The Final Mist / Maria Luisa Bombal

For me, “The Final Mist” is a ravishing and frightening tale of warning. Through the voice of the nameless heroine, Bombal creates a powerful vision of a deeply feminine perspective caught in the conflict of body and soul, reality and illusion, and immobilized by both the fear of life and the fear of death. But her story is Everyone’s. The narrator is not a proto-feminist; she yearns not for freedom, self-expression, or self-knowledge, but, rather, to be dominated by a stereotype stranger in the usual way.

Her erotic reverie mirrors a traditional Christian religious yearning, a failed tale of redemption. Her fault—if it is that—is that she “weds” herself to an ordinary, conventional fantasy incapable of carrying anything extraordinary. More, she uses this fantasy to stand in the way of any other connection, until, too late, she must recognize the ordinariness of even that waste—of time and possibility. She is lazy, and can neither accept nor reject life, which never comes in the guise one expects. She is both victor and victim, shamed and envious of her sister-in-law who has done what the narrator could only dream, poorly.

It is not a surprise that the mist and death first appear after she declines to comfort her weeping husband on their wedding night. The peculiarity of her sudden marriage to her recently widowed cousin is not a sufficient excuse. She knows this herself: “I move away from him, trying to convince myself that the most discreet reaction is to pretend absolute ignorance of his pain. But inside, something tells me that my attitude is also the most convenient, the least involved. More than my husband’s sobbing, the idea of my own selfishness disturbs me.” But not sufficiently to act differently. Instead she goes to bed and falls asleep instantly. Then her dream commences.

At the end, her husband will reward her moment of truth and awareness in the same manner. The power of the story is not in revealing the narrator’s failing (in which she is unexceptional—not to be condemned), but in how common and easy failure is.