Azucena’s plight is based on the real-life entrapment of a 13-year-old girl named Omayra Sánchez Garzón. The 1985 eruption of the Colombian Nevado del Ruiz volcano triggered calamitous mudflow, destroying the nearby town where Omayra lived with her family. The young girl became trapped by her home’s concrete, with her deceased aunt’s arms wrapped around her legs underwater; she became a media mainstay during news coverage of the tragedy, even as the disorganization and inefficiency of the Colombian government’s rescue response hastened her death. Azucena suffers an identical fate, and Allende’s fictionalization of these events reveals that though the caprices of the natural world—in this case a volcanic eruption—can prove cruel, human action and inaction often complicate, and sometimes exacerbate, the situation.

In the story’s opening pages, Allende deeply and intentionally personifies the earth. It is its “subterranean sob” that is ignored; its “moaning” that goes unheeded; and, eventually, its “unfathomable meters of telluric vomit” that entomb mountain towns (Paragraph 2). Such personification undermines the idea that the natural world and the human world are diametrically opposed, instead allying them through visceral feeling and sensation. This physical concordance should spawn empathy, as ideally, humans’ intuitive understanding of our own bodily pains would make us wish to prevent another entity from experiencing anything similar. However, this is not what happens in Allende’s story. The evocative descriptions of the earth’s pain suggest a sickness gone purposefully untreated, recasting humanity’s indifference towards the volcano’s warning signs as deliberate ill will. More specifically, it’s the government’s inaction in these pre-eruption days that dooms the mountain’s inhabitants. Though Allende’s frequent use of nonspecific nouns like “no one” and “towns” suggests that the geologists’ warnings of the impending disaster go ignored by all, the state, as the one institution with the ability to launch extensive preparation campaigns, is uniquely culpable.

The disregard of expert opinion and the subsequent mudflow lead to Azucena’s confinement. The varying reactions of the media at large, the narrator, and Rolf Carlé speak to the human tendency to project our personal preoccupations onto tragedy, which can itself be a horror. For the narrator, Rolf’s loyalty to Azucena allows her to see him in a rare state of helplessness. This vulnerability results in an expanded intimacy for her and Rolf, and even her compassion for Azucena is an arena for experiencing this emotional closeness: “[T]he child’s every suffering hurt me as it did him; I felt his frustration” (Paragraph 16). The heavily equipped TV and movie teams who swarm the site are more obviously dehumanizing and exploitative, turning Azucena into a spectacle: a visual exhibit of the gravity of this disaster. Even Rolf does not fully recognize Azucena’s humanity. Though he is emotionally affected by the time he spends with the young girl and puts forth concerted effort to save her, her plight leads him to reflect on his traumatic past, and he eventually realizes that “he could not continue to escape his past; he was Azucena; he was buried in the clayed mud” (Paragraph 22). That he turns Azucena’s literal situation into a metaphor for his inner struggles—while she is suffering through the situation in real-time, no less—not only extends the aspect of spectacle that surrounds Azucena’s character but completes it. Here, the story shows the very process through which one person (in this case, Rolf) imposes their search for personal meaning and healing onto another.

The title of “And of Clay Are We Created” addresses a cyclical mortality. It references a creation myth, shared by many cultures, that posits that humans were created from clay and are thus an outgrowth of the natural world. The scene of Azucena’s sinking, the slow descent that turns her to “a flower in the mud” (Paragraph 24), can be read as a return to these origins—a completion of a birth-death cycle. Nevertheless, there is an irony to the inevitability the title implies. Azucena’s death is avoidable, and it is precisely this that makes it tragic. A latticework of culpability contributes to the girl’s fate and raises a number of what-ifs: What if the government had heeded the geologists and put forth more effort to convince villagers of the present danger? What if the villagers had gotten out in time? What if Rolf had received his pump as soon as he requested it?