The Invisible Fires
With this in mind, I was reading the story Los invisibles fuegos (The Invisible Fires) by Adriano González León, a Venezuelan writer who is the author of one of the most important novels in our literature: País Portátil (Portable Country). The story Los fuegos invisibles is about a woman, Dorila Márquez, who, after having lived a traumatic and unpleasant experience, holds a grudge against all the people who live around her and lets these feelings consume her little by little. The description that the narrator offers us of the village environment where Dorila lives reinforces the idea of alienation of Dorila and of amalgamation between woman and space.
At the beginning of the story we can observe the aridity of the land, the thirst of animals and people, since it has not rained:
And the clumsy glances of the animals, their intemperate and thirsty cries, covered the hill with desolate visions. At noon everything seemed to swell and burst, crunching over the few leafless trees. And it was as if a powerful light broke the eyes slowly... The men who brought sweat down to the tip of their fingers, gave great voices to the tails of the animals and thick whips crossed the air with a sinister noise.
As we can perceive, the dryness of the environment not only refers us to heat, but also to a certain hopelessness, loneliness, and even sterility. This climate is going to be fundamental for the development of the weft, since, as I mentioned earlier, there is a certain analogy between the landscape and Dorila, who is also described as a dry woman, who has lost her best years and who has been left alone. With regard to her loneliness, the narrator tells us the story behind Dorila's helplessness and resentment: a man has abandoned her and the people are guilty:
That's when the candle started. Because he left without ever having felt his body near her. That is why during these twenty years she dragged a virginity that weighed heavily on her and drowned her like ashes. Nobody from the village, after the shooting, tried to approach her. Then the loneliness increased the wrinkles, broke the face, sank the eyes.
With this fragment we feel several things: one of them is that the fire that consumes Dorila, to a great extent, is sexual.
The man who pretended it, has gone and left it abandoned. Notice the mention of virginity and the little physical contact she had with the suitor, which makes us believe that it is the heat of repressed passion, desire, that consumes her. Likewise, we realize that this fire also comes from anger towards people, towards other men who never approached it and did not extinguish the flame that consumed it.
As we advance in the reading, we read that the lack of rain, makes the fire begin to spread throughout the village, which leads to the trees burn and the animals come out terrified before the huge fire. Faced with this situation, all the people seek to save themselves and protect the little they have, except Dorila, who begins to laugh out loud and scream like crazy all over the house. I quote a fundamental fragment in the story:
Only in the last few days, since the earth began to split, had Dorila's eyes seen an unknown glow. Her gaze now wandered with a rare and joyful brio and a rejoicing born of a bitter grudge ran through her body... The end, she thought, would be complete. The whole earth would be consumed in one great flame. Neither animals nor old junk could be saved. And it did not matter that she fell into the rubble. For a long time the fire had been spilled inside and had burned her blood, had made ashes in her bones.
With this passage we corroborate what we said before: Dorila is happy with the tragedy of the people. She hopes that the fire she has carried within her for a long time will be real and consume her entire environment. To see that just as the fire has destroyed her, it does so with everything that surrounds her. A kind of revenge: let the fire destroy everything. In the end, we see that a rain begins that airs the air, that wets the earth like holy water. Before this, Dorila comes out terrified, because she does not want the people to be saved: her resentment or rage consumes her, destroys her.
It must be said that resentment is a feeling that accumulates until it finally becomes a desire for revenge. A desire that one feeds oneself and causes it to grow to the point that it begins to be unbearable. The person who keeps this kind of negative sensations can get sick and even die, as happened to Dorila. The idea is not only to pull these harmful feelings out of the ground like a tree, but also not to let them grow in us. Remember Carrie Fisher's quote: "Resentment is like taking poison waiting for the other person to die". Keeping our wound open only hurts ourselves.
I hope you enjoyed reading this post. I remind you that you can vote for 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE
Adriano González León: Uno y otros cuentos. Monte Ávila: Venezuela.
Written by: 
Click the coin below to join our Discord Server
We would greatly appreciate your witness vote
To vote for 