“During
Mass, Conceicao kept appearing between me and the priest.” (-Joaquim Maria
Machado de Assis “Midnight Mass” p. 101).
One of the
things that characterize Machado is the ability that the author possesses as a
writer to invite his readers to find what lies deeper than what is on the
surface of his stories. This method
converts the readers into co-authors of the work. This idea of exploring
through his stories is reflected in the same way when we try to find answers to
the origin of Latin America.
As in the end of
the story “Midnight Mass,” Machado represents the idea that he is viewing the
woman Conceicao as an infinite being during the mass when he cannot get her out
of his head. This is because he has not been able to read and understand her
completely. The author leaves the end of this story open to the reader and
invites them to do what he could not, figure her out.
Machado said, “We
kill time, but time is what buries us.” The way in which he invites us to kill
time is through thinking about the things that we haven’t been able to figure
out. We know that history has buried
many things, and we should continue to think and analyze in order to contribute
to the future and earn our right to judge the past. Many are the theories such as Malinche,
Iracemas, or Pocahontas, that all result in the pondering and searching for a response
for the questions which up until now have not be answered. Even now, time has
resolved to bury this lost piece of the puzzle, the answer to the question of
where we come from in Latin America.
Machado helps us
understand that we cannot understand his books without analyzing them to find
the ending that best complements our reality.
In the same way, we will not comprehend the origin of Latin America
without thinking and analyzing the past for ourselves.
This reminds me
of a video of a selective attention test. It demonstrates how sometimes we have
to look at things more than once in order to completely understand the reality
of them. In the case of the origin of the Latin American, we perhaps need more
Malinches and Iracemas to help us understand the history.
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