45 pages • 1-hour read
Aura
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During Reading
Reading Questions & Paired Texts
Reading Check and Short Answer Questions on key points are designed for guided reading assignments, in-class review, formative assessment, quizzes, and more.
Reading Check
1. How must Felipe Montero navigate the stairs in Señora Llorente’s house?
2. What unnerving sight in the side garden does Felipe see from the skylight?
3. What is the only decoration in Aura’s bedroom?
4. What does Felipe see Señora Llorente doing through the crack in the door?
5. What action are Aura and Señora Llorente simultaneously doing that alarms Felipe?
6. What does Felipe discover in the photographs?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What strikes Felipe as unusual about the location of the job advertisement? Describe how the exterior setting (the street and surrounding buildings) contrasts with the interior of the location.
2. Describe what duties Señora Llorente asks of Felipe. How does his initial response change upon meeting the woman’s companion?
3. What are Felipe’s working conditions at Señora Llorente’s house? What is his plan for working in the following weeks?
4. What distresses Felipe about Aura’s living conditions? How do Señor Llorente’s memoirs help Felipe draw a conclusion about the truth of the household?
5. Describe Felipe’s evolving physical relationship with Aura. How does his first night with her compare to their second night together?
6. What final discovery does Felipe make about Aura? How does he react in the moment?
Paired Resources
- Director Venmans’s 2016 film is an adaptation of Fuentes’s novel. This entry on IMDb includes a series of still photos from the film. (Content Warning: Potentially sensitive images)
- This resource connects with the themes Identity, Doubling, and Colonialism; Memory And History; and Time.
- Based on these images, how might Venmans bring the mystical elements of Fuentes’s story to the screen? Consider the use of colors, shadows, composition, and expression.
“Carlos Fuentes: The Lost Interview”
- Guernica magazine’s 2006 interview with Fuentes focuses on North American and Latin American politics. (Content Warning: Mature, potentially sensitive content)
- The content of this interview connects with the themes Identity, Doubling, and Colonialism and Memory And History.
- How does Fuentes’s views of politics affect his writing? Are any of his political views apparent in Aura?
“Mexico During the French Intervention, 1862–1867”
- The Getty Research Institute shares a brief overview of France’s colonization of Mexico.
- This information connects with the themes Identity, Doubling, and Colonialism and Memory and History.
- Based on the text as well as the above resource, how does Fuentes explore different colonizing empires’ relationships with Mexico? How does he romanticize them?
Recommended Next Reads
Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes
- Fuentes’s 1975 work is a futuristic tale that combines magical realism, time travel, and the history of colonization.
- Shared themes include Identity, Doubling, and Colonialism; Memory and History; and Time.
- Shared topics include Latin American magical realism, the “El Boom” literary movement, and references to France.
- Terra Nostra on SuperSummary
“A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner
- Faulkner’s 1930 short story centers on the mysterious aging Emily Grierson and her disappeared lover in the postbellum turn-of-the-20th-century American South.
- Shared themes include Memory and History and Time.
- Shared topics include Gothic short stories, aging women and loneliness, and the deterioration of previous generations.
- “A Rose for Emily” on SuperSummary
Reading Questions Answer Key
Reading Check
1. By counting them (Chapter 2)
2. A group of seven cats on fire, yowling and writhing (Chapter 3)
3. “[A]n enormous black Christ” (Chapter 3)
4. Señora Llorente appears to be hugging, biting, and kissing a military tunic and dancing. (Chapter 3)
5. Skinning animals (Chapter 4)
6. Felipe and Aura are in the photographs from the late-19th century. (Chapter 5)
Short Answer
1. Felipe finds it odd that the location of the job is in the district where old colonial style houses have been transformed into commercialized entities such as shops, with the numbers changed and replaced. These shops sharply contrast with the mansion at Donceles 815, which is an old colonial style house; it is dark and only lit with small candles. (Chapter 1)
2. The old woman asks that Felipe help her finish the memoirs of her late husband so they can be published before her death. Given the unusual living arrangements and present environment, Felipe is hesitant in agreeing to live there; however, after meeting her companion, Aura, he is so taken with her appearance that he agrees to the job. (Chapter 1)
3. While Felipe is given freedom with his schedule, he is unable to go outside, as Señora Llorente insists there is no balcony area. As a result, he works in his room, and although he completes the work quickly, he decides he should slow his progress so he can maximize the earnings. His goal of 12,000 pesos will allow him to work on his own academic interests next. (Chapter 3)
4. After seeing Aura and Señora Llorente multiple times, Felipe believes that Aura is trapped in the house, forced to take care of the older woman who is controlling her. After reading Señor Llorente’s memoirs, Felipe believes that Aura is being kept “to perpetuate the illusion of youth and beauty” in Señora Llorente. (Chapters 3-4)
5. Their physical relationship first begins when a figure whom Felipe believes to be Aura visits him in his room and calls him husband. The following night, he visits her in her room, where she washes his feet and offers him a half of a wafer before they engage in intercourse. When he wakes up, he realizes that Señora Llorente was also in the room, most likely watching the entire time, and the two women leave in synchronization. (Chapters 3-4)
6. After learning that Señora Llorente will be gone for the day, Felipe makes arrangements to meet Aura in the old woman’s room. He feels as though in a trance, but makes his way in the room, believing that Aura is in the bed. Upon discovering that the body is Señora Llorente’s, he realizes that he is in love with her. Señora Llorente reveals that Aura is an entity who can be summoned only three days at a time, but that together they will bring her back. (Chapter 5)
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