Aura

“You grab the handrail—the bus slows down but doesn’t stop—and jump aboard. Then you shove your way forward, pay the driver the thirty centavos, squeeze yourself in among the passengers already standing in the aisle, hang onto the overhead rail, press your brief case tighter under your left arm, and automatically put your left hand over the back pocket where you keep your billfold.” 

This passaged is an excellent example of Fuentes’s style. Using the second-person point of view makes the narrative feel more personal, as if the author is addressing the reader directly. It also encourages a sense of identification with the protagonist. Additionally, the use of present tense adds a sense of contemporaneity and immediacy, as if the story is happening at the moment of reading. This passage also gives a glimpse of daily life in Mexico City in the 1960s. Public transportation is very affordable but crowded, and there is a danger of pickpockets. Using the bus also suggests that Felipe does not possess an automobile, emphasizing his poverty.

“Up there, everything is the same as it was. The jukeboxes don’t disturb them. The mercury streetlights don’t shine in. The cheap merchandise on sale along the street doesn’t have any effect on that upper level; on the baroque harmony of the carved stones; on the battered stone saints with pigeons clustering on their shoulders; on the latticed balconies, the copper gutters, the sandstone gargoyles; on the greenish curtains that darken the long windows; on that window from which someone draws back when you look at it.” 

This description of Mexico City’s historic downtown represents its colonial past. Remnants of the European presence are still standing, but life has moved on and away, leaving the houses and their legacy as empty shells. The window with green curtains belongs, presumably, to the widow. The curtain’s color echoes the old woman’s eyes and Aura’s clothing. The fact that someone is observing Felipe suggests that his arrival is expected, hinting at a supernatural element.

“The door opens at the first light push of your fingers, but before going in you give a last look over your shoulder, frowning at the long line of stalled cars that growl, honk, and belch out the unhealthy fumes of their impatience. You try to retain some single image of that indifferent outside world.” 

This passage describes the last time Felipe stands outside in the novel, and it seems he is experiencing a moment of foreknowledge. However, for him, city life is chaotic and noisy. Felipe does not feel like he belongs there, as indicated by the word “indifferent.” His frown conveys his disdain for the trappings of modernity.

“‘I’m Felipe Montero. I read your advertisement.’

‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry, there aren’t any chairs.’

‘That’s all right. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Good. Please let me see your profile. No, I can’t see it well enough. Turn toward the light. That’s right. Excellent.’” 

This first exchange between Felipe and Consuelo alludes to the widow’s machinations. The fact that she knows his name indicates some kind of supernatural power and intent behind the advertisement. Her interest in Felipe’s profile alludes to her plan of finding a replacement for her husband. Felipe’s obsession with the past and his physical resemblance to the General are two elements that make him the ideal candidate.

“You’re thinking about the salary of four thousand pesos, and how the work should be pleasant because you like these jobs of careful research that don’t include physical effort or going from one place to another or meeting people you don’t want to meet.” 

This passage offers insight into Felipe’s character. He is antisocial, not adventurous, and dislikes physical activities. These traits indicate that history and academia are likely an escape from the demands of a dynamic and rapidly moving modernity in Mexico City. As a result, his lack of connections to his surroundings and his desire to understand and reconstruct Spain’s conquest of South America make him susceptible to Consuelo’s manipulations.

“The room feels damp and cold. The four walls are paneled in dark wood, carved in Gothic style, with fretwork arches and large rosettes. The cats have stopped yowling. When you sit down, you notice that four places have been set.”

The dining room description consciously uses the adjective “Gothic,” which activates the subtext of 19th-century European Romantic literature. Gothic literature tends to feature dark themes and stereotypes, such as old, decrepit, rambling houses or castles and mysterious, brooding protagonists, as well as madness and the supernatural. It can be seen as an expression of irrational and unconscious fears and desires. Alluding to the Gothic in connection to the widow’s house, the narrator both foreshadows the supernatural and indicates one possible frame of interpretation.

“You sit down in Aura’s chair, stretch your legs, and light a cigarette, feeling a pleasure you’ve never felt before, one that you knew was part of you but that only now you’re experiencing fully, setting it free, bringing it out because this time you know it’ll be answered and won’t be lost.” 

Felipe feels physical attraction for Aura, which he equates with pleasure. Since he dislikes interacting with people, it is likely that he has never dared to think about love or passion before, because he lacks confidence in his ability to attract a woman. Thus, part of Aura’s appeal is her perceived availability.

“While you’re thinking of the continual rubbing of that rough wool against her skin, she suddenly raises her fists and strikes feebly at the air, as if she were doing battle against the images you can make out as you tiptoe closer: Christ, the Virgin, St. Sebastian, St. Lucia, the Archangel Michael, and the grinning demons in an old print, the only happy figures in that iconography of sorrow and wrath, happy because they’re jabbing their pitchforks into the flesh of the damned, pouring cauldrons of boiling water on them, violating the women, getting drunk, enjoying all the liberties forbidden to the saints. You approach that central image, which is surrounded by the tears of Our Lady of Sorrows, the blood of Our Crucified Lord, the delight of Lucifer, the anger of the Archangel, the viscera preserved in bottles of alcohol, the silver heart: Señora Consuelo, kneeling, threatens them with her fists, stammering the words you can hear as you move even closer: ‘Come, City of God! Gabriel, sound your trumpet! Ah, how long the world takes to die!’” 

Describing the widow’s manner of praying as battling hints at her ambivalent attitude toward Christianity. She seems to be deeply devout: the rough woolen nightgown brings to mind the medieval tradition of flesh mortification. However, her behavior is not submissive but resistant. Her words are phrased as a challenge or an order, not a prayer. This suggests that Consuelo is not willing to accept her fate, so she must actively fight against the world order that enforces it. The fact that the central image depicts happy daemons foreshadows the General’s description of her as a devil, someone who rebels against God’s power.

“You open one of the windows and pull yourself up to look out at that side garden, that square of yew trees and brambles where five, six, seven cats—you can’t count them, can’t hold yourself up there for more than a second—are all twined together, all writhing in flames and giving off a dense smoke that reeks of burnt fur. As you get down again you wonder if you really saw it: perhaps you only imagined it from those dreadful cries that continue, grow less, and finally stop.” 

The burning cats are the first clear sign of something being very wrong with the household in which Felipe now resides. The number seven suggests this is more than casual cruelty, perhaps some kind of ritual. The fact that Felipe does not react to the gruesome sight, and even dismisses it, hints that he is already succumbing to the widow’s influence.

“Your great, inclusive work on the Spanish discoveries and conquests in the New World. A work that sums up all the scattered chronicles, makes them intelligible, and discovers the resemblances among all the undertakings and adventures of Spain’s Golden Age, and all the human prototypes and major accomplishments of the Renaissance.” 

Felipe’s research is focused on the Spanish conquest. The process of colonization in South America might have unfolded in different ways, but the underlying rationale remains the same. Thus, Felipe’s project is essentially a desire to recreate and understand the colonial project itself. The fact that he uses the word “Golden Age,” the traditional European term for Spain’s expansionist period, indicates his Eurocentric view of the conquest.

“And the more you think about her, the more you make her yours, not only because of her beauty and your desire, but also because you want to set her free: you’ve found a moral basis for your desire, and you feel innocent and self-satisfied.” 

This passage grants another glimpse into Felipe’s thinking. He is aware that Aura is much younger than him and in a subservient position. His desire for her can be seen as unethical, since the young woman has very little autonomy. However, because he casts himself in the role of her savior, Felipe assuages his own consciousness and feels morally superior.

“They want us to be alone, Señor Montero, because they tell us that solitude is the only way to achieve saintliness. They forget that in solitude the temptation is even greater.” 

Consuelo’s words reveal the motivations for her actions. After her husband’s death, she is left completely alone in a rapidly changing world. Loneliness drives her to find any way to bring back the General, a process that she equates with being young and beautiful. The “they” who want her to be alone are probably society and the Catholic Church. Consuelo’s words indicate that the Christian disregard for physicality and sexuality is actually a negative thing. If older people, like the widow, were not rejected by society, she would not feel the need to practice witchcraft to bring back her husband at any cost.

“Now you know why Aura is living in this house: to perpetuate the illusion of youth and beauty in that poor, crazed old lady. Aura, kept here like a mirror, like one more icon on that votive wall with its clustered offerings, preserved hearts, imagined saints and demons.” 

Aura is described as another type of iconography—that of youth and beauty. Consuelo worships her just as deeply as the actual Christian images and relics. This realization indicates a moment of clarity on Felipe’s part. He understands the widow’s obsession with youth and Aura’s function as an embodiment of that, but despite this knowledge, Felipe cannot grasp the danger to himself.

“You wash your face, brush your teeth with your worn toothbrush that’s clogged with greenish paste, dampen your hair—you don’t notice you’re doing all this in the wrong order—and comb it meticulously in front of the oval mirror on the walnut wardrobe.” 

This passage presents the first hint of Felipe’s transformation. The fact that he does things out of order suggests that he is beginning to take on someone else’s habits: the General’s.

“The woman, you repeat as she comes close, the woman, not the girl of yesterday: the girl of yesterday—you touch Aura’s fingers, her waist—couldn’t have been more than twenty; the woman of today—you caress her loose black hair, her pallid cheeks—seems to be forty. Between yesterday and today, something about her green eyes has turned hard; the red of her lips has strayed beyond their former outlines, as if she wanted to fix them in a happy grimace, a troubled smile; as if, like that plant in the patio, her smile combined the taste of honey and the taste of gall.” 

Aura’s accelerated aging hints at the brevity of her existence. The “happy grimace” could indicate an acknowledgment of her mortality: She is happy to be alive but keenly feels the approaching end. Comparing Aura to one of the poisonous plants indicates her duality. On one hand, she brings comfort to Consuelo and pleasure to Felipe. On the other, she seems to absorb the energy of those around her: Consuelo’s strength is depleted by sustaining Aura for three days, while Felipe is always very tired and dizzy after spending time with her. Thus, like a poisonous plant used for healing, Aura can soothe certain small pains but she is fundamentally destructive.

“When you wake up, you look for another presence in the room, and realize it’s not Aura who disturbs you but rather the double presence of something that was engendered during the night. You put your hands on your forehead, trying to calm your disordered senses: that dull melancholy is hinting to you in a low voice, the voice of memory and premonition, that you’re seeking your other half, that the sterile conception last night engendered your own double.” 

This passage alludes to the process of doubling that takes place throughout the story. Aura is Consuelo’s younger copy, so when Felipe makes love to her, he opens the door to becoming a double himself. Sex usually leads to conception, but here it is described as “sterile,” meaning it cannot produce a living child, only some kind of ghost or a replica.

“‘Love her? She loves me. She sacrifices herself for me.’

‘But she’s an old woman, almost a corpse. You can’t…’

‘She has more life than I do. Yes, she’s old and repulsive… Felipe, I don’t want to become…to be like her…another…’

‘She’s trying to bury you alive. You’ve got to be reborn, Aura.’

‘You have to die before you can be reborn… No, you don’t understand. Forget about it, Felipe. Just have faith in me.’” 

This passage is one of few instances where Aura is depicted as an independent person with her own inner world. Her words reveal a degree of self-awareness, since she understands that her existence is made possible through the widow’s sacrifice. While it is possible that Consuelo is the one putting words in her mouth, the fact that Aura makes the distinction between “I” and “her” suggests that she is speaking on her own behalf. If that is the case, the young woman is just as obsessed with youth as her creator and just as afraid of being rejected by society. If it is the widow speaking through Aura, her words indicate an interiorized fear of and disgust with the aging female body.

“In the parlor the widow Llorente comes toward you, bent over, leaning on a knobby cane; she’s dressed in an old white gown with a stained and tattered gauze veil.” 

The gown’s color and the veil indicate that this is probably Consuelo’s wedding dress. It hints that some kind of marriage ritual will happen later in the day, foreshadowing Felipe’s merging with the General.

“In his florid language General Llorente describes the personality of Eugenia de Montijo, pays his respects to Napoleon the Little, summons up his most martial rhetoric to proclaim the Franco-Prussian War, fills whole pages with his sorrow at the defeat, harangues all men of honor about the Republican monster, sees a ray of hope in General Boulanger, sighs for Mexico, believes that in the Dreyfus affairs the honor—always that word ‘honor’—of the army has asserted itself again.” 

Eugenia de Montijo was the last French empress, the wife of Napoleon III. She supported Napoleon Bonaparte’s conservative authoritarian politics. Napoleon the Little was a political pamphlet by French writer Victor Hugo that criticized the politics of Napoleon III. The Franco-Prussian War was an armed conflict between France and Germany that ushered the end of the Second French Empire. General Boulanger was a hugely popular public figure in the period following the Second Empire advocating for Revanchism, a type of French nationalism. The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal centered around the unjust conviction of Captain Dreyfus, a French Jew, for espionage. The people and events mentioned by the General recreate the atmosphere in which he lived in Paris after his exile and indicate his own political leanings toward a conservative monarchy based on the idea of European supremacy.

“She cried, ‘Yes, yes, yes, I’ve done it, I’ve re-created her! I can invoke her, I can give her life with my own life!’ It was necessary to call the doctor. He told me he could not quiet her, because the truth was that she was under the effects of narcotics, not of stimulants.” 

This passage gives some clues to what Aura is. The fact that Consuelo refers to the girl as “her” rather than “I” indicates that she sees Aura as a separate being. It is possible that the old woman’s experiments were originally meant to help her create a daughter. Alternatively, Consuelo could be referring to youth as a separate being embodied by Aura.

“‘Don’t stop me,’ she said. ‘I’m going toward my youth, and my youth is coming toward me. It’s coming in, it’s in the garden, it’s come back…’ Consuelo, my poor Consuelo! Even the devil was an angel once.” (

The General’s words link Consuelo to the idea that Lucifer was an angel who rebelled against God’s control. Consuelo cannot accept the natural progression of time, her body’s decline, or society’s rejection of old women. Consequently, she takes up witchcraft to counteract what is perceived as God’s design.

“The photograph has become a little blurred: Aura doesn’t look as young as she did in the other picture, but it’s she, it’s he, it’s…it’s you. You stare and stare at the photographs, then hold them up to the skylight. You cover General Llorente’s beard with your finger, and imagine him with black hair, and you only discover yourself: blurred, lost, forgotten, but you, you, you.” 

This is the moment when Felipe loses his sense of self. After reading the memoirs and seeing the old photographs, Felipe feels as if he identifies with the General. It is possible that there truly is a resemblance, since the widow hires Felipe after checking his profile, presumably to compare him to her dead husband. However, it is Felipe’s obsession with Aura, whom he recognizes as the young Consuelo, and the widow’s witchcraft that pave the road for this moment of doubling.

“You bury your face in the pillow, trying to keep the wind of the past from tearing away your own features, because you don’t want to lose them. You lie there with your face in the pillow, waiting for what has to come, for what you can’t prevent. You don’t look at your watch again, that useless object tediously measuring time 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.” 

Felipe begins to experience the loss of his identity under the weight of the past. Recognizing the resemblance between himself and the General undermines Felipe’s understanding of how time flows and makes him feel as if the events of the 19th century are more real than his own experiences. Traditional means of measuring time, such as clocks, are simply a convention. They give people the illusion of control and prevent them from thinking too deeply about their mortality.

“It falls on Aura’s eroded face, as brittle and yellowed as the memoirs, as creased with wrinkles as the photographs. You stop kissing those fleshless lips, those toothless gums: the ray of moonlight shows you the naked body of the old lady, of Señora Consuelo, limp, spent, tiny, ancient, trembling because you touch her. You love her, you too have come back…” 

This passage describes the final stage of Felipe’s transformation into the General. The last line indicates that the speaker is the widow’s husband, not the historian, as throughout the story Felipe’s attitude toward Consuelo is dismissive. It is not Felipe who loves the old woman but the General.