The Little Widow from the Capital (독후감 by 강치범)

[여준영]

The Little Widow from the Capital

The little widow committed suicide. She married as soon as she graduated from high school. Her family was so rich that the couple could live in the huge house with three live-in servants on the beach. In a year, one of them filed her husband to accuse of forcing himself on her. She was pregnant. He could get rid of the punishment because of her family's influence. However, the victim's husband shot him to death.

The little widow left the Dominican Republic to restart her life in New York. She would never imagine another tragedy waiting for her. The apartment which she rented was already occupied by a group of tenants coming from the same country. They were wary of the newcomer. It didn't take long for her to notice the bully from the group. They imagined something bad about her to make her look bad. Curiosity made them become detectives to gather the information which would help them to accuse her.

Despite such a harsh environment, she could have another lover who was thirty around her age. He seemed to love her so much that not only could she retrieve her normal life but she looked forward to looming happiness. “She smiled often, sometimes no apparent reason” Five days before their marriage, he tried to rape the girl who had lived in the little widow's apartment. The girl was the niece of a member of the group. She was too angry to forgive him although he knelt down, crying for it while all the bullies were watching the scene. She nearly died of shame.

Now, it's our turn to unravel the puzzle. Why did she have to die? We believed the question would be the key to crack open the story with our compassion. We couldn't exclude counting her family's money which might devote her to get caught up in a victim of it. The late husband's main concern was her family's money rather than loving her. “A man who was primarily interested in her family's money” The second man was nothing better than him. The group noticed something suspicious about his love. “We didn't know yet the little widow was rich, we assumed Andres returned two nights later because he loved her.” In fact, both of them pretended to love her passionately in order to achieve their main goals.

Since she loved them with all her heart, her agony was beyond imagination. Andres might crack the psychological scar ingrained in her mind. The pain would be overwhelmed as much as she could not handle it by herself. To escape, she might determine to surrender herself to eternity.

There would be something more significant reason for her death than the other. She seemed to raise a concern about other's opinions relating to herself so seriously that she believed ending her life was the only way to defend her pride and dignity. While the man knelt down and cried out for forgiveness she mentioned the same words twice. “Let those busy bodies witness.” “Let those chismosas be my witnesses.”

When the wedding date and time arrived, the group which was wary of her came to the door of her apartment, calling her name in unison although they knew the wedding ceremony was canceled. Calling her name in unison took on eerie quality under the circumstances. They might want to see how miserable she was. On the contrary, it was a big surprise to break their expectation. “When the little widow open her door, she wore an enormous white silk wedding dress.” When she was going up to the roof they followed but they acted as if they were spectators waiting for dire moments. “The whine of a car alarm halted our hearts.”

A new super short story was added before closing the story. When she rented a house, her neighbor liked her immediately then assuming she kept alive until now. It seemed to be nuanced that dislike would draw our lives to be damned one way or the other. However, the name of like would be as it was.

All in all, the story seemed to look like a mirror reflecting the dark side of human nature conspicuously.

WRITTEN BY YOHANCA DELGADO: MAY 28 2023, CHI B KANG.