I'm writing sort of an essay on Carlos Fuentes' short story, "La Pena", and I'm thinking about the role that negative emotions play in our lives. When you make a mistake, do or think something that you later feel shame for, the sting of the negative emotion has a purpose to serve. The subject of the story is so ashamed of his actions some years earlier that he wishes an invisible "narrator" to recount them to the world while he keeps his back turned.
Unhappiness sucks....when you realize you've misjudged a situation and behaved inappropriately, the moment of realization can feel like a slap in the face. It hurts to be so wrong, to know that we are the bad guy in a particular exchange. But there is a purpose in that pain, it's telling us we made a mistake, just like touching a hot stove, and it behooves us to find a way not to repeat the experience if we don't want to feel that same pain again. Well, humans being humans, what causes us shame may also provide some benefit (money?social recognition among people we are trying to impress?) and once the sting has subsided we wade back in and are up to our same old tricks. Rinse and repeat, until, perhaps, the sting of shame is muffled by our forward impulse and our lives are governed by avoidance of what we should be facing.
The protagonist in this story is frozen in place by his shame and, while it seems unlikely that he has repeated his mistakes, the shame of past errors remains over his head like a cloud, and he has not been moving forward, that is, learning from his mistakes and trying a new approach to life. However, it seems he had learned something about himself, and others, by first telling his story privately to the narrator. In the very last line of the story he allows himself to turn to us....the world, his audience, those who are judging him based on this story, because he has learned compassion....both for the other people in this period of his life, and, as important, for himself.
Now, to translate all these deep thoughts into Spanish!
