Aura by Carlos Fuentes

First published: 1962 (English translation, 1965)

Type of plot: Gothic fantasy

Time of work: The early 1960’s

Locale: Mexico City

Principal Characters:

• Felipe Montero, a young historian
• Consuelo Llorente, an extremely old woman
• Aura, her beautiful young niece

The Novel

The fantastic nature of this short novel is indicated at its very beginning when Felipe Montero, an indigent young man, reads a newspaper advertisement requesting the services of a historian. The advertisement is so suited to his own experience, needs, and skills that it seems to be addressed to him and to no one else; all that is missing is his name. This sense of Montero’s being especially summoned by the advertisement is further emphasized when he arrives at an ancient mansion in the old section of town where no one lives. As he enters the door, he takes one last look to try to “retain some single image of that indifferent outside world,” before entering a realm of magic and imagination.

Although the incredibly old Consuelo Llorente ostensibly wishes Montero to edit the memoirs of her dead husband for publication, one suspects that she has other, more profound plans for the young historian. Indeed, with the appearance of her beautiful young niece, Aura, who immediately exerts a hypnotic hold on Montero, the reader’s suspicion that this is a sort of modern fairy tale or parable is confirmed. The mysterious, old, witchlike crone, the quietly beautiful young girl, and the summoned young man establish an archetypal fairy-tale situation.

The house itself is typically gothic and always in darkness; the old woman’s room is filled with religious relics and lighted only with votive candles; in private she engages in occult rituals and makes entreaties to Gabriel to sound his trumpet. She continually caresses a pet rabbit, whose name is Saga, and the trunk which contains her dead husband’s papers seems always covered with rats. Montero feels a pleasure in the house that he has never felt before, a feeling that he always knew was a part of him but that has never been set free. He decides that the old woman has some secret power over her niece, and he is obsessed with the desire not only to set her free but also to possess her himself. Consuelo’s witchlike nature is further emphasized when, as Montero studies her husband’s papers, he discovers that she must be at least 109 years old.

The mystery of the relationship between Consuelo and her niece deepens when Montero sees Aura skinning a young goat in the kitchen and then goes to the old woman’s room to find her performing the same skinning action in mime. When he dreams of Aura, he sees the old lady’s image superimposed on the image of Aura. Although Montero believes that Aura is kept in the house to preserve the illusion of youth for the old woman, the truth of the matter is even more occult and mysterious. Aura seems to age each day. One day, she appears to be a girl of twenty, the next, a woman of forty. When Montero makes love to her, the act is prefaced by Aura’s rubbing a wafer against her thighs and offering him half of it to eat. He falls upon her naked arms, which are stretched out on the side of the bed like the crucifix on the wall: “Aura opens up like an altar.” To complete this carnal communion, she makes him promise to love her forever, even if she grows old and dies.

As the actions of Consuelo and Aura become more and more blended, as if one is an echo of the other, Montero realizes that the “sterile conception” of their lovemaking has created another double, his own other half which he now seeks. He finally discovers the secret of the old woman’s relationship to Aura on the last page of old General Llorente’s papers, where he reads of Consuelo’s growing herbs which will perform the magic of creating Aura as an image of her own youth. Moreover, he discovers portraits of the young couple and realizes that the old woman is Aura, and that the old general is himself. Montero fears that the hand of the past will wipe away his own features, “the cardboard features that hid your true face, your real appearance, the appearance you once had but then forgot.” He rejects the human vanity of clock time and accepts what seems fated to happen to him.

In the final scene of the novel, Montero goes to Consuelo’s room and calls for Aura. The voice he hears from the darkness tells him that she is gone and will not come back: “I’m exhausted. She’s already exhausted. I’ve never been able to keep her with me for more than three days.” Montero tears off Aura’s robe and embraces and kisses her. As the moonlight falls on her face, he discovers it to be as brittle and yellowed as the memoirs—to be the body and face of the old Consuelo. He accepts this, however, for he has promised to love Aura even when she is old. He embraces her and waits until the cloud covers the moon, when the “memory of youth, of youth reembodied, rules the darkness.” In the last line of the story, Consuelo promises that Aura will come back again: “We’ll bring her back together.”

The Characters

Because Aura is essentially a modern gothic romance, the characters of the story are not intended to be realistic, but rather representative. They are psychic archetypes in a parable of youth, love, age, and imagination. Montero is the fairy-tale protagonist who is magically summoned to fulfill old Consuelo’s desire—to recapture not only her own past, but also the past of her husband and of their love. Consuelo herself is one of Fuentes’s witchlike women with the magical power of imaginative creation. The headnote to the novel, from Jules Michelet, emphasizes the power of female imaginative creation embodied in the story: “Man hunts and struggles. Woman intrigues and dreams; she is the mother of fantasy, the mother of the gods. She has second sight, the wings that enable her to fly to the infinite of desire and the imagination.” Aura is a self-created image of Consuelo, an imaginative projection of her own youth.

Essentially there are only two characters in the story: Aura/Consuelo and Montero/ General Llorente, and neither is so much a character in the conventional sense of the term as an embodiment of an archetype—the former embodying Carl Jung’s anima, or archetypal female, the latter the questing male figure who yearns to unite with, and know the secret of, the mysterious woman. Montero is drawn out of the world of external reality and into the unconscious world of the imagination and thus becomes one with the occult reality of Aura/Consuelo. This basic nature of the characters explains the mysterious blend of the occult and the erotic which dominates the story. The same character configuration and the same union of the sexual and the supernatural can be seen in the works of Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pushkin, and Sir H. Rider Haggard. The basic dichotomy between the male and the female principle which Aura embodies is that whereas man hunts and struggles in the profane world of everyday reality, always questing for the answers to metaphysical mysteries, woman is the passive dreamer, the creator, who achieves the fulfillment of her desires by imaginative creation.

Critical Context

Although many of Fuentes’s novels have been concerned with political and social reality, his short stories and novellas, or short novels, have more often been mythic and symbolic. Aura is perhaps his best-known work in which magic, the occult, and particularly the witch archetype are of central importance. In an earlier collection of short stories, Los días enmascarados (1954), the same witch figure appears, as does the prevailing theme developed in Aura of the dominance of the past over the present.

Various sources for the story have been noted by critics. Perhaps the most commonly mentioned are Henry James’s The Aspern Papers (1888), Pushkin’s Pikovaya dama (1934; The Queen of Spades, 1896), and Haggard’s She (1887). The single most important source, however, as Fuentes himself has noted, is Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière (1862; The Witch of the Middle Ages, 1863), in which a woman is depicted as a witch who has the ability to give birth to a being identical to herself.

Aura was practically ignored by reviewers when first published because it appeared almost at the same time as Fuentes’s best-known and most controversial novel, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964). Now, however, Aura is recognized as a central text in Fuentes’s continuing exploration of history, myth, and the anima archetype, as well as a particularly fine example of the genre of the fantastic.

Bibliography

Duran, Victor Manuel. A Marxist Reading of Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Puig. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994. An interesting study comparing the politics in the writings of these three important Latin American authors. Many of Fuentes’s works are examined in detail.

Helmuth, Chalene. The Postmodern Fuentes. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1997. A solid overview of Fuentes’s work from a postmodernist point of view. Several individual works are discussed, focusing on the issues of identity, national and narrative control, and reconsiderations of the past.

Ibsen, Kristine. Author, Text, and Reader in the Novels of Carlos Fuentes. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Although Ibsen does not discuss Aura, she offers valuable insight into the problem of communication, which remains one of the central preoccupations throughout the work of Fuentes. Her analysis focuses on the means of textualization by which Fuentes activates his reader and how this coincides with his notions of the role of literature in society.

Pollard, Scott. “Canonizing Revision: Literary History and the Postmodern Latin American Writer.” College Literature 20 (October, 1993): 133-147. Scott analyzes the impact of Latin American narrative on Western literary history after World War II. Focusing on authors Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, and José Lezama Lima, Scott discusses narratives of conquest and exploration, international modernism, the fashioning of cultural identity, and the primacy of European culture. Offers valuable insight into several of Fuentes’s works.

Van Delden, Maarten. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Using Fuentes’s writings as a springboard for his discussion, Van Delden presents a comprehensive analysis of Fuentes’s intellectual development in the context of modern Mexican political and cultural life. Includes extensive notes and a helpful bibliography.