And of Clay Are We Created

“For some time [the geologists] had predicted that the heat of the eruption could detach the eternal ice from the slopes of the volcano, but no one heeded their warnings; they sounded like the tales of frightened old women.” 

This passage establishes nature as the one thing that may dislocate or significantly alter itself, as it is not human activity but the “heat of the eruption” that detaches the supposedly “eternal” ice from the volcano slopes. Humans are not only significantly weaker than the natural forces that govern the world around them, but they are also only brief collateral damage in a much grander drama taking place among the forces of nature themselves. Additionally, this piece likens these experts, whom one might expect to have a favorable social position and credibility, to “frightened old women”—a demographic likely to experience condescension as the result of both their age and their gender. This comparison reveals the underlying prejudices of the society explored in the narrative while also emphasizing the experts’ critical disadvantage.

“As soon as the survivors emerged from the paralysis of that first awful terror, they could see that houses, plazas, churches, white cotton plantations, dark coffee forests, and cattle pastures—all had disappeared.” 

These lines describe the terror the initial mudslide generates as a “paralysis”—a full-bodied loss of sensation. Such a loss mirrors the radical loss of the area’s most visible features, but the fact that the villagers have emerged from their paralysis, a situation that might have proven truly insurmountable, suggests that the surrounding area may one day do the same. The list of structures and locations buried under the mud moves from sites most frequented by people to sites where human presence proves scarcer. This suggests that the villagers continue to identify strongly with civilization even in the face of equalizing destruction, only noticing the devastation to the natural world as an afterthought. However, the ordering of the list also gradually dissolves these elements of civilization until eventually they have all been reabsorbed by the primordial terrain that predates them.

“Fear seemed never to touch him, although he had confessed to me that he was not a courageous man, far from it. I believe that the lens of the camera had a strange effect on him; it was as if it transported him to a different time from which he could watch events without actually participating in them.”

The personification of fear turns it into an entity that is explicitly choosing not to interact with Rolf—not to “touch” him. This suggests that fear exists not only inside but also outside of Rolf’s body, and that it may similarly choose to affect him at any moment. This deepens the role of Rolf’s camera as protection; it not only distances him from situations that might trigger attacks of external and internal fear, but also counters the forced intimacy of these fears.

“When he finally was close enough, he took the rope and tied it beneath her arms, so they could pull her out. He smiled at her with that smile that crinkles his eyes and makes him look like a little boy.” 

As Rolf, optimistic about his ability to save Azucena, tries to pull her from the mud, he exhibits an excitement that hearkens back to his own boyhood. More than emphasizing the ironic difference in maturity between Azucena and Rolf—the younger Azucena is far more realistic about her situation than Rolf is—Rolf’s boyishness calls to mind innocence’s expansive possibilities. Innocence, in its close ties to childishness, allows one to develop expectations of the future that are unencumbered by the pain one knows to be true. This is a radical departure from Rolf’s upbringing, in which the trauma he experienced fractured his innocence and colored his expectations for the future.

“A military doctor came to examine the girl, and observed that her heart was functioning well and that if she did not get too cold she could survive the night.” 

The clinical tone of these lines highlights the doctor’s (and by extension anyone’s) limited capacity to help Azucena. Though likely trained to treat traumatic injuries, all this professional can do is offer an assessment of Azucena’s physical state. This helplessness elides social station or profession; he is just as ineffectual at ensuring that she survives the night, or that she is removed from the mud, as anyone else. Additionally, the reference to Azucena’s strong, healthy heart underscores the tragedy of her situation; a well-functioning heart might lead one to assume that its owner has several decades left, not several hours. The phrasing of the passage also displaces the burden of survival from emergency services or the government onto Azucena herself.

“To pass the hours he began to tell Azucena about his travels and adventures as a newshound, and when he exhausted his memory, he called upon imagination, inventing things he thought might entertain her. From time to time she dozed, but he kept talking in the darkness, to assure her that he was still there and to overcome the menace of uncertainty.” 

As Rolf keeps Azucena company, the stories he tells her follow the trajectory of their deepening rapport. Rolf starts off by telling Azucena about publicized undertakings that many are likely aware of before moving into the realm of the truly personal when he begins to tell Azucena the stories he has made up. Though these stories are fiction, Rolf’s imaginative efforts are supremely personal in that he is offering up the creative quarters of his psyche. Considering Rolf’s experience with trauma, and the pensive moods he is liable to fall into by the story's end, he also does this at significant risk of becoming lost among his darker thoughts. That he chances encountering his own “menace” to beat back the “menace of uncertainty” for Azucena demonstrates the depth of their relationship.

“Faced with the impossibility of communicating with him, the fantastic idea came to me that if I tried, I could reach him by force of mind and in that way give him encouragement. I concentrated until I was dizzy—a frenzied and futile activity. At times I would be overcome with compassion and burst out crying; at other times, I was so drained I felt as if I were staring through a telescope at the light of a star dead for a million years.”

The narrator watches through TV screens as Rolf attempts to change the course of Azucena’s fate. She desires to reach Rolf in a way that surpasses both human and environmental capability: one that would allow her to share emotions with him as though they were a single body. The yearning and idealism here reflect a common human desire to change cosmic laws in order to aid or benefit disadvantaged loved ones. The mention of a long-dead star shifts the passage towards the literally cosmic, but it also posits that death is able to camouflage itself in life. This mirrors the fact of the corpses buried under supposedly life-giving (or life-originating) mud, as well as the way in which the area around Azucena buzzes with lively activity even as she approaches her own demise.

“I watched that hell on the first morning broadcast, cadavers of people and animals awash in the current of new rivers formed overnight from the melted snow. Above the mud rose the tops of trees and the bell towers of a church where several people had taken refuge and were patiently waiting for rescue teams.” 

Here, the passage of a new natural element, the snowmelt-rivers, over recently destroyed elements illustrates time’s utter ruthlessness. In this moment, death is only a pause, and one that only affects the people closest to the deceased; on a cosmic and natural scale, the march of time is ceaseless. Consequently, the people who await rescue teams at the church bell towers are in a temporal limbo between the lulls signified by the death around them and the pitiless forward movement of the rivers.

“I knew everything my love did to wrest the girl from her prison and help her endure her suffering; I overheard fragments of what they said to one another and could guess the rest; I was present when she taught Rolf to pray, and when he distracted her with the stories I had told him in a thousand and one nights beneath the white mosquito netting of our bed.” 

The contradictory claims in this passage allow Eva Luna to emerge as a somewhat unreliable narrator: a person so deeply affected by her love for and admiration of her partner that her conviction in his goodness is wholesale. Though the narrator says that she “knew everything” Rolf did to try to rescue the girl or to ease her suffering, she also notes that she could only “guess” some of what Rolf said to Azucena. Her claim to this “knowledge” therefore seems based not on concrete facts, but rather on the capacity that she believes Rolf possesses to aid the girl in any way he can. In these lines, Rolf’s sharing of Eva Luna’s stories with Azucena knits all three of them together in a familial dynamic that, while it could not possibly replace the family Azucena has lost, brings her a similar comfort.

“He could not tell [all his memories] to Azucena; she perhaps did not know there was a world beyond the sea or time previous to her own; she was not capable of imagining Europe in the years of the war. So he could not tell her of defeat, nor of the afternoon the Russians had led them to the concentration camp to bury prisoners dead from starvation.” 

As Azucena’s plight persists into the night and Rolf’s requests for a pump go ignored, he realizes that his encounter with her is excavating the more horrific moments from his past. His decision to withhold this information reflects his concern that Azucena will not fully understand the things he has experienced, and that this will impede his own emotional reconciliation with himself. It would be easy to write this impulse off as simple selfishness, but it also reveals Rolf’s desperate desire for human connection on even this most painful of registers. His inability to achieve it foreshadows his eventual bouts of pensiveness; according to the narrator, Rolf can only seem to find sufficient understanding within his own mind. The passage ultimately demonstrates a double failure of empathy: in the apparent inability of others to fully comprehend what Rolf has experienced, but perhaps also in Rolf’s assumption that Azucena could not understand what he has experienced.

“[The President of the Republic] added that it was impossible to remove all the corpses or count the thousands who had disappeared; the entire valley would be declared holy ground, and bishops would come to celebrate a solemn mass for the souls of the victims.” 

When the government does explicitly appear in the narrative, it does so through the unnamed president. The lack of a name for this president not only makes this figure applicable to a range of real-life places and situations, but also signals to the reader that none of the narrative’s chief characters (particularly the narrator) feel especially close to this character. The namelessness widens the existing gap between government and constituent, making the president feel even more out-of-touch and insincere. The final line of this passage holds irony, as the mudslide, which occurred as the result of rapid and intense activity, engenders a place of solemnity and stillness—a mass grave.

“[The President] waved to [Azucena] with a limp statesman’s hand, and microphones recorded his emotional voice and paternal tone as he told her that her courage had served as an example to the nation.” 

The reference to the president’s “limp statesman’s hand” speaks to the patent weakness of the state in these pages; what’s more, since the wave and the positioning of the president’s hand are voluntary, it suggests a certain willfulness to that impotence. This passage cements the president’s status as a satirically disingenuous politician; the passivity of the phrase “microphones recorded his emotional voice and paternal tone”—as though no humans were involved—gives the impression that this supposed genuine care is an affectation. Moreover, he attempts to minimize the sheer tragedy of Azucena’s situation by gilding it in idealistic, celebratory language.

“I was there when she told him that in all her thirteen years no boy had ever loved her and that it was a pity to leave this world without knowing love. Rolf assured her that he loved her more than he could ever love anyone, more than he loved his mother, more than his sister, more than all the women who had slept in his arms.”

Azucena’s recognition of what she has not experienced in life emphasizes her precocious understanding of just how permanent death is. At the age at which many children are looking forward to their social and physical developmental milestones, Azucena keenly regrets having to miss a significant one. Rolf’s assurance is an effort to blunt the edge of this regret, but it may also be an expression of the sort of intimate connection he has been in desperate need of, and which Azucena has provided: one where he does not have to hold his affection and his pain separate, terrified that the latter will taint the former.