It doesn’t occur often that a person follow’s his/her own advice, but for this particular text Raymond Carver does. When I read “Cathedral” I felt absolutely threatened. More than a sense of suspense, the reading gave me a feeling that something was going on and I wasn’t able to pick it up at the moment. Something was going to go wrong, very wrong.
From the very first lines of the story he speaks of the blind man in a very mysterious way, somehow despising his condition. This strange hatred and fear towards him creates a lot of tension for the reader, who is not able to understand the source of his cold feelings. Personally, the way in which he detailed some scenes made me feel really tense, like waiting for something terrible to come. For example, all the times he repeated to describe how the blind man touched his beard and let it fall.
I am not certain if I picked up any of the things implied, but there certainly are many, for a story written so carefully and with such a confusing ending is meant for us to discover something about it. It probably has to do with the cathedral. What I am sure of is that the “sense of menace” of this text made me think a thousand things while reading it. I wondered about if the woman was in love with the bald man, if he was actually faking and was not blind at all, and even if the main character was actually the blind one and had been speaking about himself all the time. It definitely played with my perception of things, making the words mean three different things at a time.
As soon as I finished reading the first thing I did was looking at this picture I received yesterday in order to let go of all that tension. This are two of my sisters back home in Venezuela (I have five sisters in total). They told me the little one with the curly hair was behaving terribly, and so the older one said: “Let’s meditate like Manuela taught me a while ago”. This picture makes me HAPPY.
Manuela Toro.
