Adelma

Adelma

                           The written piece, “Adelma”,  is a chilling and frightening look into what Marco Polo portrays life after death would be like. According to the writer, the city, Adelma, is a dark, gloomy place haunted by the living dead in which they live their daily lives knowing that they are damned for sadness, as they “arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known.”
                            Throughout the entire piece, Marco Polo explains how everyone seemed familiar to him. For example, the sailor on dock resembled a deceased man who had soldiered with him and the girl lowering a basket from a balcony was identical to a deceased girl from his village who had killed herself over love. It was as if he was walking in the city of Adelma amongst the already dead, especially when he saw the vegetable vendor as his grandmother. It is self-explanatory to the reader that his grandmother is deceased yet he had recognized her here, in the haunting city of Adelma.                  
                            In conclusion, the best way I pictured Adelma in my mind was seeing it as if it were a bad dream. In your dreams, you encounter faces you have never seen before, yet they are a representation of people that are in your everyday life. Except, he was comparing the living and the dead. These people living in the city of Adelma reminded him of people that had already died which is why  he relates Adelma to an unhappy life after death. I agree with the writer in a sense that when you meet new people in your life, it is very rare to hear someone say, “I have never met anyone like him or her before.” We blame human nature for comparing people that we already know or have known to people we meet for the first time by finding similar traits, qualities, expressions, etc. Nevertheless, Adelma allows the reader to create an imagination of what life after death is by using faces we have once known.