‘Pearla’, from Hughes: the pain of loss

Story of a shocking beauty and an exquisite sensitivity, ‘pearl’ is pierced incessantly by a sharp and penetrating lyricism that makes it shine, at every step, at every step, Like that rare and unusual pearl that announces the title. In him, Marianne, the narrator, is a woman who has lived all her life trapped in a mystery that completely decided her existence and the relationship with others.

When I was eight years old, His mother left one day without saying a word and disappeared forever. Behind he left a husband professor who always watched quietly for his absence, a newborn baby in the crib and a girl who loves fantastic stories and poems that his mother recited him with immense love and tenderness. Above all of them, one: ‘pearl’, a medieval poem, from the end of the fourteenth century, included in the same book next to the romance of the Celtic mythology ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’.

His young mother, mysteriously, had surrounded the word ‘pearl’ with the pencil and with capital letters had added ‘Consolatio’. What did he mean, Marianne will ask for Mayor? Maybe it was a sign for a future of inextinguishable pain, because of an absence that would never close in your mind and heart? Did his mother send him, as a unique legacy, a message of eternal consolation, of consolation in the inconsolable?

Always looking through signs, of supernatural fantasies that bind to the myths of the earth, plagued with superstitions, with the aim of appeasing fears and communicating with the dead of the small town where they lived, Marianne will see the times of her life ghostly remover memories “Even if they tell me that I am wrong in order and in details,” no matter how insignificant they are.

Footprints and tiny traces in the house that everyone shared, that they can give light to the unknown of their loss. Or, if not, spells manufactured by herself Based on stabs of intense and self -colon pain, as he will say: «I was convinced that pain was part of the magic; If he suffered enough, he could make her reappear.

Marianne will never stop waiting for her and choose the precise places where her mother can suddenly make her appearance. The sites that identify them and that talk about them and what they are in the most intimate. Thus, every year, although his father and his brother do not understand him, Marianne will go to the town’s festivities, the vigils. At the end of the Mass, everyone is heading to the local cemetery, to pay tribute to those who left.

There, the same surnames (Hewitt, Huxley, Proudlove) are repeated again and again, except for them: “If my mother returns,” Marianne will say – where, if not, would he come to look for us? How would I recognize me if I was not sitting next to this tombstone? If he appeared there and had to show him who I am, he would sing our song, ‘Green Gravel’. The one that my mother sang a baby so much ago ».