Sainthood or Hell?

This novel was chilling yet addicting to read. The youthful, beautiful, immortal Aura was all an illusion. This story embodies the desire and sexual tendencies beauty attracts. By contrasting the withered and gum less old woman, with the timeless and elegant young woman, beauty is isolated to youth.  Beauty and the idea of immortality become vicious addictions for the old woman and Senor Montero. Their evil desire to preserve their innocence is not an act of greed in the final scene. The old lady/ Aura, because they are the same person tells Montero/ Senor Conseuelo because they are also the same person, that, “She’ll come back Felipe. We’ll bring her back to together. Let me recover my strength and I’ll bring her back…” (145) This moment was one of the few human and genuine interaction in the novel.  This quote does not reveal self driven greed to recover their younger selves, but rather a connection that holds the old woman and Senor Conseulo together because it is their way of escaping the clock that life is limited by. I believe that the old lady is a Saint, which enables her to escape the clock of mortality. Senor Montero says, “you don’t look at your watch again, that useless object tediously measuring in accordance with human vanity, those little hands marking out the long hours that were invented to disguise the real passage of time, which races with a mortal and insolent swiftness no clock could ever measure.” (139) This is mocking the idea that immortality exists, and it is making a distinction between us (humans), and the immortal Saints (such as the old woman). It is also saying that life is not measured and limited by a clock because life is more that just the little hands on the clock counting down our days left. The novel uses the pronoun you to make us a character in the book. It’s manipulative and effective because it deceive us with the possibility that we can have immortality, but in reality we are going to fall the victims to the callous reality of death.