Mercè Rodoreda’s novel is definitely one that leaves you feeling some type of way, only what way you can never be sure.
After reading this narrative, I sat down and contemplated how I felt about it because my mind was blank and I couldn’t gage what I thought about it. Even now, as I write this post, I am still no closer to finding a solid answer. Maybe, in a way, it is because I feel a multitude of things for different aspects of the book that I cannot settle on just one alone. Or maybe the story just didn’t strike me. Whatever it is, my thoughts on the narrative are as follows.
Firstly, I feel sympathetic towards our protagonist, a young woman by the name Natalia, who seems to be recounting her life story and experiences in a way that is sort but also really different to Ana Maria from Bombal’s ‘Shrouded Woman.’ The fact that she finds herself trapped under the control of men from her father to her husbands, and treated as a possession, that she seems to be a character who not just highlights but in fact personifies the phrase ‘damsel in distress’ as she needs a man to protect and provide for her, the absence of a maternal presence and a father who is emotionally unavailable, all of these points garner my sympathy towards her. Perhaps if her father was more of a guiding, parental figure or had she had her mother with her growing up, Natalia might not have made the decision to end her relationship with Pere and marry Quimet and perhaps then we would have a completely different story.
She is almost forced into a corner with no way out after her marriage as Quimet asserts absolute control over the household and her, becoming jealous and controlling, something we particularly take notice of when he accuses Natalia of meeting Pere in the streets. There is a sort of helpless feeling created within the reader as we read since we see the danger in having such an unstable man controlling a woman who has no way out of her miserable fate yet all we can do is continue the story in hopes that it will not end on a terrible note. She is even stripped of her identity in a way as Quimet insists on calling her Colometa and that births a woman who is a world away from what Natalia might have been had her circumstances been different, only tightening the control her husband has over her. That Natalia is also forced to seek work as Quimet cannot reliably hold a job and has to be both the breadwinner and the homemaker of the family seemed especially cruel to me; it is as if the author decides she does not have enough to contend with and must have another burden placed on her shoulders.
Maybe I am truly saddened by the story and all its events that it prevents me from feeling any other way. Despite that, my question for this week is this; had Natalia continued her relationship with Pere, where would she have ended up at the end of the narrative?