Perhaps one of the hardest things to live with is the life we imagine we might have had. We can spend years looking at someone else and wondering what they were given that we were not — beauty, love, opportunity, happiness. And over time, that comparison can become its own kind of prison. José Emilio Pacheco’s “La Zarpa,” or “The Claw,” is a haunting story about what happens when envy takes hold of a life and refuses to let go.
The idea is profound not because it’s complicated, but because it resonates. It’s profundity lies in that resonance. It gives language to something deeply human that most of us recognize but rarely articulate.
Pacheco was one of Mexico’s most important writers of the 20th century — a poet, novelist, essayist and translator whose work often looked closely at memory, childhood, aging and the ways people make sense of their own lives. In “The Claw,” he turns his attention to something much more ordinary — and perhaps much more dangerous: envy.
At the center of the story are two women whose lives become intertwined from childhood. One is beautiful. The other is not. One seems to receive all the things the world has to offer — attention, affection, opportunity — while the other watches from the margins.
And what begins as a childhood comparison becomes something darker over time –a very long time.
What makes this story so compelling is that Pacheco doesn't give us a simple villain. Instead, he asks us to sit with an uncomfortable question: What happens when we spend our lives measuring ourselves against someone else? When admiration becomes resentment, and resentment becomes a way of seeing the world?
“The Claw” is also a story about the stories we tell ourselves. We can spend decades building an explanation for why our lives turned out the way they did — and sometimes that explanation becomes more powerful than the truth.
So we’ll have to talk about the unreliable narrator here. But it’s an idea that serves our discussion here. The narrator may be unreliable not because she deliberately deceives us, but because she has become the author of her own version of the past.
There’s something almost fairy-tale-like about the story, but its emotional territory is painfully familiar. Most of us have known envy. Most of us have compared ourselves to someone else. And most of us, at one time or another, have wondered what our lives might have looked like if we had been given someone else’s face, someone else’s luck, someone else’s life.
That’s where Pacheco’s claw finds us.
Today, on The Lonely Voice, “La Zarpa,” or “The Claw,” by José Emilio Pacheco.
The hosts discuss the translation by Francisco Fenton.
