23 pages • 46 minutes read
Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Corrupting Power of Want
At the beginning of the story, Balthazar is content with what he has, while characters who desire material wealth live unhappily. Although Montiel is not wealthy, he has curated his image to suggest that he is. As Balthazar approaches Montiel’s house, the narrator reveals that “he never felt at ease among the rich. He used to think about them, [...] and he always experienced a feeling of pity” (153). Once he is inside, Balthazar’s feelings of pity turn out to be well-founded. Montiel sleeps lightly to guard his possessions, carries weight on his body that may parallel the objects he hoards, and violently berates his family. García Márquez’s short story suggests the narrator’s distaste for the town’s materialism. While Balthazar is morally elevated the more he gives up, his fall comes suddenly when he begins to desire the external reward of the town’s favor. In the story’s moral ethos, wanting is a corrupting power and humility is the only lasting contentment.
Dr. Octavio Giraldo’s account of his wife’s love for birds is central to his need for Balthazar’s bird cage. “His wife liked birds, and she liked them so much that she hated cats because they could eat them up” (150). Although she despises cats, the subtext suggests that by caging birds, Giraldo’s wife makes herself a worse opponent to a bird than a cat could ever be. Though the Giraldos carry less threat than Montiel and his obsession with power, the doctor’s offer to pay Balthazar a substantial amount of money to give away a commission meant for another customer introduces the corruption of want early in the narrative.
Ultimately, Balthazar becomes enraptured with the same ambition the other characters demonstrate. Ursula represents the life that Balthazar risks losing in his grab at power. At the story’s climax, when Balthazar watches Pepe Montiel throwing a tantrum for the cage, he thinks that in his home, Ursula must be singing an old song and slicing onions in the kitchen. This reinforces the contrast between the subtle pleasures of the quiet and anonymous life that Balthazar values at the start of the story and the discord rampant in the home of the Montiels. After Balthazar’s drunken night and literal fall into the gutter, the image of the cut onions, prepared and waiting on his steak, recurs in the narratives as a symbol of loss. Drunk and penniless, Balthazar thinks he would like to “lay with two women,” while Ursula becomes like the Giraldos’s canaries, unhappy and taken for granted.
Art Versus Enterprise
As the story starts, Balthazar finishes the cage and hangs it under the eaves “from force of habit” (148)—a habit he has had since boyhood. “He did not even know that for some people, the cage he had just made was the most beautiful one in the world. For him, accustomed to making cages since childhood, it had been hardly any more difficult than the others” (148). Balthazar’s cage-making comes from creativity and practice, not economic concerns or external influence. He fills orders for birdcages because it is something he has always enjoyed doing. Balthazar does not think of the cage as art or even that it might fetch the value of sixty pesos. It is Ursula who suggests that he is pricing the cage too low. In the story’s first scene, the central conflict is in Balthazar’s economic naïveté, as Ursula has to remind Balthazar of the sleep he has lost and the carpentry shop (presumably Balthazar’s main source of income) he has closed to complete the cage. It is Doctor Octavio Giraldo who first sees Balthazar’s cage as a work of art that serves an aesthetic purpose. The doctor calls the cage “a flight of the imagination,” and tells Balthazar, “[y]ou would have been an extraordinary architect,” which makes Balthazar blush (150).
The narrator does not confirm whether Balthazar’s cage is as worthy of praise as Giraldo suggests, but Balthazar’s artistic merit comes most surely in his fierce protectiveness of the cage. When Doctor Giraldo tries to purchase the cage, suggesting that he could simply make another for Pepe Montiel, Balthazar is not simply defiant, but genuinely bewildered. He contends that the cage is for Pepe. “‘There’s no proof that this one is the one you were asked to make.’ ‘It’s this very one,’ said Balthazar, confused. ‘That’s why I made it’” (151). For Balthazar, the piece has an intention, and an intended recipient, that cannot be reproduced. He sees the results of his craft as unique, not interchangeable.
When the crowd that follows Balthazar to deliver the cage begins to cheer him on, Balthazar finally begins to understand the importance the crowd has ascribed to the cage. His short-lived fame immediately changes the way he views cage making. Later, at the pool hall, in his revelry he tells the crowd of his new project “of a thousand cages, at sixty pesos each, and then of a million cages, till he had sixty million pesos” (156). At this point, Balthazar is no longer pursuing his art, and is no longer directed by the same “flight of imagination” that inspired the original cage for Pepe. Balthazar has identified the true values of the townspeople. The cage, his passionate act of creativity, had the greatest importance to the crowd when they believed it had made him money. As a result, Balthazar has landed on the idea of mass production, a capitalist economic model that closely resembles Montiel’s line of calculating thought. In this sense, Balthazar’s tragedy comes when he trades his integrity as an artist for the very idea of sixty pesos.
Townspeople as Arbiters of Reputation
In “Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon”, the unnamed townspeople act as the engine that raises up or condemns characters through gossip, aggrandizing, and villainizing, thus creating a second economy. Dr. Giraldo, who hears about the cage through town gossip, says the cage is “better than its reputation” (150). The word “reputation” signals that the way the townspeople think of the cage (and by proxy, of Balthazar) exists on a value scale, and that it can be diminished. In this sense, Balthazar’s financial and social fate is driven by the townspeople and by the narratives their gossip creates.
At no point do the people in the crowd champion the cage or show themselves to understand it the way Giraldo does, but they amplify its worth. They begin to talk about it after Balthazar hangs it beneath the eaves of his house, and when Dr. Giraldo arrives at Balthazar’s house, there are already people crowded around looking at the cage. When they follow Balthazar to take the cage to the Montiels, they have already enhanced its worth with their presence and fanfare. Upon first seeing the cage, Montiel asks what it is, though in passages earlier he has already learned of the cage’s creation and has “remained indifferent to the news of the cage” (152). That Montiel has heard about the cage, but does not recognize it, is a theme in the story. Despite the network of rumors and secondhand accounts, only a few characters ever truly see and understand the cage for what it is. Instead, the townspeople define if through its reputation, just as they do both Balthazar and Montiel.
When the townspeople begin to celebrate with Balthazar after he emerges from the home of the Montiels, they do not remark on the cage, the item of Balthazar’s true passion, or on Balthazar’s act of kindness and integrity in giving the cage away. Instead, they celebrate that Balthazar has taken money from Montiel, a known “cheapskate.” Montiel is cast as a villain for his perceived wealth, but this wealth, like Balthazar’s sixty pesos, does not exist. These qualities are products of the townspeople’s narratives. Though they cheer when they believe Montiel’s will has been overthrown, even this is false. He is not rich, nor is he overthrown. Rather, Balthazar’s lies about Montiel are accepted as truth, and swept up in a self-propagating wave of gossip and rumor. This suggests that the town’s true economy is the trade in all-important reputations—a power bestowed by the townspeople rather than by Montiel.
Unlock all 23 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Gabriel García Márquez
