THE BLUE BOUQUET

Octavio Paz (Author of the Story )

Great Mexican Poet and Nobel Prize winner for 1990. His Poem 'Sunstone' is considered as one of the ten greatest poems in Latin American literature. He was the Ambassador of Mexico to India from 1962- 1968 and was an ardent admirer of India's priceless cultural Heritage and had special interest in Tantricism. He last came to India in 1994 to present Jnanpith Award to the renowned Malayalam writer 'Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai' of 'Chemmeen' fame. He had close relationship with many Indian writers and artists like Raja Rao, Srikanth Verma, Vivian Sundaram, Jayanth Mohapatra etc. His last prose work  titled 'Light on India' is an amazingly accessible treatise on the legacy of India. Paz passed away in 1998.

THE BLUE BOUQUET

There are abundant situations in everyday life where your dear life is in the hands of a maniac who wants to kill you or molest you to satisfy his flimsy fancies or desires. The villain of the following story is such a character who is in search of blue eyes to present a  bouquet of blue eyes to his beloved. It shows the extent of idiocy and cruelty that senseless love and passion can sometimes entail. The story also makes us to ponder over suspended terror in everyday life. An apparently calm moment can turn sinister and stage macabre scenes. A bouquet of flowers can turn into a bomb to annihilate us (Remembering Rajiv Gandhi). A cozy trip can culminate in a traumatic incident to stab our memory. This story beautifully captures this angst that pervades in our everyday life

A disheveled man wakes from a sweat-drenching nightmare, furiously shaking his shirt and pants free of possible small jungle creatures, and hastily dresses to face the utterly dreamlike reality of remote Mexico, a torpid limbo. He is a lost soul from the American middle-class, middle aged and unmoored, now alone in a squalid hotel. The owner of the makeshift inn, one-eyed man, warns him to stay put for his own safety. Disregarding this the man  takes a brief, circular walk through the alley and he is suddenly set upon by a stranger. The predatory figure bears a machete and a slender knife, which he will use to cut the eyes from his head in order to present this penitent, macabre offering of “a bouquet of blue eyes” to his bewitching lover. The fervor of the man's obsessed mission, his dizzying persuasiveness to grab the sacrificial price that might reunite him with her, and his menacing wit and insight, push the victim's wit to its limits.

The story is rich in ironic pathos, humor, cruelty and metaphor.

We know almost nothing about the man threatened with the loss of his eyes, since the crux of the story is not biography but confrontation- that moment of danger in which the man finds himself, a moment such as any of us could experience. Faced with such danger, he loses whatever fragment of individuality he may have for us, and all that matters is the color of his eyes.