- Before you read
- Where to read it
- Questions
- Beside “The Bourgeois King”
- For talking it over
- Write about it
Part 1
Before you read
A man goes to the sea, and when he leaves, a wave follows him home. He smuggles her onto the train in the water tank, goes to jail for it, and finds her waiting in his apartment in Mexico City when he gets out. For a while she fills his life with light. Then winter comes.
- Written by
- Octavio Paz (1914–1998), a Mexican poet and essayist, one of the great writers of the Spanish language. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990.
- First printed
- In Spanish, as “Mi vida con la ola,” around 1949. The English translation by Eliot Weinberger is in The Eye of the Heart, the same book of Latin American stories that includes Darío’s “The Bourgeois King.”
- Length
- About 2,000 words, seven pages. Allow 15 minutes to read it.
Nothing in this story could really happen. A wave cannot hold a man’s arm, ride a train, or sing in his ear. Paz tells it anyway in a calm, serious voice, as if it were a report of ordinary events. Do not stop to ask whether it is possible. Ask what it is like: what kind of love, what kind of trouble, in the real world, looks like this?
Some passages describe the narrator’s love for the wave in sensual, physical language, the way a man might describe a lover. That is part of the answer.
Words you will meet
- ingenuity
- cleverness; here, the simple imagination of someone who has never left home (page 383)
- Inspector, Magistrate, Penal Judge
- officials who rank higher and higher: a railroad inspector, a judge of a lower court, a criminal court judge (pages 384 and 385)
- reverberations
- echoes of sound or light (page 385)
- abject
- miserable, the lowest (page 385)
- perpetual
- never-ending (page 385)
- poplar
- a tall, thin tree (page 386)
- vertigo
- the dizzy feeling of being high up (page 386)
- concentric, excentric
- ripples that circle a center, like a stone dropped in water, and ripples that spread outward with no center (page 386)
- phosphorescence
- a glow, like the light some sea creatures give off at night (page 386)
- conches
- large sea shells (page 387)
- aberration
- something strange and wrong (page 387)
- voluptuousness
- rich physical pleasure (page 387)
- redeemer
- someone who saves another person (page 388)
- metamorphoses
- complete changes of form (page 388)
- carbonized, corrosive
- burned to black; eating away, like acid (page 388)
- implacable
- impossible to calm or stop (page 388)
- precipices
- cliffs (page 389)
Where to read it
My Life with the Wave
This story is still under copyright, so it is not printed on this page. It is in the book The Eye of the Heart: Short Stories from Latin America, edited by Barbara Howes (1973), on pages 383 to 389. The questions give those page numbers.
Your class will read it together. You can also look for the book at the library. A New York Public Library card is free for anyone who lives, works or goes to school in New York State; see the stories page for how to get one.
Part 2
Questions like the test’s
Narrator. The voice telling the story. Here it is the man himself, telling it as “I.” We see the wave only through his eyes.
Tone. The attitude a writer takes toward what is being described: serious, joking, calm, bitter. In writing, you hear it in the words chosen.
Personification. Writing about something that is not a person as if it were one: the sun “entered the old rooms with pleasure.”
Inference. Something the story does not say in plain words, but that you can work out from what it does say.
Theme. An idea about life that the whole story shows.
Thirteen questions, in the kinds the test uses. Have the story open in front of you, and go back to the page each question names. Press Check after each one.
1. At the beach (page 383), the narrator does not send the wave back. What reasons does he give?
He tells her the city is not what she imagines. He is not eager to take her.
She has the whole sea. The other waves try to pull her back.
He has to sneak her onto the train in the water tank.
Why: He says it hurt him “to shame her in front of her friends,” and that “the furious stares of the elders paralyzed me.” He lets her come, and then tries to talk her out of it in town, too late.
2. On page 383, the narrator worries that “the rules say nothing in respect to the transport of waves on the railroad,” and takes this silence as a sign of how strictly he would be judged. What is the tone of this passage?
He is not complaining about the rules. He is working out how to get around them.
He is worried, but he is not confused. He makes a plan and carries it out.
Nothing in this passage looks back at the sea.
Why: He thinks through the railroad rules the way a careful traveler would think about carrying a large package. Telling an impossible thing in a calm, reasonable voice is what gives the story its strange humor. Keep listening for that voice; it stays calm to the very last line.
3. On page 384, the lady tastes the water, and then: the husband calls the conductor, the conductor calls the Inspector, the Inspector calls the police, and the police call the Captain. Each asks a question: “So you put substances in the water?” “So you poisoned the water?” “So you’re the poisoner?” What does this pattern show?
The system jails a man for a year for salty water. The story is making fun of it.
He tried to keep the children away from the tank. And the Chief of the Prison says there were “no victims” (page 385).
She only says the water is salty.
Why: The words climb step by step: salt, then “substances,” then “poisoned,” then “the poisoner.” No one checks what actually happened. The pattern is funny, and it is also a picture of how a small thing can grow as it passes up a chain of authority. He spends a year waiting to be judged.
4. When the narrator gets home to Mexico City, the wave is already there. How did she get back (page 385)?
She says she came “in the train.”
No police officer helped her.
Someone poured her out of the tank and into the engine.
Why: “Someone, after making sure that I was only salt water, poured me in the engine.” She became “a white plume of vapor” and fell “in a fine rain.” “I thinned out a lot. I lost many drops.” Notice: the story explains the impossible with real facts about water.
5. “Her presence changed my life. The house of dark corridors and dusty furniture was filled with air, with sun, with sounds and green and blue reflections” (page 385). What can you infer about the narrator’s life before the wave?
The story says the house was dark and dusty until she came.
He met her at the sea, but he lives in Mexico City.
Nothing in the story says so. The house sounds old and neglected, not grand.
Why: A house of “dark corridors and dusty furniture” is a house where little happens and no one visits. The wave fills it with light, sound and color. The contrast tells you what was missing.
6. “The sun entered the old rooms with pleasure and stayed in my house for hours, abandoning the other houses, the district, the city, the country” (page 385). What does this sentence do?
The sun does not stay in one house. This is not science.
It is about his house, not the weather of the city.
This takes the figure of speech literally.
Why: The sun cannot feel pleasure or choose one house over another. Writing about it as if it could is personification. It is also an exaggeration, and a happy one: his house has become the best place in the country.
7. On page 386, the narrator says, “never did I reach the center of her being,” and that she “had no center, just an emptiness as in a whirlwind.” What is he saying about his love for the wave?
Nothing suggests illness.
She loves him in her way: she follows him from the sea, she laughs and sings and embraces him.
The opposite. He never reaches her center.
Why: He can be carried up and dropped, sung to and held, but he can never get to the middle of her. A wave is always moving; there is nothing still at its heart to hold. This is the first sign of the trouble to come.
8. On page 387, the narrator says the wave changed her moods “in a way that I thought fantastic, but it was as fatal as the tide.” What does fatal mean here?
This is the everyday meaning of fatal, which is why it tempts. But the tide is not deadly; it is regular and unstoppable. The comparison tells you which meaning is meant.
“Fantastic” is the word for what he first thought. “But” tells you fatal means something different.
The opposite. Her moods rule the house.
Why: The tide rises and falls because of the moon, whether anyone likes it or not. The sentence just before says she was “subject to the moon, to the stars.” So fatal here means governed by fate, bound to happen. It is the older meaning of the word.
9. “I confess that it was not without jealousy that I watched them swimming in my friend” (page 387). What does “not without jealousy” mean?
He is watching the fish swim in her.
He knows exactly what he feels. He “confesses” it.
This is the most common mistake: reading only the “not.” Two negatives together make a positive.
Why: Two negatives, “not” and “without,” cancel each other. “Not without jealousy” means “with some jealousy.” Writers use this roundabout way to admit something a little at a time. He brought the fish in for her, and now he is jealous of them.
10. Put these events in order. Choose 1 for the first and 6 for the last. put in order
Why: The sea (page 383), the train (384), jail (384–385), the fish (387), winter (388), and the ending (389). The story moves from delight to trouble to cold, the way a year moves from summer to winter.
11. Which two details show the wave’s love turning into something dangerous for the narrator? choose two
This is from the good time: tender, not dangerous.
This is the house full of joy, early in their life together.
This is from the happy beginning. Perpetual means never-ending.
Why: When he goes after the fish, she pounds him until he nearly drowns. In winter, the embraces that were sweet become “knotty cords that strangled me.” The same wave that filled his house with light now threatens his life.
12. At the end, the narrator finds the wave frozen into “a statue of ice,” says “I was unmoved by her weary beauty,” and sells her to a waiter who chops her up to chill bottles (page 389). What does the ending suggest?
The opposite. He had “decided,” and he feels nothing for her.
She laughed, sang, raged and cried. The story treats her as fully alive.
The waiter is the narrator’s friend, and he only does what the narrator arranged.
Why: The wave that once filled the house with the sun ends as ice cubes in a restaurant. And the narrator tells it in the same calm voice he used for the train: “I was unmoved.” The calm is what makes it chilling.
13. The whole story is told by the man. How does that shape what we know about the wave?
She speaks only a few lines. The man tells the story.
The other waves appear only in the first paragraph.
He tells the girlfriend his story. She never tells us anything.
Why: He tells us she was wild, moody and cruel. But she also cried every night, dreamed of warm beaches, and was left alone more and more as he stayed away. She speaks only a few lines in the whole story. We never hear her side.
Part 3
Beside “The Bourgeois King”
Darío’s “The Bourgeois King” is on its own page, printed in full. Read it first if you have not. The two stories are far apart in time and style, and they end in almost the same place.
14. “The Bourgeois King” and “My Life with the Wave” are both in The Eye of the Heart, sixty years apart. Which is true of both endings?
Neither ends with a wedding.
Neither one goes home. That is part of the sadness.
No one is punished in either story.
Why: The poet freezes turning a crank for the king’s dances; the wave freezes and is sold to chill drinks. In both stories, what was wild and full of life is reduced to a tool for someone else’s comfort.
15. How are the two narrators different?
There is no king in Paz’s story.
The reverse is closer: Darío’s narrator speaks of bitter tears; Paz’s is unmoved.
Darío’s narrator is not a character; he tells the story to a friend.
Why: Darío’s narrator stands outside the story and takes the poet’s side. Paz’s narrator is inside the story and is responsible for what happens, and he says “I was unmoved.” One asks us to grieve; the other lets us judge a man who does not grieve.
Part 4
For talking it over
These have no single right answer. They are for class, or for a friend, or for thinking about on your own. Each one has a hint, folded away, for anyone who wants a place to start.
- Is the wave a woman? Is this story about a real kind of love? What in your own life, or in people you know, looks like the life the narrator describes?
A place to start
Think about the beginning (she chooses him), the middle (the house full of light, then jealousy), and the end (winter, and his absences).
- Who is to blame for how it ends: the wave, the man, or neither? He took her from the sea, but she chose to come.
A place to start
Page 383: “No, your decision is made. You can’t go back.” Who says that, and who made the decision?
- On page 388 the narrator says, “Nothing moves women so much as the possibility of saving a man.” Do you agree? What does the sentence tell you about the man who says it?
- The chain of officials on the train turns salty water into a poisoning. Have you seen something small grow bigger and bigger as it went up a chain of people in charge?
- Why tell an impossible story in such a calm, matter-of-fact voice? Would it be better or worse if the narrator were shocked by everything?
- The wave spent the winter dreaming of “warm beaches.” Many people in this city came from somewhere warm. Does the story speak to that?
Part 5
Write about it
Choose one of these and write in the box below. Put the number of the one you chose at the top. The box saves your writing as you go, under your code, and you can send it to Myles when it is ready.
- 1. What is the wave?
Paz never says what the wave stands for. Write about what you think she represents, and support your answer with at least three details from the story, with page numbers.
Start with your answer in one sentence. For each detail, say what it shows. It is fine to say she stands for more than one thing.
- 2. The wave’s side
Tell part of the story from the wave’s point of view: leaving the sea, the train, the house, the fish, or the winter.
Use what the story tells you about her: what she said, what she did, what she dreamed. Give her the voice the narrator never gives her.
- 3. Two endings
Compare the endings of “The Bourgeois King” and “My Life with the Wave.” What does each story say about what happens to something wild and alive in a world that uses it?
This is close to the test’s essay: two texts, and your judgment about them. Give details from both.
Answers
1 C · 2 A · 3 D · 4 B · 5 A · 6 D · 7 B · 8 D · 9 A · 10 (top to bottom) 4, 6, 1, 5, 3, 2 · 11 B and D · 12 D · 13 B · 14 A · 15 C