauty was covered all over by an intense paleness.
'Don't you feel well?' she asked her.
Remedios the Beauty, who was clutching the sheet by the other end, gave a pitying smile.
'Quite the opposite,' she said. 'I never felt better.'
She had just finished saying it when Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o'clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.
The outsiders, of course, thought that Remedios the Beauty had finally succumbed to her irrevocable fate of a queen bee and that her family was trying to save her honor with that tale of levitation. Fernanda, burning with envy, finally accepted the miracle, and for a long time she kept on praying to God to send her back her sheets."
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Comment by Lilla
From The Home Front
Enviro Warrior
Dream Herald
Esoteric Bookshop
Can you get maintenance out to fix your post, the words fall off the right margin and can't read the text...
Lilla...
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
Comment by Hellvis
Earache Hotel
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
For what it's worth, here are two comments in relation to the book.
I attended a one-day course on it. Can't quite remember what was discussed. But I did ask the presenter, "So why did you bother running this course anyway? What do you like about the book?" His answer, in a word: "Richness." Every time he went back to the book, he found more.
Which sort of relates to another idea. I spent a year doing a creative writing degree a while back, and the supervisor commented on Garcia Marquez being an influence on him. Essentially, to the effect, that the inspiration the book gave was overpowering. "I couldn't read it all in one go. I read a few passages, and then I'd be inspired and would have to go and write for a while myself. And I'd read a little more, then write a little more, and on and on like that."