The part that struck me the most was whenever the narrator, Dr. Xavia, was saying prayers in the morning. “Why are you punishing him, Padre? I asked. I never thought you had such a mean streak.” While I haven’t been to church since I was fourteen, (and it was a Methodist church which meant that they liked to focus on more heartwarming parables and the miracles of the gospel rather than the harsh brutality of the Old Testament) it was still never lost on me that God is vengeful, or maybe- rather was vengeful. Abraham and Issac, the suffering of his people in Egypt, the flood that wiped out most of humanity, and so on and so forth. So for the narrator to make the comment about God having a mean streak almost made me laugh in a morbid sort of way.
Much like the Old Testament, this story was brutal in a way that made me think that there almost wasn’t a reason for the suffering other than to make the characters (maybe the readers as well) appreciate what they have. The doctor made a note about how hands were important, and it makes sense for a doctor; no one would want to have someone who couldn’t use their hands to perform any sort of surgery on them. For Gregorio? This was his whole life, a secretive and mysterious one, that we could assume was all over after having them crushed. Much like the narrator, I couldn’t help but to think how much of a waste it was. It was like I was hoping along with Dr. Xavia that this museum of Gregorio’s was worth it, because otherwise what was the point? For an artist, a person’s hands are their lives.
It was also an interesting detail how the museum had always been unlocked, but it was just that as far- as the narrator knows- no one had gone into it. The more I think about it, the more I wonder about if Gregorio wanted people to enter, or if he knew that everyone thought that he was a quack so why should he worry about people going inside.
It was devastating to see what had happened with Gregorio’s hands. He was practically humiliated and angry that he could no longer do most things by himself without his hands. He could no longer work on his museum the way he wanted to. However, perhaps it was a sign from God that Gregorio’s work was complete, not a punishment like Dr. Xavia had suggested.
Personally, I think the museum was Gregorio’s love letter to Monterojo, the village he grew up in. Even though Gregorio seemed angry and disgruntled at everything in the story, he still loved his home. To be able to convey his love, he decided to make this museum filled with miniatures of the village. Even when his family criticized him for not sharing the lottery money and refusing to let anyone see inside his museum, he still wanted to create something that physically showed his love for the town, to put his mark in the world.
From my understanding of the story, his parents loved him. His sister, I’m sure, loved him in her own way. He was an artist, however, and artists have always been mocked for their career choice. The destruction of his hands was terrible, yes, but if you read the ending, the last image is of him working with his hands on a new project–a testament to the human spirit. It was heartbreaking to read that the door had always been unlocked, and the town simply never bothered to visit him, even out of curiosity, not even the narrator (you recall that this “fact” was the opening of the story). It was Gregorio’s own fault that his hands were crushed; he didn’t let go of the glass, after all. If this accident hadn’t happened, his family and the narrator wouldn’t have known that they were the inspiration for his museum. They wouldn’t have realized their mistakes; I doubt anyone would have visited the museum even after Gregorio opened it. God makes good out of bad.