Octavio Paz’s extraordinary tale of "My Life with the Wave" is exactly about what the title states, a man’s life with a body of water. Paz experiments with the norm and takes literature to a higher level (Christ 375). He plays with our imagination from the start and lets us believe the man has stolen "a daughter of the sea." These two beings try to establish a relationship despite their extremely different backgrounds and in so doing take us on a journey of discovery. The way these two characters react to one another represents the friction found in so many types of relationships. This is a love affair doomed from the beginning but destined to be experienced.

Like so many other wonderful tales from Hispanic cultures, this story blends imaginative events with realism. Just as the filmmakers did in "The Milagro Beanfield War" and "Like Water for Chocolate," Paz encourages you to believe in the incredible. You can almost visualize the wave as a self-contained cubicle of water frothing and pumping itself up against invisible walls.

There are impossible passages that the male character takes in this story that you can enjoy through your imagination. He calls them "his troubles" (Paz 852). Events that revolve around this relationship become his secrets which leads him to alienate himself from the life he once may have had. His relationship with the water develops slowly and the water’s strong and passionate character is revealed. It is clear that the man’s troubles are directly related to the existence of the wave in his life.

Paz presents the wave as real. She is immortal. This is proven when she is left behind on the train when her man is arrested for smuggling her onboard. Moved from the tank to the engine room, the wave becomes steam and finds her way to a place not mentioned to wait for her man’s return. She is a survivor and is well established upon her man’s return.

Paz describes the wave’s insatiable appetite for attention and understanding in an almost unimaginable way. He gives the wave a personality all her own as if to point out that no emotions like hers exist in the human realm. Water is in constant motion and becomes riled when attacked by wind and lightening. It reacts and becomes tempestuous and the reader can see where the wave might resemble a human woman. But she is reactionary at best and tries their relationship.

The wave can in some ways be exactly like a woman. As water, she can envelop the man, lapping and devouring him, and then trying to control him with demands and desperation. The man in the story tries to please the wave, but his attempt only frustrates him. There is realism though in the way the man cares for the wave as if she had the feelings of a human woman.

The wave knows little about the man and how to love him. She is a force created by nature as is he, but seems to be genetically programmed and unyielding in the sense that she can be nothing but water. She was created to be a life force for sea life. The man feeds her in many ways and Paz explains this symbolically when he states "The horrible fish he fed her laughed with ferocious smiles" as if to say for all his love he got little in return (Paz 854).

The wave can only serve man as a life-giving source, not as a companion. One thing the wave does try to do to save their relationship is change, but the man, who is such a different being, sees nothing different in her incessant metamorphoses (Paz 855). The wave only proves that she is limited in her ability to grow in the relationship. She can give, but it is nothing the man finds desirable or has a need for.

The man grows weary of ignoring his personal affairs and pursues relations with old friends. He meets an old girlfriend who sees his passion and she is moved by this. The unbelievable becomes understandable by an outside person, but Paz still does not reveal that the wave represents anything other than female water. She never becomes anything else.

As winter arrives the wave and the man come to another season of their relationship. The wave grows uncomfortable and is uncontained in her emotions. From somewhere deep within her depths the intolerance of the situation floats to the top. As a result, the man can no longer take her torment or his own. The wave has become charged with electricity, and carbonizes everything she touches. Her sweet embraces become knotty cords that strangle him (Paz 855).

He leaves her and returns in a month to discover she is still and frozen next to the chimney. By allowing herself to become ice she is in a form that seems to sacrifice itself for the man. In reality it is a compromise. She knows somehow that she does not belong and instead of being sad about it she knows what she must do. From being broken into ice chunks for chilling champagne, to becoming run-off to the sewer, the wave knows her destiny will eventually return her to the sea because that is the nature of water. Since she escaped the train’s water tank, her life has proven to be cyclical. In this way she is self-serving, which is much more like the true character of water.

Paz distances the reader from the norm, arriving in a seemingly alternate universe. He demands that the reader bring the level of comprehension to a higher one (Christ 375). "My Life with the Wave" is a successful experiment in literature that celebrates the ability to view the many combinations of relationships in our world.

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