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Sunday, January 16, 2011
title: Eva is Inside Her Cat
author: Gabriel García Márquez
genre: short story fiction
source: http://www.americanliterature.com
first line: ALL OF A SUDDEN SHE NOTICED that her beauty had fallen all apart on her, that it had begun to pain her physically like a tumor or a cancer.
I first discovered Gabriel García Márquez and his beautiful prose when I read Love in the Time of Cholera. However, as much as I was taken in by his wonderful writing I disliked the characters in Cholera.
I had the same kind of experience reading this short story, the writing was captivating, yet the story was creepy and depressing.
In the short story Eva is Inside Her Cat, Eva has dreams of being ordinary.
Apparently her beauty is a burden and she likens it to 'tiny insects' who live under her skin. As the story goes you see that the narrator Eva, was mentally ill and has committed suicide. Her story is being told after her death.
Those insects didn't belong to her. They came, transmitted from generation to generation, sustaining with their tiny armor all the prestige of a select caste, a painfully select group. Those insects had been born in the womb of the first woman who had had a beautiful daughter. But it was necessary, urgent, to put a stop to that heritage. Someone must renounce the eternal transmission of that artificial beauty.
After Eva's suicide she is still not free, her spirit is in limbo. When she realizes she is dead, she starts to crave an orange. A man is buried under an orange tree outside Eva's home and she is both drawn to the oranges and repulsed by them, thinking that the man is somehow a part of the oranges since his decaying body nourished the trees.
Eva decides to possess the house cat so she can have a body in which to be able to eat the oranges. When Eva realizes her spirit is inside her cat, she looks around she sees only arsenic covering everything in her home. She realizes two thousand years have passed since her suicide and she is still stuck inside her cat.
Why didn't it dawn right then and there or why didn't she die once and for all? She had never thought that beauty would cost her so many sacrifices.
As I said Márquez writing always grabs my attention. When I first began reading Eva is Inside Her Cat, I didn't think it would be a depressing story about a woman who has been dead for two thousand years and has been craving oranges and mourning the curse of her beauty, yet the story piqued my interest from the start.
The story has a lonely and desperate feel to it, especially when Eva comes to realize that she is already dead. Márquez does a great job conveying Eva's anxiety. I think his writing has a touch of genius to it and this makes me a fan of his work.
But at every moment something was vibrating in her, a shudder that ran through her, overwhelming her, making her aware of that other physical universe that moved outside her world. She couldn't hear, she couldn't see, but she knew about that sound and that sight. And there, in the heights of her superior world, she began to know that an environment of anguish surrounded her.
Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century.
