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Without further narrative artifices, Augustus Effio has woven with threads from the ancient world views, "Two Trees" (Underwood Collection, Lima, 2010), six-part story with a wedge-section that adds substance dose metaphorical relevance to a network of extraordinary symbolic architecture.
From the title, Effie, rather than suggest a topic, proposes the philosophical doctrine of dualism, worldview rooted in Andean culture (in which Hanan and Hurin are a duo that distinguishes top below) and other ancient civilizations such as China (where the yin and yang constitute nothing less than the principle of universal order.) In this perspective, "Two Trees" is the story of a heterosexual couple, ie a unit made up of opposites that complement each other, coming together, first, by a feeling (love) and then by social contract (marriage).
In the literary tradition, we found that marriage tends to be the crowning of love, which coincides with the end of the story being told. This is because the institution of marriage, from this view, is the ritual called to order at both material and spiritual. Even the fairy formula is added as a finishing touch after the wedding - "and were happy eating partridge" - not a childish internal rhyming verse that sounds good ... is above all a deep desire to be subject to a higher purpose.
But from the Judeo-Christian myth of Adam and Eve know that things are not easy for people who have for each other and vice versa. The couples, as evidenced by any Latin American soap opera, they go through trials and stages, and must overcome the temptation, doubt, betrayal, repentance, the curse, expulsion and loss. The myth that Plato's account by the playwright Aristophanes in dialogue The banquet is no less interesting than the couple Adam in paradise. According to the comedian Aristophanes, in Plato's dialogue, round and haughty beings were separated, divided, parted in two, resulting in many half in search of his other hand, the corresponding soul mate, to be supplemented, full and happy. Both of legend aim to raise the unit, the common bond of two people as the culmination of a search and start a new life together, but the facts do not prove as happy nor as palatable partridges.
With these concepts and legends as a backdrop, Effio begins the story of "Two Trees" to an affair that quickly, in narrative terms, culminating in a marriage. In the last paragraph of the first part reads: "... I called my mother to say that I married. She did not acknowledge my presence and continued talking to me "(p. 8), and a few lines later, the author states:" None of our relatives attended the marriage austere but passionate student's budget allowed us to improvise. It was a pity that my father would not see us without the waltz and the disposition of the guests when they heard the first peals of If you knew amore "(p. 8).
According to literary tradition, marriage is usually a cause for celebration and joy or, sometimes, obfuscation and disgust, but never of indifference and disinterest. This transgression of the code is a first call attention to the conflict that "Two Trees", as does every story, sooner or later, is revealed to the reader. At this signal, it adds another: the second call of care set out in the first paragraphs of the next part: "... these ills were minor, certainly compared to the precipice of silence to which one should look out if I wanted to get in touch Isabel "(p. 9).
Indeed, Isabel, the young wife who just came into existence before the narrator-character-by-the husband discursive vitality peppered with references to flowers, fruits and plants, trees, orchards and gardens, and beyond this, from the same soil, the province began his mysterious departure from everything she loved: her husband, her profession their dreams. Estrangement that becomes self-absorbed and disappear morbid mania.
Far from the couple's return to the province would result in the pursuit of happiness, everything breaks down and deteriorates. The mystery of the disappearance of Elizabeth becomes clear halfway through the story, from one made by other plausible given the context: a village gossip. Where Isabel was? Nothing less than a ruin, where he remained most of the day, and returning wet, soaked by rain.
It should be noted that water, expressed as rain, stream or spring, is a particularly referred to in "Two trees." The first significant reference is embedded in an explanation of Elizabeth: "I'm just tired of living in a place where it rains as it should, to wet your bones" (p. 11). With this phrase, Isabel not only states that want to leave the city and return to their homeland, but clearly stated ad nauseam live in a place where it does not rain as she wants and needs. The second reference is a fine mother to the narrator-character, "what you have deserved to go as far to get water in your own stream" (p. 13). A criticism that hurts the husband for being the last to know that Elizabeth spent most of the day and sometimes night, touring the ruins.
The third reference is a breath very special, because there is a prominent point of the story, the degree to explain the title and confirm the suspicion that the two trees are symbolizing the married couple . The narrator-character, invited by Isabel, will the ruins, and arrives at a place called 'concourse of the two trees "(p. 16), two shrubs bent of snags and cavernous. Lines later, the narrator-character that Isabel told the hearing the myth which can explain the origin of the first man and first woman of his ancestors. "He said that both were born of the spring that flowed precisely from the space between the two trees. Speaking of spring, he paused and stretched his hands with his eyes closed, so that I could hear the sound of water springing miraculously from the earth "(p. 17).
Rain, stream and spring-sky land-surface and involves, as a continuum that flows into a painful revelation, an unintended result and explaining the scope hapless erratic behavior of Isabel.
Paradise, as Effie, as present as invisible, but not immaterial or nonexistent, you can find out more about what we can imagine. In the case of Isabel and her husband (the narrator-character), was initially just for her a revelation in the form of ruins that housed two ancient trees. These reflection of both, perhaps mythical evocations of the two special trees of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of life ", are fed from the centuries by the symbolism of spring water.
is not surprising that the narrator-character does not have a name in this story. (Adam, you have to specify in a malicious logo, reading the name from right to left, nothing, or worse than anyone else before the sirens tempting.) Havens in foreign governing laws, ordinances and mandates, prohibitions abound as the fragile balance of such harmony is very easy to break or alter. Without doubt, the biggest attack against any paradise is to deny not only see or perceive in their vulgar and dilapidated appearance. To such violation, the penalty is the lack of an identity, and the only way to be forgiven is rejecting the stagnant waters of oblivion.
The last reference, which coincides with the end of the story, is again a rain, a supposed look at the water that comes from heaven, to renew from the mythic conception, the cycle of eternal return, the old promise of love. But this is a misperception of the narrator-character, which moves in the plane of linear history and unique, because this water comes from, "in reality", in the depths of time, to the extent that there is a spring to recall memories, to affirm the convictions thought to be lost or forgotten, and to resume next love in a spiral (not cycle) of death and rebirth.
In a few pages, Augusto Effio has had elegantly and simply a love story legendary and contemporary, on good account, an ancient and recent history of humanity, in which two beings transcend their identity and existence to emerge, thanks to the power of literary creation-power capable of synthesizing all the truths in a single truth, hoping to regain paradise, which is nothing else than the Garden of Eden.
