Daguio’s short story is about a woman who was waiting for the man who went away to get a priest for them to be married. The narrator tells us that the woman did not always use to look out of the window; instead she used to stand at the edge of a hill, waiting for her beloved’s return, as their child inside her continued to grow. After a long while, the season around her began to change, and she finally stopped waiting for him on the hill. She went inside the house which the man had built for her, but still left unfinished, and watched from one of its windows, still, his return. There were instances also when it was raining and she decided to step out of the house. She played in the rain as some of the girls and women of the village followed her in the rain. They sai d, “Marita Marita mia!” and hoped that she would stop playing in the rain because she might fall sick. Finally, one night, her child was born. The villagers thought that the child would save her from her insanity, but it was no use, Marita continued to look out of the window, still waiting for her beloved to come back. A week later, the villagers found out that she had disappeared along with her infant child who was later on found in a big jar, “buried in soft dark soil beside a path.” The baby was then ado pted by a farmer and his wife who said that they saw Marita crying over the broken pieces of the jar which she used to bury her child in. Later on, the villagers also speculated that the man w hom Marita was waiting for must’ve drowned, in the floodwaters perhaps because of the rainy season. Years after, an old man with gray hair came to town, and visited the house that Marita had once lived in. The villagers sent the owner of the house, an eighteen year-old boy, to check up on the old man who seemed to have started living in the house. Upon meeting him, it dawned upon the boy that the old man must be his father. Daguio’s story ends in a first person POV, in which the boy is revealed to be the narrator of the story. In the last few paragraphs, he confesses that he had killed the old man in the midst of while he was singing a love song. Now he was in prison awaiting his trial.
I would like to point out a few symbolisms
that I could conclude out of Daguio’s The Woman Who Looked Out of the Window. First, the scene in the beginning of the story wherein Marita’s hair loosened in the wind as she stood waiting on top of the hill – she fixes her hair in place, but then, the wind loosens it one more time and she doesn’t mind it at all. Perhaps this scene is trying to reflect her behavior towards the man she is waiting for – at first, she still has her sanity, her “poise,” but later on she loses it and she starts becoming restless because of the strong “wind” or circumstance that has come her way. Next symbol is the setting of the rainy season that can directly reflect the torrent of emotions that has overcome Marita after waiting for so long. Another one can be seen in this line – “Sometimes she caressed her body with her hands.” Being pregnant, this could mean that Marita was caressing the child in her womb for comfort or for that feeling of her being a ‘soon-to-be-mom.’ But on a sexual assessment, this scene can be implied as Marita masturbating to fill the absence of the lust and love t hat she wanted to feel from her man.
I personally think that Daguio’s way of presenting the story is good – especially when the story shifts in the end part from 3rd person POV to 1st, revealing that the narrator was the child of Marita and the old man whom he later kills as revenge of some sort, or a burst of emotions. The scene where the narrator discusses the murder of his own father ‘in the middle of his love song,’ perhaps does not literally translate into a singing of an actual love son g – rather, this love song is the old man’s words or conversation which he tries to use in order to reach out to his son. But unfortunately, due to his absence, he was found hard to be accepted by his son.
