My Life With the Wave

“When we got to town, I explained to her that it was impossible, that life in the city was not what she had been able to imagine with all the ingenuousness of a wave that had never left the sea. She watched me gravely: No, her decision was made.” 

On the day they meet, the narrator anticipates that a new life in the city would be too difficult for the wave, rendering a relationship impossible. He tries to reason with her, but she is determined. The emotional and rash decision to leave her life behind characterizes the start of this relationship as intense and spontaneous, if a bit reckless, and foreshadows her difficulty in adjusting to this massive change, just as the narrator predicted.

“The next day my troubles began. How could we get on the train without being seen by the conductor, the passengers, the police?” 

The relationship presents difficulties to the narrator from the very beginning: In this surrealist world, the narrator faces the logistical problem of transporting a wave from the beach to Mexico City by train. The secrecy of the relationship and the narrator’s deep fear of others’ judgment suggests that this is a love affair, heightening the emotional strife.

“You were lucky. Lucky there were no victims.” 

On the day of the narrator’s release, the prison warden tells him he would have received a worse sentence if there had been victims of his crime. Everyone involved in the case has assumed that the narrator attempted to poison the train’s drinking water, but the only evidence against him was that a woman took a sip of saltwater.