[Callan is an American critic and educator. In the following essay, he uses Jungian analysis to analyze the various symbols in Fuentes's novella Aura and sees the narrative as "ritualistic. "]

Aura is an intriguing novella with three characters, or perhaps only one, and a conclusion that seems disconcerting. Felipe Montero, twenty-seven years old, single, a student and teacher of history, answers an ad for a young secretary who knows French. He finds a very old woman, Señora Consuelo, who lives with her niece, Aura, in a house lit only by candles in the old center of town. The job consists of revising and finishing the memoirs of her husband, General Llorente, who played a small part in the Second Empire of Mexico. The young man accepts the financially attractive offer largely because of the lovely and entrancing Aura. He is to remain in the house until the work is completed. The next day when he observes Consuelo's absolute control over Aura and assumes that she keeps her niece at her side as a means of recovering her youth, he realizes that it is up to him to rescue the girl from such an abnormal life. A trace of abnormality, negligible at first, develops rapidly until it becomes evident that the two women are one and the same person. In the last scene, Felipe embraces Aura believing that Consuelo is away, but the girl has now become the old woman and he remains in her arms. He has also come to recognize that he is General Llorente. The concept of a woman, age-old but ever young, immediately calls to mind standard symbolic figures such as Mother Church, or the goddess Natura, and when we learn that Consuelo/Aura renews herself through animal sacrifices, we are reminded of the ancient nature cults and their Great Mother goddesses: Venus, Cybele, Ishtar. Proceeding along these lines it may be noticed that the plot presents some elements of an archetypal situation, the dragon fight: a young man's attempt to rescue a damsel in distress. The theme of the dragon slayer has been interpreted by analytical psychology to correspond to a specific stage in psychic development: the initiation into manhood. In a wide sense, it is patterned on the rites of sacrifice, death and rebirth, successive forms of which, repeated at intervals throughout life, enable consciousness to expand and renew itself, on its path to wholeness. The purpose of such ritual rebirths and renewals, according to Jungian psychology, is to release or liberate psychic energy from the unconscious. The dragon fight has a corollary aim for the young Ego: to differentiate the Anima, or the creative, animating aspect of the unconscious from the total unconscious, which is experienced as a power at once protective and destructive, but in both cases overwhelming to consciousness, and is personified in the universal figure of the Great Mother. The task of the young "hero," expressed in myths, literature and dreams, is to rescue a "princess" by penetrating into the lair of her captor, confronting and vanquishing it; he then carries her off in triumph and marries her, which means that he takes possession of the psychic energy she represents.

Initially, Felipe Montero's adventure exemplifies the "heroic" stage, of psychic development, wherein he is to separate Aura, his Anima, from Consuelo, the Great Mother. The archetypal structure of the novella depicts him entering into the unconscious, the realm of the Mother, when he goes to see Consuelo. Her house is hidden in the heart of the city, another, on Donceles Street; doncel was the term for a young lord before he had received armor. The street name suggests that this is the place for youths to begin their ordeal and become "heroes." Before entering what will be a pitch dark hallway, Felipe stops and looks back over his shoulder at the "undifferentiated world outside." Differentiation of the Anima is now in order. Consuelo later restates this when she corrects him regarding the gender of her rabbit: "Ah, you're not able to distinguish yet."

Fuentes has surrounded Consuelo with many symbols of the Great Mother, and particularly those that are associated with Hecate. This was one of the Greek goddesses of the underworld (an obvious equivalent of the unconscious); among her attributes were a key, a torch, witchcraft, dogs—she was often depicted as dog-headed. Like most Great Mothers, she was an earth deity associated with darkness and fertility, with cereals and prolific animals such as rabbits, goats, mice. The doorknocker of Señora Consuelo is the head of a dog that looks like a canine fetus. The inside of her house is dark and heavy with dampness, like a cave. She has an indoor garden of forgotten plants once used in necromancy, deadly nightshade, henbane, bittersweet and other poisonous herbs. Her pet companion is a rabbit, Saga by name, which she explains means "sabia," the wise one, alluding perhaps to the allwise Mother, Sophia-Sapientia. Her bed is full of crumbs; there is a nest of mice in one corner of her room. She is also connected with other animals: cats, which as a bride she used to sacrifice to arouse her husband's sexual appetite, rats and a goat which she and Aura slaughter in the kitchen. Psychologically these theriomorphic symbols represent the libido or psychic energy contained in the unconscious. A key hangs around Consuelo's neck; it belongs to the chest containing the Llorente papers and she entrusts Felipe with it, later referring to it several times. There is a second key in this tale, Felipe's latchkey; the phallic significance of this object, as he opens Aura's fingers and presses it into her hand, foreshadows their sexual union; it is by this key that he recognizes her on the night she comes to him in the dark. These phallic keys, like Hecate's, open the treasure chest of the unconscious that houses the energy needed for psychic growth. The domain of the Great Mother is of course a holy place; likewise the old lady's bedroom with its religious articles and votive candles is a "santuario." The torch that Hecate often carries corresponds to the candelabrum that Aura holds as she stands waiting for Felipe.

The role of the Anima is to supply guidance for the hero, an Ariadne's thread, through the labyrinth of the unconscious. In much of the story, Aura serves as Montero's guide in the dark house. The conflict develops on the second day when he sees the two women together and wonders what keeps the girl subjected to her aunt. Perhaps Aura expects him to rescue her from the chains imposed on her by the crazy old lady? The girl's pure beauty has captivated him from the start. Now, bolstered by the meritorious idea of setting her free, he allows himself mentally to claim her as his own. He feels that she will guess his intention and come to his room later—as indeed she does, being a figment of his mind.

Carl Jung defines the Anima as the archetype of life, because it inspires man to do and to achieve things contrary to his innate passion for idleness. Felipe, spurred by the new job, begins to work on his long untouched History of the Conquest, in addition to doing Señora Consuelo's work. His new drive may be due unconsciously to the stimulating proximity of a beautiful girl. At any rate, Aura has many Anima qualities. For instance, while she is very real and tangible at night, at other times she becomes elusive and unpredictable, turning up suddenly beside him, disappearing into thin air, acting withdrawn and sometimes looking right through him, oblivious of his presence; she appears young and virginal at one time, at another she seems middle-aged; she can be demur as well as provocative and shameless, and she is always a little beyond reach. These are some of the contradictions that make the Anima so fascinating, for, like all archetypes, she is endowed with mana and irresistible.

Aura is green-eyed and always clad in green; so was Consuelo according to her husband's papers. Green is the life color and is commonly associated with the Anima. The General also said that his wife irradiated life. Toward the end of the story, Felipe urges Aura to leave the old lady, saying she is hardly more than a cadaver: "She has more life than I do" exclaims the girl. Indeed, this is equally true psychologically, for while the Anima is the archetype of life, the actual source of its vitality is the Great Mother, the total unconscious.

In one of the old photos that Felipe finds, Llorente's young wife appears against a backdrop of the Lorelei rock on the Rhine; the siren of that rock, who sang sailors to destruction, is a prime example of the Anima manifestation. The sea imagery by which Aura's unusual eyes are highlighted, makes of her a Venus born of the waves: ".. . those sea eyes that seem to billow, that sparkle like foam, then recover their green calm, then become dilated again like a surging wave." Jung has noted that water and the sea are the most common symbols of the unconscious, and that typical Anima figures are sirens, water sprites and other creatures that rise out of the deep, like Venus.

The Anima personifies man's unconscious and suppressed femininity; eventually he will want to raise to consciousness this other half of his psyche in order to achieve a more balanced personality. On the morning after his second night with Aura, having discovered that the aunt has been in the room all along, Felipe has a premonition that he is "seeking his other half." If this is an allusion to a man's search for his feminine half, it can only be a fleeting intuition, because this is a goal for the second half of life, and Felipe is at an earlier stage.

The matter of death and rebirth is also discussed in this novella. Arguing that Aura should leave her aunt because the old woman is trying to bury her, he tells her: "You have to be reborn, Aura." To which she replies: "One has to die before one is reborn. No. You don't understand." Montero has shown that he does not understand the need for sacrifice, symbolic or otherwise, and as a result his initiation is to be a failure. He does not "slay the dragon," like a true hero, he does not even confront her (Consuelo). True, he thought of doing it: "Why don't you have the courage to tell her that you love the girl? Why don't you go in and tell her, once and for all, that you are going to take Aura with you when you've finished the work?" But he goes to his room instead and reads in the Llorente papers about how she used to kill animals for generative purposes. Once the General found her with her legs outspread and her skirts thrown up, throttling a cat; she had explained that torturing cats and sacrificing them was her way of stimulating their love, and Llorente admitted that it worked. The young woman's posture suggests the ritual exhibitionism of a fertility goddess; sacrificial death is often symbolic of sexual union and represents fecundation. It is invariably connected with agricultural worship of the Great Mother.

Thereupon, Felipe hurries downstairs to speak to Aura about her aunt, and discovers her in the kitchen spattered with blood, slitting the throat of a goat and skinning it. Sickened by the odor and outraged at the sight of Aura's servitude, he races to Consuelo's room intent on accusing her of avarice and tyranny; he finds that the old woman is performing the same motions, killing and skinning an imaginary goat, obviously instigating the butchery from her room. He returns to his room in panic, blocks the door with his bed as if he were being pursued, and throws himself on it, exhausted. Not the doings of a hero. The need for self sacrifice has not penetrated his conscious mind; his Anima performs that which he should be doing himself, but which causes him nausea: for the goat that is being slain stands for him, and he should partake in the rite. He has neither stood up to the Great Mother nor propitiated her with blood.

Next, in a feverish nightmare, he sees Consuelo crawling toward him from out of a dark abyss, moving her bony hand, advancing until her face with its bloody, toothless gums touches his own and he screams; now she retreats, waving her hand and sowing into the abyss the yellow teeth she takes out of her bloody apron. Aura is there too, her skull shaven, laughing silently with the old woman's teeth superimposed upon her own. Her bare legs break off and fall into the ravine. These gruesome visions of Consuelo and Aura portray the negative character of the Great Mother, which signifies the primordial human fear of life. The abyss is her devouring womb, the maw of the grave; sowing the teeth and the phallic legs suggests a fertility rite for which the victim is indicated when Aura looks at Felipe and laughs. Bloody gums, wizen mask, bony claws, are common characteristics of the Terrible Mother; the double row of teeth, and the skull, bare like that of a vulture, likewise betoken her devouring and deadly nature. They are well suited to Aura, for the meaning of her name is "vulture." (The vulture is an obvious and universal symbol of the Death Goddess). All the gore and horror are not mere theatrics; they express "man's experience of life as a female exacting blood," and the Terrible Mother of ancient myths turns up in the nightmares of modern men and women.

In short, Felipe has not exhibited the bravery and aplomb expected of the hero. What has happened to his Anima when he needed her? The dinner bell awakens Felipe from his nightmare; beside his plate he finds a little naked doll made of cloth and stuffed with flour that spills out of its shoulder. He eats his cold meal, the usual kidneys, tomatoes and wine (all aphrodisiacs), while fingering the revolting little doll with his left hand. When he realizes what he is doing he drops it in disgust with the uneasy feeling that it may carry some contagion. It is a sacrificial figurine connected with a fertility rite—possibly the victim of an Aztec heart removal—and its "contagion" is his identity with it.

On his way to Aura's bedroom he visits the inside garden and examines the baneful and narcotic herbs once grown by Consuelo and now by her niece. Narcosis or any diminution of consciousness is foremost in the province of the Terrible Mother's dealings with mankind. Aura seems to have changed when he sees her; she is no longer the girl of yesterday; her features have hardened and she looks to be forty. She wears a gay grimace, a sad smile that expresses such contradictory feelings that he is reminded of the bittersweet plants he just saw in the garden: what the author is picturing here may be the expression of sentimental resignation of the sacrificer that Jung describes in Symbols of Transformation.

Aura insists on enacting a peculiar ceremony: she washes his feet, dances with him to the rhythm of a song they both sing, then breaks a wafer made of flour which they both consume. Next she lies on the bed with her arms outstretched in the shape of a cross, and Felipe falls upon her body: "Aura will open up like an altar." It seems clear that this little ritual represents a sacrifice in which Felipe is the victim that winds up on the altar. Although there are Christian allusions, because a large Mexican crucifix dominates the bare room, the passage probably refers to one of the Mexican Indian fertility rites in which washing and bathing, dancing and singing, often figure prominently, and in which tortillas and effigies of the gods, made of flour, are consumed. At the spring festival honoring Cinteotl, the Aztec goddess of corn and fertility, a youth or maiden was attached to a cross and shot by arrows, which in this context is symbolic intercourse to impregnate the deity, impersonated by the victim, and to renew the vegetation. Felipe's second tryst therefore establishes Aura as a Great Mother and himself as the victim of a fertility rite in her honor. The Anima is fading back into the unconscious, indicating regression on his part. The hero reverts to his position as son-lover of the Great Mother. He represents the grain of corn that dies to fertilize the earth and is reborn in the spring (Adonis, Tammuz, etc.), a myth corresponding to a psychological stage preceding that of the "hero."

The setup of Consuelo's household now begins to look like a trap, where the spider-like Feminine schemes to ensnare the unwary man, which is how the unconscious appears to consciousness, by nature masculine. The epitaph of Aura is well chosen: "Man hunts and struggles. Woman intrigues and dreams; she is the mother of fantasy, of the gods. She possesses second sight. . . . The gods are like men: they are born and they die on a woman's breast" (Jules Michelet). This, also, is a stereotype male experience of the feminine, of the "otherness" of all that is not consciousness. Thus Montero, the hunter (for such is the literal meaning of his name) ventures into the realm of the Feminine with the potential of mastering it and emerging in glory like the sun hero. He intends to struggle for the Anima, for the emancipation of consciousness, but the dragon takes the initiative and he is disarmed. The Anima, at first virginal, soon takes on qualities of a courtesan and merges into the unconscious, to which he capitulates, victim of his instincts and impulses. (Sexuality is only one of the regressive forces and should be understood symbolically here.)

Felipe awakens later that night to find Aura standing at the foot of the bed; as soon as he opens his eyes she begins to withdraw into a dark recess of the room to join Consuelo who has been sitting there all the time. Arm in arm they leave together, and he is not to see Aura face to face again. The next time they meet she wears a green veil. Now for the first time, he speaks to her about running off with him and proposes leaving that day. "If you like" she assents. It is not too late—but he retracts: "Well, not yet perhaps. I'm engaged to do this work. When it is finished . . . then we'll go." Loyalty to the Mother imago holds him fast. Unable to break away, he cannot be reborn through self-regeneration as in the hero myth. Thus, when he goes to Aura that night, this time in Consuelo's room, he takes her in his arms "without thinking, without distinguishing"; and when the moon shines through a crack on her white hair, on her shriveled face and toothless gums, he sees the small, wasted body of Consuelo quivering slightly because he holds it and loves it, and because he has returned ("porque . . . tú has regresado", which might also be phrased: because he has regressed). Then, with his eyes open, he buries his face in the silvery hair of Consuelo, whose name means consolation, a pre-eminently motherly attribute. There is no struggle. In surrendering to the old woman, Montero yields to a longing for death or inertia, as several references to his passivity have foreshadowed; (for example, his delay in getting started on the projected History of the Conquest). The fact that Felipe fails his initiation is not unexpected; to experience this process at the age of twenty seven indicates that he has known previous failure: "Time and again the failure of the dragon fight . . . proves to be the central problem for neurotics during the first half of life and the cause of their inability to establish relations with a partner."

According to this interpretation, the story may be understood in either of two ways: First, the events up to the second night happened to Felipe but everything else is a phantasmagoria, beginning with his first dream, the first in many years, and that a nightmare. The Aura he knows thereafter is out of character with the timid girl he first met: he "awakens" from the nightmare with a cry to find Aura lying, naked and succubus-like, on top of him. This erotic dream is presented as fact, throwing the subsequent action into the domain of revery. The second view, preferable and more likely, is that the entire story is a hypnagogic drama like the famous one that Jung analyzes in Symbols of Transformation. It further resembles the Miller fantasies in having an abortive outcome. In this case there would not be three persons in the list of characters, nor even two, but only Felipe Montero and his archetypes, which according to Jung [in Archetypes,] "appear as active personalities in dreams and fantasies."

The wealth of symbols that normally accompanies an archetypal transformation is reflected in those that Carlos Fuentes has allotted to the situation he dramatizes. For example, in Consuelo's bedroom there are holy pictures, which besides their religious symbolism, carry a psychological significance peculiar to this tale. Christ and Mary are symbols of the Self and of the Good Mother. St. Sebastian, often depicted with arrows piercing his body, is analogous to the slaves who were shot with arrows for the feast of Cinteotl, and bears a similar connotation. St. Lucy, a martyr whose eyes were gouged, foreshadows Felipe's first nightmare about a face with empty eyesockets; such a face is that of the Terrible Mother, all the more because it lacks the eyes of consciousness. St. Michael Archangel is a renowned and successful dragonfighter. A central picture on the wall represents devils piercing the damned with tridents, and violating women, bordered by blood and viscera—perhaps the hearts of Aztec sacrifices. The viscera also points to the daily fare of kidneys.

Again: the text is peppered with allusions to the Self, which is the center of the psyche and the goal of psychic development, commonly represented by symbols of wholeness and balance: circles, symmetrical mandalas, crosses, and other images of quaternity. Such symbols exert a uniting influence on the psyche at all stages of life, and especially in times of confusion. At the first meal, Montero dines alone with Aura; nevertheless, four places are set. A circle of light is cast on the table by the candelabrum placed in the center, surrounded by a circle of shadows. In Aura's room a great circle of light illuminates the bed on which she will stretch out in the shape of a cross; a crucifix also falls within the lighted ring. The colors symbolic of the four psychic functions are also highlighted: yellow, blue and red ribbons bind the three bundles of the Llorente papers, and green, the color of sensation, trails through the pages each time Aura's name appears. And again: throughout the novella there is constant tension and contrast between light and darkness, suggesting the tension of opposites in the psyche that produces psychic energy.

With the discovery that he is Llorente, Felipe is thrown into a world that is eternal. He promptly repudiates conceptual time, dismissing his watch as a useless and deceptive measure of time, and thereby accurately projecting his experience onto a transpersonal and universal level. The novella concludes on a note of hope. Consuelo puts her arms around Felipe, saying "She'll come back. .. . I'll bring her back," meaning Aura—the Anima. Impelled by her, he may attempt the process again.

In offering this interpretation of Aura I am in no way suggesting that it is the only possible one, because the text is rich in mystery and allows undoubtedly for many readings; nor is this one exhaustive. As to whether or not Carlos Fuentes knew what he was doing, I am inclined to think that he did, and, furthermore, that he enjoyed adapting and transposing into his tight little "case history" as many facets as possible of Symbols of Transformation and like Jungian studies.