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.