"They Built Up the Walls..."

But who was it who built the walls, who locked up a family, who stole the light from a home? The senora curses a mysterious force that she claims stole the light from her life, some force that covered her windows, her doors, her porch. After so much time in the dark, she seems blinded to all that is touched by light, she doesn’t know of the mice that live only feet from her bed or the cats which eat them, her excuse: “I never go there.” In other words, without light The Senora lives only by what she can feel. Her eyes – and those of her niece and employee – become in there inutility an entity all their own. When Filipe arrives in the Senora’s room, he doesn’t see a rabbit, but two red eyes, alive and eating independently, encompassed by darkness. When he sees the Senora, he sees the yellowed, monotonous eyes of a woman stuck in the past, and when he fantasizes over Aura, he dreams not of her body, but her eyes, their green piercing life, which in a place of dank darkness stand alone in his mind. The connection between Filipe and the General, and therefore between the Senora and Aura, is an infatuation with green eyes. It’s in her eyes that Filipe sees himself and ultimately understands his relationship to the house in which he works. But then what did build the walls? Could the walls be her age, which slowly took the green from her eyes and hid her true self just as the walls concealed all light.