Water

 

This story is very different from the other short stories that we have read. Rosena on the Mountain is a short story about a young Haitian boy who wants to join the sainthood. He grew up from nothing in the slums of his town. He feels that God has to lead him to become closer to him. "I felt destined to rise at two o'clock each morning of my life and to utter only three words a week" (Rosena on the Mountain, René Despestre). The boy went to the mountains to start his journey in sainthood. There he met a girl that helps with the sainthood that is called Rosena. She would help in the kitchen, making food, and gathering water.  Rosena has her eye on the boy and the boy starts to feel a certain way about Rosena. The boy knows that he cannot sin with Rosena because it goes against his beliefs. The temptation becomes too strong and Rosena and the boy sin together. The boy is in love but is distraught at the same time because he has gone against everything that he has learned. The priest knows what they have done together and makes the boy confess the sins that he committed. The boy feels ashamed but cannot stop thinking about Rosena. In the end, the priest finds the boy and Rosena together in bed. The priest is beside himself and was extremely upset that he started beating the boy. Rosena runs to the kitchen and grabs a machete and takes a swipe at the priest. The priest tells them to leave and never come back, and that was the last time they saw him.  

 

Many of the most intense scenes in this story occur when Rosena and the boy are gathering water. Their romantic relationship always occurs by the water source.  Water is a symbol of love; it is known as the universal solvent. Water goes everywhere and seems into everything.  The is the same way, it seeps into the deepest parts of an individual’s soul and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Love is so strong that there cannot be boundaries put on love. Water is the same way, the more you try and hold back water the stronger it builds until it overflows. 

 

The love that Rosena and the boy have for each other becomes so strong that they don’t even care about the repercussions. The boy doesn’t care if the priest catches them because he has such strong emotions and feelings for Rosena. Water is very powerful and descriptive, and so is love. Love can end relationships and create new pathways for life. Love ended the boy’s relationship with the priesthood and created a new path with Rosena. He traded one pathway of life for a different one. Love like water transforms a person. “Father Mulligan saw a transfigured couple arriving on the plateau that evening. What we had just done must have shone so intensely in our faces that he shaded his eyes. He understood at first glance that it was not the same Rosena or the same Alain who had returned from the river” (René Depestre, Rosena on the Mountain). The love that the boy and Rosena felt had visually transformed them that they could not even hide it. It is the same how water transforms a landscape, it is the same landscape but looks different. These were the same two people with a romantic connection they could not hide.