Answer to Question 1
- From the first sentences confession of intuitive destiny, to the final sentences prophetic fulfillment, the storys tone and diction resonates like a legend. When Nicolas Vidal cast aside all precaution and, when the fateful moment arrived, forgot the prediction that usually weighed in all his decisions (par. 1), he unknowingly begins a course of action that leads to his death. Both the reader and he know there is no other ending.
In addition to this, Casildas final actions become legendary. At whatever cost to her own body or morality, she becomes the sacrificial savior of her children, which is always the stuff of legend.
Answer to Question 2
- The first two words of the story are Nicolas Vidal, and the first thing we are told is that he has, in effect, a rendezvous with destiny. The lonely circumstances of his birth, his upbringing, his scars, his pride, and his independence all create a romantic aura about Vidal that inevitably directs our attention to him and leads us to view him as the storys protagonist. He is a bandit who has tempered his soul to the hardness of iron (par. 2).
Twice his wifes age and a lifelong bachelor with fussy habits, Judge Hidalgo is described as a harsh man, whose execution of the law with severity and stubbornness . . . even at the expense of justice had made him feared throughout the province (par. 1). The narrator states that Hidalgo refused to apply any common sense in the exercise of his profession, and was equally harsh in his condemnation of the theft of a chicken as of a premeditated murder (par. 1). He always wears black, and he always attends mass on Sundays with his wife.
Nicolas Vidals first impression of the Judges wife, Casilda, is unfavorable and misinformed. Even as the Judges verdicts are intolerant and narrow-minded, so are Vidals assumptions about Casilda. He describes her as an ethereal slip of a girl who seemed to him almost ugly, with fingers obviously unskilled in the arts of rousing a man to pleasure (par. 1). However, Casilda defies all expectations. She not only survives the harsh and unfamiliar climate to which she has been brought, but she actually thrives there. It is she who softens her husband, moving him from a rigid inflexibility in the administration of justice to a much more sensitive and compassionate approach (par. 1). The town is shocked when Casilda emerged happy and smiling from three pregnancies in rapid succession. It is she who demonstrates a level of heroism, resourcefulness, self-sacrifice, especially after her husband dies in the car crash. By the storys end, the reader assumes that it is her perfect example of delicacy and refinement (par. 1) mixed with her sensuality and sexuality that transform both her husband and Nicolas Vidal.
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