Aura- Carlos Fuentes

Phffeww... this story is enchanting but totally creepy. Aura begins with a history teacher replying to a help wanted ad in the newspaper and ends with the same teacher in bed with a 109 year old woman who has somehow conjured and now controls a younger version of herself that he is in love with. He also realizes that he is, somehow, her dead husband.

Aura reads like a very beautiful and strange ghost story. The first thing I think anyone would notice is Fuentes' use of first person present tense narrative which gives the story a suspenseful and isolated feel. It feels very unnatural and eerie. I'm not sure exactly why, but some passages just stuck out to me so strongly as very unnatural and jarring even though they seem to be still following the first person present tense. For example:

"And Senora Consuelo is waiting for you, as Aura said. She's waiting for you after supper..."(par. 5, p.400)

Perhaps you need to read it in context to understand why it sounds so unusual.

Apparently Senora Consuelo has entered into some sort of Catholic witchery that involves devotion to Christ objects and also the growing of very powerful magic herbs. Or maybe she is a saint. The things Fuentes does with religious imagery and sex are mind-boggling. After Aura undresses Felipe and then gives him what seems to be a communion from her thighs he falls onto her body which is stretched out like Christ on the crucifix. "Aura opens up like an altar."
There is a religious undertone to everything in this narrative. One place is seems really obvious and almost out of place is when Felipe first confronts Aura about the Senora keeping her locked away...
"She's trying to bury you alive. You've got to be reborn, Aura."

"You have to die before you can be reborn... No, you don't understand. Forget it, Felipe. Just have faith in me."

The Senora makes comments about religious sacrifice to the affect that she is a sort of saint or martyr. I think you could easily write a hundred pages on just the religious parallels and references in this story.

Time is liquid in Aura and we're not sure if Felipe is existing in the house of Aura's youth or the present-day house(if there really is a "present day"). Once Felipe discovers that he looks just like the Senora's husband and his belief system is shattering, he declares that he no longer has use for his watch or the kind of time that a watch can measure. He can't hold "that bodiless dust" within his hands.

The use of light and darkness as symbols of age(or reality) and youth, respectively, is striking. From the very beginning Felipe feels his way through the dark moisture of the house. Maybe there is something in that as well... the house as a sort of womb. And then in the very final sentences, he feels Aura's body in the darkness but sees the Senora in the light, old and wrinkled.

Fuentes' sentence structures alone are at times almost unbelievably unusual and effective. I just kept thinking that it was incredible that words alone could create these feelings of uneasiness and suspense or fear followed just sentences later by dreamy airiness. I don't know why that understanding of language hasn't struck me so aggressively until now. I wish I could read Aura in Spanish.