My Life With the Wave

“The next day my troubles began. How could we get on the train without being seen by the conductor, the passengers, the police?” 

The relationship presents difficulties to the narrator from the very beginning: In this surrealist world, the narrator faces the logistical problem of transporting a wave from the beach to Mexico City by train. The secrecy of the relationship and the narrator’s deep fear of others’ judgment suggests that this is a love affair, heightening the emotional strife.

“You were lucky. Lucky there were no victims.” 

On the day of the narrator’s release, the prison warden tells him he would have received a worse sentence if there had been victims of his crime. Everyone involved in the case has assumed that the narrator attempted to poison the train’s drinking water, but the only evidence against him was that a woman took a sip of saltwater. Though there were no victims of the alleged poisoning, the warden’s warning is ironic because the narrator has just been unfairly detained for more than a year for simply trying to bring his lover home. This exchange also foreshadows the wave’s later emotional and physical abuse of the narrator.

“I felt a pain in my chest, like the smack of a wave of surprise when surprise smacks us in the chest: my friend was there, singing and laughing as always.” 

The narrator is surprised to return to his home after more than a year only to find the wave happily residing in his apartment. His emotional response is complicated, encompassing both delight and pain; deeply conflicting emotions are characteristic of their turbulent relationship. The author relies heavily on personification throughout this piece, and here, the simile of a “wave of surprise” directly intertwines the narrator’s emotions with the wave herself: The narrator experiences deep joy and deep pain, always at the mercy of the wave’s endless surprises.

“Someone, after making sure that I was only salt water, poured me on the engine. It was a rough trip: soon I was a white plume of vapor, then I fell in a fine rain on the machine. I thinned out a lot. I lost many drops.” 

In this surrealist world, the wave can travel from the train’s water fountain to the narrator’s apartment by shifting into various forms. Her simple account highlights the piece’s balance between logic and the surreal, offering a scientific explanation of something fantastical.

“Nothing is comparable to sleeping rocked in those waters, unless it is waking pounded by a thousand happy light lashes, by a thousand assaults that withdraw laughing.” 

The beginning of the narrator’s life with the wave is characterized by joy, sensuality, and passion; Paz personifies the wave with positive imagery of light, softness, and gentle touch. In this line, Paz juxtaposes actions of violence (lashes, assaults) with happiness and laughter, creating a positive experience for the narrator. This juxtaposition underscores the consuming and intense nature of the relationship and foreshadows the turn in the relationship when these same actions become intentionally harmful.

“To love her was to extend to remote contacts, to vibrate with far-off stars we never suspect. But her center…no, she had no center, just an emptiness like a whirlwind that sucked me in and smothered me.” 

The narrator characterizes his intense love for the wave as otherworldly, capable of transcending this world into unknown space. Despite their passion, however, he is never able to reach her “center” because he suspects she does not have one. This reminder that the wave is not human, and the fact that her “emptiness” is all-consuming and “smothering,” does not deter the narrator from continuing their relationship. It does, however, foreshadow the relationship’s volatility and toxicity. 

“Subject to the moon, the stars, the influence of the light of other worlds, she changed her moods and appearance in a way that I thought fantastic, but was as fatal as the tide.”

Over time, the wave grows agitated and violent. The narrator attributes the wave’s turbulent moods to the moon and stars (forces that do genuinely affect the seas) and initially finds these changes beautiful and fascinating. However, her aggression later proves to be nearly fatal to him, and their relationship fails. Here, Paz continues to use ocean imagery to describe both the physical and the emotional power the wave holds over the narrator.

“I filled the house with shells and conches, with small sailboats that in the days of her fury she shipwrecked […] But my boats and the silent song of the shells were not enough. I had to install a colony of fish in the house. It was not without jealousy that I watched them swimming in my friend, caressing her breasts, sleeping between her legs, adorning her hair with little flashes of color.”

To appease the wave, an effort that parallels a victim trying to appease their abusive partner, the narrator brings her a multitude of oceanic gifts. The wave meets these gifts with violence, continuing her abusive patterns. Desperate to make the wave happy, the narrator then gifts her a colony of fish, their behavior symbolic of new lovers. The narrator tries to suppress his jealousy, but the wave begins to ignore him and devote all her attention to the fish.

“One day I couldn’t stand it any more; I flung open the door and threw myself on them. Agile and ghostly, they slipped between my hands while she laughed and pounded me until I fell. I thought I was drowning, and when I was purple and at the point of death, she deposited me on the bank and began to kiss me, saying I don’t know what things.” 

Unable to bear the fishes’ intrusion in his relationship with the wave, the narrator tries to attack them. The wave nearly drowns him in response but saves him at the last moment, trying to reconcile. This abuse leaves the narrator feeling “weak, fatigued, and humiliated” (31), and it marks the turning point at which he starts to reevaluate his relationship with the wave.

“When I came to my senses, I began to fear and hate her.” 

The narrator comes to his senses in a literal way, when he physically recovers from his near-death experience, but this latest violent outburst from the wave also helps him come to his senses emotionally. Realizing that his love and passion for her has turned to fear and hate is the catalyst for their separation.

“Nothing moves women as much as the possibility of saving a man. My redeemer employed all of her arts, but what could a woman, master of a limited number of souls and bodies, do, faced with my friend who was always changing—and always identical to herself in her incessant metamorphoses.” 

While distancing himself from the wave, the narrator rekindles his relationship with an old girlfriend. He confides in her about his life with the wave, and the old girlfriend tries to “save” him. This is a loaded passage; the narrator’s understanding of women is misogynistic in that he believes a woman’s driving force is to save the men in her life, relying on her to do the labor of saving him from a toxic relationship she has no part in. He continues to refer to the wave as his “friend,” denying her the title of lover, girlfriend, or partner. The girlfriend is unable to “save” him from the wave; as a mere mortal, she is incapable of reasoning with (or fully understanding) a cosmic force that is constantly changing.

“Her sweet arms became knotty cords that strangled me. And her body, greenish and elastic, was an implacable whip that lashed and lashed.” 

The wave’s anger and violence continue to escalate, and she destroys the narrator’s home and continuously assaults him verbally and physically. These lines stand in opposition to earlier ones: The “happy light lashes” have turned into an “implacable whip” (30), and her laughs are no longer gentle and kind but dark and malicious. Unable to take any more, the narrator flees the wave and his home.

“It had been so cold that over the marble of the chimney, next to the extinct fire, I found a statue of ice. I was unmoved by her wearisome beauty.” 

The narrator returns from a month away in the mountains to find that the wave has frozen. The fire has gone out in the hearth, but the metaphorical flame of their passionate relationship is also extinguished: He recognizes the wave’s objective beauty but no longer feels any emotional attachment to her.