Aura

Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) is the best-known Mexican representative of the Latin American Boom literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside South America contemporaries like Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar, Fuentes challenged the conventions and expectations of traditional Latin American literature. The Boom generation gained unprecedented popularity in Western Europe and, from there, became globally renowned. The trend is most often characterized by experimental forms and politically engaged content.

Born in Panama to a Mexican diplomat, Fuentes lived in various Latin American countries, as well as in Washington, DC, until his adolescence. He returned to Mexico as a young man to pursue a law degree at the University of Mexico, where he became politically engaged and began experimenting with writing. His first book, the short story collection The Masked Days (Los Días Enmascarados), published in 1954. While Fuentes continued writing throughout his life, he also pursued a diplomatic career, following in his father’s footsteps.

Within Fuentes’s body of works, Aura (1962) stands out as a brilliant, succinct example of the author’s lifelong preoccupation with literature’s sociopolitical dimensions and his interest in how history and myths influence and shape the present moment, often in unexpected ways. The story engages with most of Fuentes’s recurring topics, which include the Mexican revolution, the difficulties inherent in constructing a postcolonial national identity, and Mexico’s ambivalent relationships with the West. The novel also includes elements of magical realism, which is prevalent in Latin American literature.

The story was adapted for the screen in 1966 as La strega in amore by Italian director Damiano Damiani. This study guide refers to the 1986 bilingual edition published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Plot Summary

Aura is set in Mexico City in the 1960s. The story is told in the present tense by an unnamed narrator, who addresses the protagonist informally in the second person (the Spanish tú form).

Protagonist Felipe Montero is a young impoverished historian who is hired by Consuelo Llorente, an old, infirm widow, to edit and publish the memoirs, written in French, of her late husband, one of Maximilian I’s Mexican generals. The job requires Felipe to live with the old woman in her dark and decrepit house in the historic city center. Initially reluctant to commit to such an arrangement, Felipe quickly changes his mind after seeing Aura, the widow’s beautiful niece.

After starting work on the General’s memoirs, Felipe slowly loses his sense of time and identity. During the following three days, while learning more and more about the General’s life in Paris and his love for the young Consuelo, Felipe becomes obsessed with the much younger Aura, imagining himself as her savior. He is convinced his feelings are reciprocated when the young woman comes to him on the second night and they begin a passionate affair.

Gradually, Felipe notices some unusual details, such as the occasional tortured mewling of cats and the absence of any servants, even though his belongings are transported and unpacked overnight. Because of Aura’s strange behavior, which mirrors Consuelo’s exactly, Felipe comes to believe that the young woman is under the widow’s absolute control. After finding a small straw doll under his place setting, he starts to feel that he is succumbing to a similar fate.

On the third day, Aura asks him to join her in the widow’s bedroom in the evening, as the old woman would be away for the entire day. While waiting for darkness, Felipe finishes reading the General’s memoirs and looks at several old photographs, which depict a woman who looks identical to Aura but turns out to be a young Consuelo. Felipe also discovers that he himself resembles the General and experiences a sense of time loss.

That evening Felipe joins Aura in the widow’s dark bedroom. He makes love to her only to discover that she is the old and decrepit Consuelo, and that he has merged with the General and acquired his love for the old woman. Consuelo promises that the two of them will bring back Aura, who can only stay for three days at a time.