something i try not to think about too much are other people’s marital affairs, mainly because it’s such a foreign topic to me that i can’t even begin to understand what it’s like. love is so strange to me, but i’ve heard mostly raving reviews, and a few terrible reviews. maybe i’ll try it someday.
pressure is a theme that is prevalent in this passage. we have two relationships that must be explored in this passage, the relationship between Beto and the narrator, and the relationship between the mother and the father. the mother consciously pushes the narrator to be friends with Beto as she thinks that Beto could serve as a good influence and role model. the narrator unconsciously pushes the mother to the father when he gives her money, which she then sends to the father. we touched upon the relationship between Beto and the narrator in “on suffocation”, so we will mostly focus on the mother and father.
what little we know about the father is said in this passage – he is “…in Florida now, a sad guy who calls [the mother] and begs for money. He swears that if she moves down there he’ll leave the woman he’s living with…His words coil inside of her, wrecking her sleep for days.” so we know that the mother still pines for the father, but he is with another woman in Florida. the passage suggests that these calls occur every now and then, which is more evidence to support that the mother still loves the father.
what is worth nothing here is that the narrator ends the call. however, we can also read that the narrator is the root cause of the calls – if the narrator did not give his mother the money which she then sends to the father, would these calls take place at all since the father wouldn’t spare a thought for the mother? perhaps it’s only after she has allowed the father to sap her of her financial resources that he picks up, enticing her with tales of leaving the woman he’s with for her if she moves down to Florida.
poor soul.