there is a message that love is transient and illusory, that is the beginning of a journey of self-discovery, not the end". To what extent is this true for Eliza and Rose?.
Eliza met Joaquin Andieta and in this moment she fell in love with him. She dreamed about him, he was perfect. He appeared in her dreams every night. It became to be an obsession. Love is illusory, "she came to have such mastery of this art that her illusory lover appeared in bodily form, she could touch him, smell him, and heard his voice". In this part of the book, we can see, that the sentence "love is illusory" becomes to be true. Eliza did not know Joaquin very, but she had exalted him so much in her dreams that she was meeting somebody who did not exist.
At first all was perfect. She thought that love between them was romantic and sincere. It was romantic and passionate, but not sincere. This love did not last very long. Joaquin went to California to look for gold, and he never came back to Eliza. She spent a big part of her life looking for him, but it was impossible to find him. Eliza traveled through California with the hope to see him. She did not realize that the Joaquin of her dreams did not exist. .
One of the reasons of the search was that Eliza was pregnant of Joaquin, but in her travels, she lost the child. Even so, she wanted to find him. Never found him. She only found a boy whose name was similar to Joaquin. She found a dead boy who had been a killer and a bandit in his life. .
I think that Eliza realized her big mistake when she found Joaquin dead and different. He was not her lover, she had spent a lot of years looking for a illusory love. Joaquin Andieta did not exist. He only existed in her dreams. For this reason, love is illusory. People need to have this kind of love, but only a few, achieve it.
Love is transient. Transient mean, that it has an ending. Eliza had love for a short time. Her love had a beginning and an end.