El salvamento

So it’s getting kind of depressing writing about tragedies, but here I go again. “El salvamento”, when translated means “The Rescue”, but since this blog is about tragedy we know that the title is actually a sort of contradiction or paradox of the actual events that occur in this short story by acclaimed author Ana María Matute. On the exterior, “El salvamento” is a typical teenage bullying story in which bullies make life miserable for some poor kid. There are the classic bullies, Alberto and El Fandanguito, and then there’s the pale, timid, and shy Timoteo who becomes the unfortunate victim of Alberto and El Fandanguito’s practical jokes. What makes “El salvamento” different from the typical bullying story is that the practical jokes of the bullies are taking to a whole new level which results in great tragedy. In this “rescue” there is no movie-ending of the victim triumphing over the great, big bullies rather it is the opposite. Like I stated in my first post on One Hundred Years of Solitude, tragedy in Spanish literature is not something that it is light, rather it is intense, and in “El salvamento” the intense tragedy comes in the form of Timoteo’s death because of Alberto and El Fandanguito’s jokes. To give a brief summary of Timoteo’s death, Timoteo drowns while trying to save Margarita, a girl whom he really liked but who in a way is also responsible for his death. Going along with the jokes of Alberto and El Fandanguito, Margarita pretends to drown which allows Alberto and El Fandanguito to convince Timoteo to rush to save “the girl he loves”, but alas Timoteo drowns because he does not know how to swim.

To say that we as readers are horrified as we discover at the very end of the story that the bullies make no attempt to help Timoteo but instead watch him drown, is an understatement. To say the least, the inaction of the bullies is really what makes this tragedy so much more horrifying, and in a way create a sort of Lord of the Flies statement that man is inherently evil. Now some may try to point the unreality of such a situation by pointing to the idea there were probably other people at the beach so someone else would have saved Timoteo, or that a life guard would have saved him so he would never have died. Rather than trying to point at flaws in such a situation what we need to do is isolate external factors and look at the empirical nature of Alberto and El Fandanguito’s actions, and in doing so we see that the real tragedy isn’t in the death of Timoteo but rather in the fact that Alberto and El Fandanguito became the bystanders of a “Kitty Genovese”. In writing this tragic story, I don’t know if Matute is trying to make a statement about what we as humans are capable of, what I do know is that in certain situations inaction rather than action can sometimes become the greatest tragedy of all.