Reading The Time of the Doves I kept noticing how Natalia’s life is shaped more by what she’s missing than by what she has. No one ever showed her what a healthy relationship looks like, so when Quimet appears she doesn’t really choose him; she just drifts into him. And Quimet? Major red flag. Immediately. The pushiness, the jealousy, the public humiliation— and making her kneel in the middle of the street? Outrageous. He isn’t slowly becoming controlling, he starts that way. Even small things feel wrong, like when “he told me we had to go fifty-fifty on the apartment. Like we were just friends.” (38). On paper that sounds fair. Emotionally it’s cold. He treats her less like a partner and more like someone he’s arranging into his life, besides, of course, being really emotionally and physically abusive.
What I actually found really interesting is Rodoreda’s narration style. Natalia repeats phrases or memories, like “That rubber waistband digging into my waist and my dead mother couldn’t advise me,” even when they don’t logically fit the moment. I think this shows her anxious personality, her trauma, and also the things that really stuck with her. She isn’t analyzing her life, she’s just experiencing it as it comes. Her thoughts don’t move in straight lines; they circle back to whatever unsettles her. She never directly says she feels abandoned, but the narration keeps proving it, and the repetition made me feel her anxiety instead of just reading it.
The injured dove scene really stayed with me because it feels like the novel quietly preparing us for what Natalia will later go through. When they find the bird, “Mateu said the best thing was to kill it, that it was better for it to die than to live tied up like a prisoner.” (65). At first it just sounds harsh and kind of unnecessary, but later, when her children are starving, Natalia ends up thinking in almost the same way. I don’t see this as her becoming cruel, I see it as her running out of options. The book made me feel like ethical judgment is, in a way, a luxury, something you can only really apply when you actually have choices. Hunger shrinks the space where you can think ideally, and the question stops being what is morally pure and becomes what causes the least suffering when every option is bad. She still feels the weight of what she is considering, which shows her morality is still there, but the normal ethical categories stop making sense in a situation built around survival, and that is what makes the foreshadowing scene stick for me.
The war in this book never feels heroic. We don’t see battles; we see empty kitchens and closed businesses. Even Quimet’s death is anticlimactic, at the time she barely reacts, and I think it’s because she was preoccupied with what will follow up to having no husband and two mouths to feed. What I found powerful is that she doesn’t really grieve then; she grieves years later. When she goes back to the old apartment and screams, it feels like delayed grief and trauma finally catching up to her. The scream, “A scream I must have been carrying around inside me for many years…,” (197) feels like she leaves part of her trauma there. When she says “it’s all over now,” I read it less as happiness and more as release.
Question: Who do you think “poor Maria” is supposed to be?
2 replies on “i hate quimet”
Hello Laura,
I like your point on war and mortality in the book. We don’t know much about the war, really, besides the hearsay from the various male soldiers and townspeople about what’s vaguely happening. It all feels unreal, in a sense, that since we don’t see any of the war in person, nothing really sinks in. And for Natalia, it wouldn’t matter if they had won or lost, all that is tangible is the lack of resources and food. So for the reader, at least for me, I thought the delivery of the announcement of Quimet’s death was so flat as part of the unreal feeling, for the distant death, while the flight and death of the many doves feels even more visceral. But yeah, just because it feels unreal doesn’t mean the effects aren’t there, like invisible poison, and only somewhat released or expelled in that ending scream.
As for the question, I’m not sure. Maria doesn’t seem to be real, as Cintet testifies. So I think it’s part of how he never really perceives Natalia for what she is, but rather with the names that he pushes on her – more often Colometa, like one of the doves, but also Maria, who is like an idealized or perfect wife figure that Natalia can never become for him.
Yeah I agree with what you said especially about ” how Natalia’s life is shaped more by what she’s missing than by what she has” which was an interesting point. I think we also share a mutual dislike for Quimet. I personally thought he became a jealous and controlling husband later in the book. But now that you mention it, things def started off wierd from the start