The Familiar

The refranes are an important plot device but they also symbolize the beauty, magic, and antiquity of Luzia’s Jewish heritage, preserving the language of the Jews who were expelled by edict and who have been forced to hide their spiritual and cultural practices from the Inquisition. When Luzia first heard her aunt read the refranes, “she’d felt the language twist and take on a new shape, heard the melody those words made” (249). She made an iris bloom, the first hint of what she could do with these words—“words that had begun as Spanish and been transformed beneath a foreign sun, words made solid by ink and carried over the sea into her aunt’s waiting hands” (286). The refranes are small sayings but their significance becomes enormous, hinting at the power of the mundane, the small, and the overlooked. They are a symbol of creative power, the source of which is sacred, mysterious, and often inexplicable.

The pomegranate that Santángel gifts to Luzia symbolizes, first, the manifestation of her power. Her ability to sprout the pomegranate seed reveals Luzia’s power to manipulate living things, a step above fixing burned bread and broken glasses. When Víctor pressures her and Luzia’s spell gets out of control, the pomegranate explodes into a tree, revealing a new dimension and maturity to her power, which also can destroy.