Many of the tragedies of Geryon’s life revolve around misunderstandings and failures to connect with others. When Geryon is a young child, his older brother sexually abuses him, threatening him if he says anything to their mother. Because of this forced inability to communicate to Geryon’s mother and his mother’s failure to listen for signs of abuse, Geryon’s brother is allowed to continue this abusive behavior. The trauma of this experience, in turn, instills in Geryon a mistrust of others and an unwillingness to express his feelings. When Geryon meets Herakles, a charismatic, confident older boy, he falls deeply in love with him. However, he keeps his authentic feelings for Herakles hidden, and their short-lived relationship comes to be defined by the things they leave unsaid and the things they fail to hear in each other. When Geryon ruminates on the relationship years later upon unexpectedly reuniting with Herakles, he realizes that they had never really known each other: he had never known what Herakles was thinking, and “What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked.” The novel suggests that failures of communication are central to the human condition, as people are fundamentally separate from one other, unable to experience the same consciousness. But while separate consciousnesses can lead to feelings of misunderstanding and alienation, they also instill a drive to be understood, which ultimately imbues life with meaning. Geryon comes across this idea in a philosophy book he reads in a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The book speaks of never being able to tell what the color red means to another person, framing this conundrum as a “mystery,” without which a person would “go mad.” The “mystery” of separate consciousness necessitates a quest for self-expression that draws people to each other in an effort to communicate and narrow the distance between them.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Communication and Mystery ThemeTracker
Communication and Mystery Quotes in Autobiography of Red
Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.
Once she said the meaning
it would stay.
Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.
“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless
within to the edge
of what can be loved.
What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the lava
has just reached his window?
he asked. I think you are confusing subject and object, she said.
Very likely, said Geryon.
All your designs are about captivity, it depresses me.
I am a drop of gold he would say
I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
How do you think it feels
growing up in a house full
of empty fruit bowls? His voice was high.
His eyes met hers and they began
to laugh. They laughed
until tears ran down. Then they sat quiet. Drifted back
to opposite walls.
Geryon’s life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste.
Yellow? said Geryon and he was thinking Yellow! Yellow! Even in dreams
he doesn’t know me at all! Yellow!
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
There is no person without a world.
It was not the fear of ridicule,
to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life,
but this blank desertion of his own mind
that threw him into despair.
[…] Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction.
Just a meaning that we
impose upon motion.
It is
because of her I began to notice moments of death. Children make you see distances.
You can’t be alive and think about nothing.
“…I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.”
I’m a master of monsters aren’t I?
What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them
developed a dangerous cloud.
A volcano is not a mountain like others. Raising a camera to one’s face has effects
no one can calculate in advance.
There is one thing I want from you.
Tell me.
Want to see you use those wings.
This is for Ancash, he calls to the earth diminishing below. This is a memory of our
beauty.
We are amazing beings,
Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back.
