The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

by Mavis Gallant

  “In the room next to the bathroom. Didn’t you see it? You’ll be comfortable here in the parlor. The couch pulls out. You can stay as long as you like. This is your home. A home for you and Chris.” She said this so stubbornly that I knew some argument must have taken place between her and Martin.

  I intended this room to be my home. There was no question about it in my mind. I had not yet finished high school; I had been taken out for anti-aircraft duty, then sent to the front. The role of adolescents in uniform had been to try to prevent the civilian population from surrendering. We were expected to die in the ruins together. When the women ran pillowcases up flagpoles, we shinnied up to drag them down. We were prepared to hold the line with our 1870 rifles until we saw the American tanks. There had not been tanks in our Karl May adventure stories, and the Americans, finally, were not out of The Last of the Mohicans. I told my mother that I had to go back to high school and then I would apply for a scholarship and take a degree in French. I would become a schoolmaster. French was all I had from my captivity; I might as well use it. I would earn money doing translations.

  That cheered her up. She would not have to ask the ex-tram conductor too many favors. “Translations” and “scholarship” were an exalted form of language, to her. As a schoolmaster, I would have the most respectable job in the family, now that Uncle Gerhard was raising rabbits. “As long as it doesn’t cost him too much,” she said, as if she had to say it and yet was hoping I wouldn’t hear.

  It was not strictly true that all I had got out of my captivity was the ability to speak French. I had also learned to cook, iron, make beds, wait on table, wash floors, polish furniture, plant a vegetable garden, paint shutters. I wanted to help my mother in the kitchen now, but that shocked her. “Rest,” she said, but I did not know what “rest” meant. “I’ve never seen a man drying a glass,” she said, in apology. I wanted to tell her that while the roads and bridges of France were still waiting for someone to rebuild them I had been taught how to make a tomato salad by the druggist’s wife; but I could not guess what the word “France” conveyed to her imagination. I began walking about the apartment. I looked in on a store cupboard, a water closet smelling of carbolic, the bathroom again, then a room containing a high bed, a brown wardrobe, and a table covered with newspapers bearing half a dozen of the flowerless spiky dull green plants my mother had always tended with so much devotion. I shut the door as if on a dark past, and I said to myself, I am free. This is the beginning of life. It is also the start of the good half of a rotten century. Everything ugly and corrupt and vicious is behind us. My thoughts were not exactly in those words, but something like them. I said to myself, This apartment has a musty smell, an old and dirty smell that sinks into clothes. After a time I shall probably smell like the dark parlor. The smell must be in the cushions, in the bed that pulls out, in the lace curtains. It is a smell that creeps into nightclothes. The blankets will be permeated. I thought, I shall get used to the smell, and the smell of burning in the stone outside. The view of ruins will be my view. Every day on my way home from school I shall walk over Elke. I shall get used to the wood staircase, the bellpull, the polished nameplate, the white enamel fuses in the hall—my mother had said, “When you want light in the parlor you give the center fuse in the lower row a half turn.” I looked at a framed drawing of cartoon people with puffy hair. A strong wind had blown their umbrella inside out. They would be part of my view, like the ruins. I took in the ancient gas bracket in the kitchen and the stone sink. My mother, washing glasses without soap, smiled at me, forgetting to hide her teeth. I reexamined the tiled stove in the parlor, the wood and the black briquettes that would be next to my head at night, and the glass-fronted cabinet full of the china ornaments God had selected to survive the Berlin air raids. These would be removed to make way for my books. For Martin Toeppler need not imagine he could count on my pride, or that I would prefer to starve rather than take his charity, or that I was too arrogant to sleep on his dusty sofa. I would wear out his soap, borrow his shirts, spread his butter on my bread. I would hang on Martin like an octopus. He had a dependent now—a ravenous, egocentric, latehomecoming high school adolescent of twenty-one. The old men owed this much to me—the old men in my prison camp who would have sold mother and father for an extra ounce of soup, who had already sold their children for it; the old men who had fouled my idea of women; the old men in the bunkers who had let the girls defend them in Berlin; the old men who had dared to survive.

  The bed that pulled out was sure to be all lumps. I had slept on worse. Would it be wide enough for Chris, too?

  People in the habit of asking themselves silent useless questions look for answers in mirrors. My hair was blond again now that it had dried. I looked less like my idea of my father. I tried to see the reflection of the man who had gone out in the middle of the night and who never came back. You don’t go out alone to tear down election posters in a village where nobody thinks as you do—not unless you want to be stabbed in the back. So the family had said.

  “You were well out of it,” I said to the shadow that floated on the glass panel of the china cabinet, though it would not be my father’s again unless I could catch it unaware.

  I said to myself, It is quieter than France. They keep their radios low.

  In captivity I had never suffered a pain except for the cramps of hunger the first years, which had been replaced by a scratching, morbid anxiety, and the pain of homesickness, which takes you in the stomach and the throat. Now I felt the first of the real pains that were to follow me like little dogs for the rest of my life, perhaps: The first compressed my knee, the second tangled the nerves at the back of my neck. I discovered that my eyes were sensitive and that it hurt to blink.

  This was the hour when, in Brittany, I would begin peeling the potatoes for dinner. I had seen food my mother had never heard of—oysters, and artichokes. My mother had never seen a harbor or a sea.

  My American prisoner had left his immediate life spread on an alien meadow—his parachute, his revolver, his German money. He had strolled into captivity with his hands in his pockets.

  “I know what you are thinking,” said my mother, who was standing behind me. “I know that you are judging me. If you could guess what my life has been—the whole story, not only the last few years—you wouldn’t be hard on me.”

  I turned too slowly to meet her eyes. It was not what I had been thinking. I had forgotten about her, in that sense.

  “No, no, nothing like that,” I said. I still did not touch her. What I had been moving along to in my mind was: Why am I in this place? Who sent me here? Is it a form of justice or injustice? How long does it last?

  “Now we can wait together for Chris,” she said. She seemed young and happy all at once. “Look, Thomas. A new moon. Bow to it three times. Wait—you must have something silver in your hand.” I saw that she was hurrying to finish with this piece of nonsense before Martin came back. She rummaged in the china cabinet and brought out a silver napkin ring—left behind by the vanished tenants, probably. The name on it was “Meta”—no one we knew. “Bow to the moon and hold it and make your wish,” she said. “Quickly.”

  “You first.”

  She wished, I am sure, for my brother. As for me, I wished that I was a few hours younger, in the corridor of a packed train, clutching the top of the open window, my heart hammering as I strained to find the one beloved face.

  SEÑOR PINEDO

  Because there was nothing to separate our rooms but the thinnest of plaster partitions, it sometimes seemed as if the Pinedos—Señor, Señora, and baby José María—and I were really living together. Every morning, we four were roused by the same alarm clock. At night, we all went to bed to the sound of Señora Pinedo’s prayers. She prayed in a bored, sleepy voice, invoking a great many saints of the Spanish calendar, while her husband, a fussy Madrid civil servant, followed along with the responses.

  “San Juan de la Cruz …,” Señora Pinedo would say, between ya
wns. “San Agustín de Cantórbery … Santa Anatolia …”

  “Pray for us!” her husband would command after every name.

  After the prayers, I would hear them winding the clock and muffling door and window against harmful, wayward drafts of the night air. Then, long after all the lights in the pension we lived in had been put out, and against a background of the restless, endless racket of the Madrid night, their voices would sound almost against my ear as they talked about money.

  “I have only one dress for the summer, and it’s too tight,” the Señora would say, into the dark. “José Maria’s doctor came right to the house today. I pretended I was out. ‘I know she never goes out,’ he said. By Monday, we have to pay the interest on the silver crucifix at the Monte de Piedad, or we lose it.” The Monte de Piedad was the municipal pawnshop, a brisk, banklike place into which occasionally vanished not only the crucifix but also José Maria’s silver christening cup and Señora Pinedo’s small radio.

  “I know,” Señor Pinedo would reply, with somewhat less authority than he used in his prayers. Or, “It can’t be helped.”

  Sometimes the baby cried, interrupting the sad little catalogue of complaints. He would cry again in the morning, jolted by the alarm, and I would hear Señor Pinedo swearing to himself as he stumbled about the room getting dressed and preparing José María’s early-morning biberón of dark wheat flour and milk. Señora Pinedo never rose until much later; it was understood that, having given birth to José María a few months before, she had done nearly as much as could be expected of her. Hours after her husband had gone off to his ministry desk and his filing trays, she would inch her way out of bed, groaning a little, and, after examining her face for signs of age (she was twenty-three), complete her toilette by drawing on a flowered cotton wrapper that at night hung on a gilded wall candle bracket, long fallen away from its original use.

  “Is it a nice day?” she would call, knocking on the wall. Our windows faced the same direction, but she liked to be reassured. “Shall I go out? What would you do in my place?” It took several minutes of talking back and forth before the problem could be settled. If the day seemed to lack promise, she turned on the radio and went back to bed. Otherwise, she dragged a chair out to the courtyard balcony that belonged to both our rooms and sat in the sun, plucking her eyebrows and screaming companionably at the neighbors. Since it was well known that crying developed the lungs, José María was usually left indoors, where he howled and whimpered in a crib trimmed with shabby ribbons. His cries, the sound of the radio, and Señor Pinedo’s remarks all came through the wall as if it had been a sieve.

  The Pinedos and I did, in a sense, share a room, for the partition divided what had once been the drawing room of a stately third-floor flat. The wall was designed with scrupulous fairness; I had more space and an extra window, while the Pinedos had the pink marble fireplace, the candle brackets, and some odd lengths of green velvet drapery gone limp with age. Each side had a door leading out to the balcony, and one semicircle of plaster roses on the ceiling, marking the place where a chandelier had hung.

  Like many pensions in Madrid, the flat had once housed a rich middle-class family. The remnants of the family, Señorita Elvira Gómez and her brother, lived in two cramped rooms off the entrance hall. The rest of the house was stuffed with their possessions—cases of tropical birds, fat brocaded footstools, wardrobes with jutting, treacherous feet. Draperies and muslin blinds maintained the regulation pension twilight. In the Pinedos’ room, the atmosphere was particularly dense, for to the mountain of furnishings provided for their comfort they had added all the odds and ends of a larger household. Chairs, tables, and chimneypiece were piled with plates and glasses that were never used, with trinkets and paperweights shaped like charging bulls or Walt Disney gnomes. In one corner stood a rusty camping stove, a relic of Señora Pinedo’s hearty, marching youth. The stove was now used for heating José María’s bottles.

  Added to this visual confusion was the noise. The baby wept tirelessly, but most of the heavy sounds came from the radio, which emitted an unbroken stream of jazz, flamenco, roaring fútbol games, the national anthem, Spanish operetta with odd, muddled overtones of Viennese, and, repeatedly, a singing commercial for headache tablets. The commercial was a particular favorite with Señora Pinedo. “Okal!” she would sing whenever it came on the air. “Okal! Okal es un producto superior!” There were three verses and three choruses, and she sang them all the way through. Sometimes it was too much for Señor Pinedo, and I would hear him pitting his voice against the uproar of his room in a despairing quaver of “Silencio!” He was a thin, worried-looking man, who bore an almost comic resemblance to Salvador Dali. Nevertheless, he was a Spanish husband and father, and his word, by tradition, was law. “Silencio!” he commanded.

  “Viva a tableta Okal!” sang his wife.

  I had arrived at the pension on a spring morning, for a few weeks’ stay. Señorita Elvira warned me about the noise next door, without for a moment proposing that anything might be done about it. Like so many of the people I was to encounter in Madrid, she lived with, and cherished, a galaxy of problems that seemed to trail about her person. The Pinedo radio was one. Another stemmed from the fact that she didn’t report her lodgers to the police and pay the tax required for running a pension. No government inspector ever visited the house, nor, I discovered from the porter downstairs, had anyone so much as asked why so many people came and went from our floor. Still Señorita Elvira lived in a frenzy of nervous apprehension, shared, out of sympathy, by her tenants.

  On my first day, she ushered me in with a rapid succession of warnings, as dolorous and pessimistic as the little booklets of possible mishaps that accompany the sale of English cars. First, if a government inspector asked me questions, I was to say nothing, nothing at all. Then (frantically adjusting her helmet of tortoiseshell hairpins), I was not to use the electric fan in the room, because of the shaky nature of the fuses; I was to sign a little book whenever I made a telephone call; I was not to hang clothes on the balcony railing, because of some incoherent reason that had to do with the neighbors; and, finally, I was not to overtip the maid, who, although she earned the sturdy sum of two hundred pesetas—or five dollars—a month, became so giddy at the sight of money there was no keeping her in the kitchen. All her tenants were distinguished, Señorita Elvira said—muy, muy distinguished—and the most distinguished of all was my neighbor, Señor Pinedo. No matter how noisy I might find my accommodations, I was to remember how distinguished he was, and be consoled.

  Later in the morning, I met my distinguished neighbor’s wife. She was sunning herself on the balcony in nightgown and wrapper, her bare feet propped flat against the warm railing. Her hair was tied back with a grubby ribbon, and on the upper and lower lids of her eyes, which were lovely, she had carefully applied makeup, in the Arab manner.

  “I heard the old one,” she said, evidently meaning Señorita Elvira. “Do you like music? Then you won’t mind the radio. Will you be here long? Did you bring many bags? Do you like children? Do children where you come from cry at night?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Not after a certain age.” It seemed to me a strange sort of introductory conversation. The courtyard, formed by adjoining apartment blocks, was so narrow that women on balconies across the way could hear, and were listening with interest.

  “Some babies are forced not to cry,” said Señora Pinedo. “Many are drugged, to make them sleep. Qué horror!”

  An assenting murmur went around the court. Suddenly maternal, Señora Pinedo went indoors and fetched José María. For the next few minutes—until it bored her—she entertained him by shaking a ring of bells in his face, so that he shrieked with annoyance.

  The courtyard, crisscrossed with lines of washing that dripped onto the cobbles below, seemed to be where the most active life of the apartment houses took place. Children played under the constant rain from the laundry, and the balconies were crowded with women sewing
, preparing vegetables, and even cooking on portable charcoal stoves. The air was cloudy with frying olive oil. In spite of the sun, everyone, and particularly the children, seemed to me inordinately pale—perhaps because they had not yet shaken off the effects of the tiring Castilian winter. Against a wall that made a right angle with ours hung a huge iron block attached to a cable. At irregular intervals it rose and descended, narrowly scraping between the balconies. I asked Señora Pinedo about it finally, and she explained that it was the weight that counterbalanced the elevator in the building around the corner. Sometimes the little boys playing in the courtyard would sit on the block, holding on to the cable from which it was suspended, and ride up as far as the second-floor balconies, where they would scramble off; frequently the elevator would stall before they had traveled any distance. From our third-floor balcony, the children below looked frail and small. I asked Señora Pinedo if the block wasn’t dangerous.

  “It is, without doubt,” she said, but with a great dark-rimmed glance of astonishment; it was clear that this thought had never before entered her head. “But then,” she added, as if primly repeating a lesson, “in Spain we do things our own way.”

  Only after meeting Señor Pinedo could I imagine where she had picked up this petulant and, in that context, meaningless phrase. He arrived at two o’clock for his long lunch-and-siesta break. Señora Pinedo and I were still on the balcony, and José Maria had, miraculously, fallen asleep on his mother’s lap. Señor Pinedo carried out one of Señorita Elvira’s billowing chairs and sat down, looking stiff and formal. He wore a sober, badly cut suit and a large, cheap signet ring, on which was emblazoned the crossed arrows of the Falange. He told me, as if it were important this be made very clear, that he and his wife were living in such crowded quarters only temporarily. They were used to much finer things. I had the impression that they were between apartments.