Clara possesses the power of being clairvoyant. She can see the future and also can move things with her mind. When Alba is young, Clara notices the same traits in her. Clara teachers her and nourishes Alba’s powers. When Clara was young, Nana, her grandmother, did the same for Clara as she is doing for Alba. Clara’s family, her father especially, didn’t want Clara using her powers. Clara uses her powers for the better, to help protect her family and the people around her. Also, Clara writes down everything in a journal, a journal that Alba reads. She is passing down not only her clairvoyance, but also her thoughts and feelings as everything happened through out her life. Clara doesn’t realize this as Alba states in the beginning of the novel that, “She also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.”(1) Not only is clairvoyance in common between the two, but the names Alba and Clara have the same meaning, which was chosen intentionally by Clara, and her daughter, Blanca, Alba’s mother.
When Clara was a young child, she tended to hold her family together. She was very close to her sister Rosa, since they were both different, they bonded easily. Clara predicted Rosa’s death. Also, Clara was very close to her Uncle Marco. No one cared too much for Uncle Marco’s crazy stories and wild adventures, except for Clara. Along with Uncle Marco, she was close to Nana, whom she turned to for comfort when Rosa died. In comparison, Alba has similar people in her life. Alba has green hair, as Rosa had had. She resembles Rosa in many aspects and has a similar bond with Clara and Clara had had with Rosa. Clara’s son Nicholas, to everyone disappointment but Clara’s, is taking the same path as Uncle Marco had in the past. Just as Clara had learned from Uncle Marco, Alba learned of “vegetarian diets, Japanese martial arts, Tibetan dance, yogic breathing”(267). She also discovered Uncle Marcos trunks full of adventures at a young age. As for the role of Nana is Alba’s life, Clara teaches Alba how to use her clairvoyant powers, as Nana did for her. Alba goes to Clara for comfort. Alba and Clara both have the same bonds with members in their family, which seem to hold the whole family together through all of the tough times.
At the end of the novel, Clara predicts her own death, as she has predicted so many other things in the past. Reading into the novel, it is noticed that at the time of Clara’s death, Alba is now old enough to have full control of her powers, and old enough to take over Clara’s duties. Clara lived just long enough to teach her grand daughter how to fill her shoes. Not only does Clara believe Alba is old enough, but mature enough to us her powers to protect her family, just as Clara has tried to do with Rosa’s death, and the earthquake. In death, Clara passes to Alba how she over came everything through out her life, which Alba uses to her advantage.
This story follows through four generations of women, even though the focus is on two of them. The story of Clara almost predicts what will be Alba’s story as she lives her life. Clara and Alba’s life start out identical, same influences, same powers. Also, they hold together their families, a power that Clara passes on to Alba as she passes. Clara and Alba can be seen as the same person, who lived during different times.
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