Releasing versus freeing: "Rosaura at Dawn" by Daniel Saldaña París (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I don't have a grand unified theory for "Rosaura at Dawn," something that makes sense of all the parts both individually and in their relationship to the whole. (I just learned the term "mereological" this week, and I could have used it there to sound really smart, but I feel like it'll be obvious I just learned it and was anxious to show off.) I do, however, have some theories about the parts themselves, and maybe these will be useful to readers as they seek their own ideas for making sense of the whole.

Two physical landscape and one personal, bodily landscape

A lot of what's going on during the few pages of "Rosaura at Dawn" involves comparisons and contrasts. One very clear set of comparison/contrast going on is between the physical border between Tijuana, Mexico, and the United States on the one hand and the body of the unnamed female narrator on the other. The opening lines describe the border: "The fence is topped with barbed wire and winds between the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, zigzags capriciously, and extends into the ocean for about a hundred yards." There are two subsequent invitations to compare the narrator's body to this landscape, one explicit and one implicit. The first is when the narrator describes the scar on her leg from an undisclosed accident as resembling the frontier line, seen from above. (The "bird's eye" that the translator uses is a clever wink to the frequent appearance of birds in the story.) The second is when she refers to the scar on her leg, now fading, as "zigzagging," the same word she used to describe the border fence. 

This juxtaposition of the landscape of the border with the bodily landscape of the narrator likely means that the same feeling the border gives her, one of unfulfilled dreams, is how she feels in her own skin after her undisclosed accident in which her mother died. A body can be a prison, and our scars can serve to remind us of all that's gone wrong.

But then there is another comparison, one between the border and the aviary that Severiano has created for the exotic birds and reptiles the police bring to him after busting illegal exotic animal dealers. In some ways, the aviary performs the same function as the border fence: it keeps some things in and some things out. But instead of being "tall and threatening...the northernmost limit of a dream gone bad," it is, in the narrator's one-word assessment, "awesome." It is constructed "from metal tubes, like the ones used in market stands, and completely covered in chicken wire." Unlike the border, which was built by companies for profit using standard construction materials, this was built by salvaged parts out of love. Chicken wire is much less threatening than barbed wire. The aviary, like the border, is there to restrict entrances and exits, but it shows there can be more reasons for building something like this than fear or (as Severiano's brief time in "the can" reminds us) punishment. Walls and fences can also be a means of providing sanctuary.

There are prisons and border fences, but also bird sanctuaries. Which kind of building will the narrator's body, with its zigzagging scar, end up being? That is the question of the narrative. (Okay, that's sort of a GUT for the story, isn't it?)

The two openings

When I went back to re-read the story, I tried to find the original Spanish version. I succeeded, but only partly. I did find the original online, but only the first few paragraphs. That leaves me to rely on the translation for most of the story. In the little that is available for free online, I did realize that there is a version with a different opening paragraph. The translated version in the O.Henry Anthology goes: 

The fence is topped with barbed wire and winds between the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, zigzags capriciously, and extends into the ocean for about a hundred yards. It stands tall and threatening, rusting in the sunlight, the northernmost limit of a dream gone bad. People peer through it, projecting hopes and a new version of themselves beyond the ICE patrols. There is no escape from this place.

The other version, with my own translation below, goes:

The enormous fence, crowned with barbed wire, winds among the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, cuts a capricious zigzag and, out beyond where it can be seen, ends several meters into the ocean. But the waves that break upon one side are the same that break upon the other, and the clouds cross the line routinely, in both directions, without passports or visas. 

I'm not saying the translator made the first version up. I'm sure there's a different Spanish version out there somewhere. Authors change their vision all the time, including after something has been published, so I guess that between the version online and the publication in O.Henry, the author changed his mind.

The version one goes with has an effect on how one views the resolution for the narrator. Are the barriers of her body a sanctuary or a prison? If we read version one, perhaps the narrator views her scars and her body as a confinement to escape from, but her dreams of escape have been disappointed. Her journey is in learning not to escape, but to find a better kind of confinement, one that provides protection rather than restriction. But if one takes reading number two, then there almost never was a confinement. In nature, nothing respects borders. The narrator needs to learn from nature not, as in the first reading, how to find the right kind of enclosure, but how to ignore enclosures altogether. Version one emphasizes the eventual returning of Rosaura, while version two emphasizes the freedom of her flight.

Chickens

I count four references to chickens in the story. The first is when the narrator sees Severiano in Tijuana. She assumes he is waiting for a pollero, a colloquial Spanish term for a guide to take him across the border into the United States. (Coyote is an older term for the same thing.) A pollero is literally a farmer or poultry owner who takes care of chickens. In this figure of speech, all the people the guide takes over the border are chickens that he is herding. The narrator assumes Severiano is a chicken looking to escape from his cage. She is wrong, of course, just as she is mistaken a moment later when she sees Severiano take the cockatoo Rosaura out of a bag to release her. She thinks at first that it is a chicken he has released. But it isn't a chicken, and as he will point out, he hasn't really released her. The bird is going to fly back to the aviary.

The third mention is the chicken wire that protects the aviary, which is a much less threatening and muscular type of barrier than the barbed wire that protects the border. The final mention is the raw chicken that the narrator feeds the hawk in the aviary. If the people moving around the border are chickens, then the narrator is reminded that sometimes they will end up getting caught and killed as prey for the stronger birds. 

I'm not sure what to make of all this chicken imagery. Obviously, birds are ubiquitous quasi-characters in the story, and chickens, which can kind of fly but not very well, are a good symbol of humanity, which shares some of the natural and animalistic traits of birds but not all of them. Birds might be able to fly over borders easily enough, but not chickens. So humans will have to modify their notions of freedom.

The comparison between chickens and humans is apt.

Releasing vs freedom

The narrator mistakes Severiano's letting the bird go for freeing it, when it fact, Severiano is merely letting it roam for a while before it comes back. There is a secret ritual he performs in order to get her to come back, one he teaches to the narrator, but it involves an incantation she will not even share with the reader. 

When Severiano is gone to take care of old business, the narrator releases Rosaura, the cockatoo. She does it in one of the seediest parts of the city and awaits Rosaura's return back at the farm where the aviary is. When the narrator sees Rosaura returning at dawn (roll credits!), she is deeply moved by it. She'd seen this return before, but "it had never felt so personal, as though the birds were celebrating me too, rejoicing that something inside me had also returned." 

As if this was the last thing Severiano needed to teach her, we find out immediately after this that he has left the farm to her. 

Freedom means the ability to roam wherever and not come back. Releasing means being free for a time an then to return. Whichever opening one uses, what the narrator learns is that there is a relationship between true security and true freedom. Without true security--which for the narrator, means a space so safe not even Jesus or Buddha can come into it--one cannot be well enough to venture out. Without returning to that place, our journeys will eventually wear us down. 

I think the theme of "Rosaura at Dawn" is similar to that of Robert Frost's Poem "Birches." While the transcendence of soaring into heaven is dramatic and liberating, it's the homecoming after the transcendence that is the point of the whole thing:

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it's likely to go better.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.