"The light in his head grew brighter."
Before the reader finds out what Fausto’s new idea for raising money to buy the guitar actually, an accessible metaphor is used to describe the processing inside his brain. There is no actual light inside there, of course, any more than there is a brightly bulb that appears over a person’s head at that moment of inspiration. The additional insight of Fausto’s vague thinking—“It just might work”—is the verbal equivalent of this visual metaphor. The simplicity of language here is not just due to the story being aimed at a juvenile audience; it is also a reflection of the simplicity of Fausto’s devious nature. He’s just not that bad a guy.
"a television as large as the front window at home"
This simile also serves to underscore how the guilt Fausto experiences over his sin is far out of proportion to the level of immorality of the sin itself. Fausto is very naïve about the relative class distinctions of his own hometown, much less the world. He is overly impressed by the clear wealth of the owners of the dog when the facts as presented through his consciousness paints a portrait of fairly ordinary middle-class lifestyle. What is especially fascinating about this comparison is that there is genuinely useful data for the reader to make any accurate statement about the size of the TV. We don’t know how big the windows of his house, but one can assume they are not exorbitant so the best possible guess is that they are of average size, meaning the large television of his seemingly wealthy couple was probably just a 27 inch whose seemingly large bulk was mostly surrounding console. The likelihood against the dog’s owners actually having anything so extravagant as a television as large picture window is undercut by the almost immediately appearance of the wife coming from the kitchen wiping her hands with a dish towel, thus juxtaposing the reality of the situation with Fausto’s own uninformed perspective.
The Idea of the Guitar
The idea of the guitar, and not the actual instrument he finally receives, is the story driving metaphor. That idea is distinct from the real thing because the guitar as an idea carries great metaphorical weight outside the story. It represents the dream of one day being able to transform the lifestyle of everyone in the house. If he can the guitar and learn to play it and become good enough to join or form a band which in turn becomes successful to get on American Bandstand one day, it will mean the end of living in the poor section of town. It will be finding out that the nice things inside the home where Roger lives is not a genuine example of how rich people live.
The Guitarron
By contrast, the actual instrument he receives works as a metaphor for something completely different. The idea of the guitar symbolizes all those thing he doesn’t know about the future and what could happen; the guitarron is a metaphor for all those things that have actually happened that he doesn’t know about. Early on, Fausto rushes to judgment about his family when he assumes they will be against the entire idea of buying a guitar and that they hate rock music. If he had already known about his family’s past and was a little more attentive to its actual culture rather than media representations of it, he would likely have already known about what the prize gathering dust in his grandfather’s garage and could have saved himself much wasted effort as well as tortuous night of guilt eating away at this conscience. It is not by coincidence by the instrument he receives is a type of guitar uniquely related to his Latin culture.
The Turnover
The pastry that the wife offers Fausto is another metaphorical brick in the wall constructing just how very innocent Fausto is despite the heavy weight of criminality he places upon relatively harmless sin. The turnover treat connects strongly to the guitarron since it is called an empanada which is a means of preparation strongly tied to the Fausto’s own cultural heritage. Thus the turnover become yet another symbol of his ignorance of his own cultural identity despite being inspired to pursue a guitar precisely because of seeing a Latino rock band on TV. The empanada also works a metaphorical foreshadowing: exposure to the empanada and the gift of the guitarron suggest that Fausto is about turn over a new leaf and begin to explore his own cultural past a little more intently.
