Salt and the Significance of a Quiet Moment
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Salt by Adriana Riva, translated by Denise Kripper, is a novel about a woman’s quest to understand her mother, about mothering more generally, and about the disconnect of not quite knowing a person who holds a central place in your life.
The narrator is also the mother to a young boy, Antonio, and pregnant with a second child for much of the book’s timeline. These children jump into the story in interesting ways.
I started taking anxiety medication two months after my father’s funeral, following dreams that I had lost my wallet with my ID and credit cards inside and that the car I was driving kept running through all the red lights. Those were days of intense humidity and smelly cigarettes. And then one morning, Antonio climbed into my bed, put his ice-cold feet inside the sheets and, lifting my eyelids, asked me to tell him about his grandmother.
In this passage, a child physically interrupts the narrator’s slumber, but also her frame of mind. She is fixating on her father’s death, but her son jerks her into awareness of her mother, who becomes the main obsession of the book.
I love how physically it manifests. She is literally awakened. But it’s more bodily than that. She’s not roused with a gentle word, but with ice-cold feet and the physical lifting of eyelids.
And, sure, the eyelids could be a metaphor. It could be that Antonio wakes her and the narrator just feels like he is peeling them open. But this is a small child and I know they are capable of such absurd and casual brutality. (Ask me how I know.) And so I’m reading this as actual—Antonio’s hands on her face, fingers at her eyes and squeezing them open. But even if I’m wrong and it is meant to be a metaphor, the image of this physical manipulation exists for the reader.
A child’s physical body bursting into a parent’s state of being—interrupting a thought or a dream or an anxious episode—is so real and so frustrating, and sometimes also so tender. A physical moment like this can work to ground a narrative in space and in bodies and in reality. This is especially important because the book spirals through memories and fragmented pieces of family lore and history. So a solid moment like this one can help to orient the reader—and just feel satisfying.
And of course, it’s also important that it’s this child, the one who she is mother to, who has pointed her in the direction of her own mother. It reflects the central quest of the book in a powerful way.
Metaphorically, I think it’s a very good illustration of the narrator’s struggles to understand her own mother. The child interacts with his mother in a way that is clumsy and crude. The narrator is an adult who knows better than to crank open an eyelid with her fingers, but she wants to get into the psyche of her own mother just as desperately and just as tangibly. She feels crude in her bumbling to communicate with her mother or understand her life and choices.
I often worry that pointing out a passage’s metaphorical implication will diminish its quiet charm, its truth.
But my favorite kind of metaphors exist as moments of quiet truth. Whether they emerge naturally or are carefully placed for their meaning, they feel organic. They are true enough in a literal sense that we can absorb their meaning without the flashing light of “this is a symbol!” that happens in other sorts of moments.
This passage hits that sweet spot for me because it is simple and even mundane. But it is also carefully chosen for its significance to the story and then expertly calibrated.