Summary Of Cry By Zulema

Going back to the first part of this segment, when the narrator is describing how Zulema first told her about how she felt, and what happened after she was told that her mother left, she mentions that Zulema had started crying, and how she had listened through her own tears. “Suddenly she started to sob, holding the photo to her breast. Through my own tears, I heard her describe how she had waited for days on end for her mother’s return…” (Fernández and Franco 386/7) This sentence gives further indication as to how close the narrator was to her aunt as once Zulema started to cry, the narrator started to cry as well. It could also just be the narrator describing how the story had made her feel very sad, and caused her to cry, which could also …show more content…
After tearfully kissing her aunts cheek, the narrator describes how she knew what she had to do, and drove across the border where she bought dozens of small tin offerings, bunches of marigolds, a small box of red cinnamon-scented candles, and small blank 45’s (a small record). She then described sowing the Milagros on the inside lining of the cover of the casket, then described creating a halo effect around the ‘corpse’ using the marigold, hoping the spirit could enjoy the smell of the flowers, and then how she arranged the candles in a row in front of the casket. She then stated how she finally placed the records on the left side of her aunt’s body stating, in Spanish, and then English for her aunt to fill them with her favorite stories. The whole process is a very emotional piece to read as the reader gets an image of how emotional the narrator feels to be decorating her aunt’s coffin. From those few paragraphs, the reader is also given the sense that the narrator does not want to be there as although she is mainly describing arranging the items around the casket, and even how she decorated around her aunts body, she never seems to be able to bring herself to call the corpse by her aunts name, instead using words such as corpse, the body, and the dear figure. In fact, as soon as Zulema is dead, the narrator stops referring to her body as such, and instead uses those terms to talk about her. Despite those feeling however, she stays and decorates her aunt’s casket, which goes back to what Mariana had stated before, that “One simply does what one has to do” (Fernández and Franco 393) as the narrator clearly feels that decorating her aunt’s casket in that way is something that she must do. The narrator then missed her aunt’s burial ceremony, instead choosing to write in her journal to say goodbye and honor her memory instead. At the