El árbol de oro

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El árbol de oro (The Tree of Gold) is a short story by Ana Maria Matute, in Spanish. It is part of her collection of short stories, set in the Spanish countryside, called "Historias de Artamila"(1961). The story is set during or shortly after the Spanish Civil War.

[edit] Plot summary

The story is written in first person. The protagonist of the story is a young girl (Matute) who befriends a schoolboy named Ivo. The story is set in the schoolhouse of a small town during one autumn when she attended the country school. Many of the children envy Ivo. He is a teacher's pet and always retrieves the student's textbooks from a small tower in the corner of the schoolhouse each morning and returns them there each afternoon. He relates to the narrator that when he looks through a crack in the wall of the tower he sees a tree made entirely of gold. He continues telling the narrator about the tree often over a long period of time. One day Ivo has fallen sick and does not come to class, allowing another boy to retrieve the books. When the narrator asks this boy if he saw the golden tree he scoffs at her. Later the narrator gets a chance to retrieve and to return the books from the tower. When she looks through the crack she sees only normal countryside but no tree. Eventually she moves back to the city where she came from and forgets about Ivo and the golden tree. Years later she returns to the same small town and is walking past a cemetery in which she sees a large tree illuminated by a sunset, causing it appear to be made of gold. She enters the cemetery and at the base of the tree finds the grave of Ivo, who had died at the age of ten years. The narrator finds the irony of the tree and the grave to be joyful.