The Echo (short story)

The story is written in the third-person limited Omniscient, where the focal character is Aileen. The setting is in a village near Barranquilla, Colombia. Aileen is attending college near Northampton, Massachusetts (presumably Smith College). Her mother, who is estranged from Aileen's father, has moved back to the large family properties in tropical Colombia, staffed by local servants. She invites Aileen to visit during the summer school break. The mother's companion, Prue, lives on the estate, and though never made explicit to Aileen, they are lesbian lovers. Prue, an artisan, works in her studio. The mother is preoccupied with an architectural home improvement, a cantilevered wing that overhangs precariously over a deep gorge adjacent to the house. The two women are self-absorbed in their comfortable lifestyles and relationship. In the invitation note, Aileen's mother engages in mild recriminations, disparaging her for earlier descriptions of Prue as "peculiar" and for "not liking her much." The note is a cheerful and chatty inventory of the operations on the estate, with fulsome praise for Prue. The missive lacks any expression of intimacy towards her daughter.

Aileen lands at the Barranquilla airport, expecting the two women to meet her. She finally finds them at a local cantina. When Aileen sprains her ankle entering the establishment, she is taken to the estate and convalesces for the next few days.

Several encounters between Prue and Aileen reveal that Prue resents the girl's visit. Supercilious and hostile toward the younger woman, her bullying is met with passive incredulity by Aileen. The mother interviews Aileen, expressing hurt and dismay that she is "not getting on very well with Prue." When the mother terms her daughter as merely a "guest", Aileen responds that Prue "is a maniac." The contretemps deepens the estrangement between mother and daughter.

Aileen, enthralled by the beauty of the tropical landscape, takes an early morning walk across the nearby river and wanders into a poor, rural hamlet. She is approached by a young man who beckons to her. Leaning forward, he spits a mouthful of water in her face. Aileen, outraged, flings a stone at the perpetrator as he retreats into his hut; a scream is heard.

When she returns to the house, Prue informs her that her mother, not finding her in bed, has "had a fit" and savagely berates her for causing the couple anxiety. The mother determines that Aileen has upset the harmony of the household and is told she must depart. The climax occurs in a final confrontation between Aileen and Prue the following day. As the girl prepares to leave, the older woman begins to harass her verbally. In a last parting shot, she flicks water in Aileen's face: "the reaction was instantaneous." Aileen, furious and humiliated, begins to pummel Prue with her fists, then kicks her as she falls to the floor, uttering "the greatest scream of her life." Aileen departs on her journey towards Barranquilla, affecting her liberation from her mother and Prue.

Literary critic Allen Hibbard praises "The Echo" for its "masterful regulation of the dramatic pace" and observes, "Bowles never tells how to feel about a story. Moral ambiguities are displayed without authorial intervention. It is up to us to think through a story's implications and meaning."^[2]

Author Jane Bowles remarked on "The Echo' in a letter to her spouse Bowles:

The tension as usual is terrific. It seems like an innocent enough little story when it begins and the way in which you had shaded it becomes steadily more somber, almost as imperceptibly to the reader as to the girl herself, is, I should say, masterful. I read it twice because I could not quite encompass it.^[3]