Black Flowers of Fate
Kiss of the Spider Woman“Black Flowers of Fate” is the central refrain of a bolero composed by a reporter for a retired star. The song gives voice to his longing after their quarrel, then returns as a tangible message that she reads after violence has separated them again. Its promise of love and reunion is shadowed by the very struggle over freedom and possession that has defined their relationship.
Composition and setting
The reporter composes the song in a bar after the star refuses his demand that she leave with him. He has tried to persuade her to escape the wealthy magnate who keeps her confined; when she asks for time, he insists that the choice must be made immediately. She rejects his attempt to decide for her, declaring that she is not a belonging for men to manipulate. After leaving, he drinks and begins making up lyrics to the slow, sad tropical song associated with their earlier dance at the Mardi Gras of Veracruz.
The lyrics address the woman as a prisoner in solitude, whose heart still whispers love. They dwell on the pain of her eyes and smile, and on lips that once lied; the singer wonders whether those lips could deceive him again. The refrain names the forces keeping the lovers apart as “cruelly keep us apart,” before imagining the day when she will be “mine forever, mine alone.” The song therefore combines tenderness and yearning with a claim of exclusive possession, a tension sharpened by the woman’s recent insistence on her independence.
The lyrics become a message
The reporter first sings the bolero in the bar, then hides the lyrics in his desk rather than allowing the newspaper’s story about the star to be published. When he later visits her home, he finds her with the magnate and, hurt by the sight, says that he wants them to forget him. He leaves the written song behind. The magnate demands to know what she feels for the reporter; she denies that he means anything to her, but refuses to give the magnate his name, fearing that the question may lead to retaliation.
The magnate strikes her and leaves her on the floor. Afterward, she sees the paper on a hassock, picks it up, and reads the lines about the lovers being cruelly kept apart and one day being together. She presses the crumpled sheet to her heart. The lyrics have shifted from a private performance into a physical token: although the reporter is absent, his words remain with her, and her response reveals the love she had just tried to conceal.
A song inside a story
The bolero is presented through Molina’s narration to Valentin. After recounting the lyrics, Molina asks whether Valentin remembers the bolero; Valentin says he does not and asks him to continue. That exchange makes the song part of the novel’s larger act of storytelling: it is not simply performed within the embedded romance, but retold to another listener, who can receive the story without recognizing the particular song.
The song’s refrain carries a melodramatic promise of permanence, but the plot has already made clear how fragile such promises are. The reporter’s hope that the star will be his alone sits uneasily beside her refusal to be treated as property, while the written lyrics survive their separation as both declaration and keepsake. Their emotional force comes from that contradiction: the song imagines love overcoming the distance between them, yet its language also repeats the possessive impulse that helped create the distance.
