AND OF CLAY WERE WE CREATED

Summary

The story opens abruptly, with a startling line: "They discovered the girl's head protruding from the mudpit, eyes wide open, calling soundlessly." As soon becomes clear, the girl is thirteen-year-old Azucena, one of thousands of villagers who lived on the slopes of a mountain in Latin America. A volcanic eruption has created enough heat to melt the ice on the mountain slopes, leading in turn to tremendous mudslides that have buried entire towns and killed more than twenty thousand people. The narrator, who is never named, watches pictures of the devastation on the television news, described by her lover, Rolf Carle, the first television reporter on the scene.

Carlé and his assistant film the first attempts to rescue the girl, but when volunteers are unable to throw a rope to her, he wades up to his waist in the mud to tie the rope under her arms himself. He smiles a charming smile and assures her that she will soon be out. But when the volunteers begin to pull on the rope, Azucena screams in pain; the mud has created such a strong suction around her that she cannot be pulled free. She can feel some kind of debris holding her legs, and while others suggest that it must be the rubble from her crushed house, she insists that it is the bodies of her dead brothers and sisters.

The narrator has watched Carle countless times as he has covered important stories, and she has always admired his ability to be strong and detached in the face of terrible events. This time, however, she can tell by watching his eyes and hearing his voice that his objectivity is slipping, and that he is responding emotionally to Azucena. The catch in his voice is one she has never heard before. Abandoning his task as a reporter, Carlé tries everything he can think of to get the girl free, but with no success. He manages to get a tire slipped under her shoulders so that she will not slip down any further in the mud. Finally he radios for a pump, with which he could drain the water around the girl, but none will be available until the next day. He stays beside the girl all night, giving her sips of coffee to warm her and telling her entertaining stories of his adventures to keep her calm.

Back in the city, the narrator keeps her watch, moving to the television station so that she can see Carlé's satellite transmissions unedited. She phones all of the important government and business people she can think of to try to locate a pump and makes appeals on radio and television, but to no avail. Watching the screen, she feels Carle's pain and frustration, and weeps for the girl. She sees that Carle has reached a kind of tiredness he has never reached before, and that he has "completely forgotten the camera."

Meanwhile, the story has been picked up by other news agencies, and a crowd of reporters and cameras has surrounded Azucena and Carle, sending pictures of the girl to millions of people around the world. A doctor briefly examines the girl, and a priest blesses her, but no one in the crowd can do anything to help her. Although the area is littered with generators and lights and wires and other technical equipment for the television crews, no one can locate a pump.

As the second day closes, Azucena and Carlé are still together, talking quietly and praying. Carlé has run out of stories of his own, and turns first to the stories the narrator has told him, and then to Austrian folk songs he learned as a child. While he continues to talk to the girl, he remembers scenes from his youth that he has repressed for decades: burying bodies at a concentration camp, his father's abuse, his retarded sister's fear, his mother's humiliation. He does not share these memories with the girl, but turns them over in his mind and examines them as he has never done before. He realizes that like Azucena he is trapped, and that his brave adventures have been a way to escape his fear. His experience with the girl has exposed him to feelings he has pushed aside, and he is closer to her emotionally than he has ever been to anyone else.

On the morning of the third day, Azucena andCarlé are both cold, hungry, and exhausted. The president of the Republic comes to be filmed with the girl. He praises the girl for being "an example to the nation" and promises to personally send a pump. But it is too late. As she watches on the screen, the narrator can tell the precise moment when the girl and the reporter give up hoping for a rescue, the moment that they accept the inevitability of death. For both, it is a moment of peace; they stop struggling. The narrator has managed to locate a pump and arranged a way to ship it, but on the third night the girl dies. Carlé takes the tire away from under her arms, and she slips down under the mud.

The last scene of the story occurs afterCarlé has returned home. For some time he has not worked, but he has watched the film of himself and Azucena countless times, wondering what he might have done to help her. The narrator addresses him directly, assuring him that the wounds opened by his experience with the girl will heal in time.

Source: http://www.enotes.com/clay-are

Characters:
1. Azucena (Lily) - Protagonist character.

2. Rolf Carlé - Round character since a lot of traits about him were given by the author; his past life was also being clearly explained. .

3. Narrator -  Rolf's girlfriend expresses and states the thoughts and feelings Rolfe and Azucena very accurately. She states every detail that occurs at the place where Azucena and Rolfe are at as if she were there. 

4. Republic President - Indifferent to what happened.

5. Press - Just looking to bring the news.

Time:
Wednesday of a November. Tree days and two nights.

Place:
This story takes place at the city of which is located at the slope of an active volcano that suffered the natural disaster which is the mudslide; it occurs in modern time.

Plot:
The plots in "And of Clay We Are Created" often revolve around issues of borders, mixing, and change. The beginning of the story describes Azucena's situation. The following paragraph is a description of how the volcano erupted. The plot switches from Azucena surrounded by clay, to the volcano eruption and to the narrator watching the television screen. The story changes its time period when Rolfe reminisces about his past.

Themes:
That the forces of nature are far much powerful that human nature. Its shown when she explains that Azucena (Lily) was trapped in the mud pit and they all tried with everything they could, but no one could get her out.

People are indifferent to situations outside. What is ironic about this story is that a lot of technologies were being used to transmit the sound and the picture of Azuzena but her request in having just a simple pump failed.

Conflict:
Person Vs Nature
The central conflict of this story is between a little girl named Azuzena who tried to survive the horrific natural disaster which is the mudslide.

Person Vs Himself
The other main conflict of this story is Rolf Carle against his undesired young memories.

Climax:
Azucena at the end of having endured three days floating in the mud, the mud full of corpses with a tire, the child gives up and she dies and Carlé removes the tire that had been holding her up, and her body slips beneath the mud.

Denouement:
The Narrator concludes: "You are back with me, but you are not the same man. I often accompany you to the station, and we watch the videos of Azucena again; you study them intently, looking for something you could have done to save her, something you did not think of in time. Or maybe you study them to see yourself as if in a mirror, naked. Your cameras lie forgotten in a closet; you do not write or sing; you sit long hours before the window, staring at the mountains. Besides you, I wait for you to complete the voyage into yourself, for the old wounds to heal. I know that when you return from your nightmares, we shall again walk hand in hand, as before".

Title:
And of clay we were created
For me it means that the nature created man and just as in the same way that we created us, nature can destroy us.

Criticism:
"And of Clay Are We Created" was inspired by the 1985 avalanche in Colombia that buried a village in mud. Among those trapped was Omaira Sánchez, a thirteen-year-old girl who became the focus of attention of news-hungry photographers, journalists and television cameras that fixed their curious and helpless eyes on the girl who kept her faith in life as she bravely met her death. In that horrid audience of onlookers, there was one man, a reporter, who made the decision to stop observing Omaira from the lens of his camera and lay down in the mud to offer her what comfort he could as her heart and lungs collapsed.

About Isabel Allende:

Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru. Her Chilean diplomat father and her mother divorced and she lived with her mother and grandparents. She worked first as a secretary and then as a journalist in print, on television and in movie documentaries.

After the overthrow and assassination in 1973 of her uncle, Salvador Allende, president of Chile, Isabel Allende and her husband and children left for safety in Venezuela.

It was in her exile that she began to write The House of the Spirits, her first novel, which was based on her own family and the politics of Chile.

She continued to produce novels based in part on her own experience, often focusing on the experience of women, weaving myth and realism together. She has lectured and done extensive book tours, and has taught literature at colleges in Virginia, New Jersey and California.

Her 1995 work, Paula, is based on the extended coma and death of her daughter in 1992.

She was divorced from her first husband, Miguel Frías, an engineer. In 1988, she married William Gordon, a lawyer.