The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

by Mavis Gallant

  “Yes, we’ve been here four and a half years,” said Señora Pinedo, cheerfully destroying the impression. “We were married and came right here. My trousseau linen is in a big box under the bed.”

  “But you are not to suppose from this that there is a housing problem in Spain,” said Señor Pinedo. “On the contrary, our urban building program is one of the most advanced in Europe. We are ahead of England. We are ahead of France.”

  “Then why don’t we have a nice little house?” his wife interrupted dreamily. “Or an apartment? I would like a salon, a dining room, three bedrooms, a balcony for flowers, and a terrace for the laundry. In my uncle’s house, in San Sebastián, the maids have their own bathroom.”

  “If you are interested,” said Señor Pinedo to me, “I could bring you some interesting figures from the Ministry of Housing.”

  “The maids have their own bathtub,” said Señora Pinedo, bouncing José Maria. “How many people in Madrid can say the same? Twice every month, they have their own hot water.”

  “I will bring you the housing figures this evening,” Señor Pinedo promised. He rose, hurried his wife indoors before she could tell me anything more about the maids in San Sebastián, and bowed in the most ceremonious manner, as if we would not be meeting a few moments later in the dining room.

  That evening, he did indeed bring home from his office a thick booklet that bore the imprint of the Ministry of Housing. It contained pictures of a workers’ housing project in Seville, and showed smiling factory hands moving into their new quarters. The next day, there was something else—a chart illustrating the drop in infant mortality. And after that came a steady flow of pamphlets and graphs, covering milk production, the exporting of olive oil, the number of miles of railroad track constructed per year, the improved lot of agricultural workers. With a triumphant smile, as if to say, “Aha! Here’s something you didn’t know!” Señor Pinedo would present me with some new document, open it, and show me photographs of a soup kitchen for nursing mothers or of tubercular children at a summer camp.

  The Pinedos and I were not, of course, the only tenants of Señorita Elvira’s flat. Apart from the tourists, the honeymooning couples from the province, and the commercial travelers, there was a permanent core of lodgers, some of whom, although young, appeared to have lived there for years. These included a bank clerk, a student from Zaragoza, a civil engineer, a bullfighters’ impresario, and a former university instructor of Spanish literature, who, having taken quite the wrong stand during the Civil War—he had been neutral—now dispensed hand lotion and aspirin in a drugstore on the Calle del Carmen. There was also the inevitable Englishwoman, one of the queer Mad Megs who seem to have been born and bred for pension life. This one, on hearing me speak English in the dining room, looked at me with undisguised loathing, picked up knife, fork, plate, and wineglass, and removed herself to the far corner of the room; the maid followed with the Englishwoman’s own private assortment of mineral water, digestive pills, Keen’s mustard, and English chop sauce.

  All these people, with the exception of the Englishwoman, seemed to need as much instruction as I did in the good works performed by the state. Every new bulletin published by the Ministry of Propaganda was fetched home by Señor Pinedo and circulated through the dining room, passing from hand to hand. All conversation would stop, and Señor Pinedo would eagerly search the readers’ faces, waiting for someone to exclaim over, say, the splendid tidings that a new luxury train had been put into operation between Madrid and the south. Usually, however, the only remark would come from the impresario, a fat, noisy man who smoked cigars and wandered about the halls in his underwear. Sometimes he entertained one of his simpleminded clients in our dining room; on these occasions, Señorita Elvira, clinging gamely to her boast that everyone was muy, muy distinguished, kept the conversation at her table at a rattling pitch in order to drown out the noise matador and impresario managed to make with their food and wine.

  “How much did this thing cost?” the impresario would ask rudely, holding Señor Pinedo’s pamphlet at arm’s length and squinting at it. “Who made the money on it? What’s it good for?”

  “Money?” Señor Pinedo would cry, seriously upset. “Good for?” Often, after such an exchange, he was unable to get on with his meal, and sat hurt and perplexed, staring at his plate in a rising clatter of dishes and talk.

  Sometimes his arguments took on a curious note of pleading, as if he believed that these people, with their genteel pretensions, their gritty urban poverty that showed itself in their clothes, their bad-tasting cigarettes, their obvious avoidance of such luxuries as baths and haircuts, should understand him best. “Am I rich?” he would ask. “Did I make black-market money? Do I have a big house, or an American car? I don’t love myself, I love Spain. I’ve sacrificed everything for Spain. I was wounded at seventeen. Seventeen! And I was a volunteer. No one recruited me.”

  Hearing this declaration for the twentieth time, the tenants in the dining hall would stare, polite. It was all undoubtedly interesting, their faces suggested; it was even important, perhaps, that Señor Pinedo, who had not made a dishonest céntimo, sat among them. In another year, at another period of life, they might have been willing to reply; however, at the moment, although their opinions were not dead, they had faded, like the sepia etching of the Chief of State that had hung in the entrance hall for more than thirteen years and now blended quietly with the wallpaper.

  In Señor Pinedo’s room, between the portraits of film stars tacked up by his wife, hung another likeness, this one of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, who was shot by the Republicans during the Civil War.

  “He was murdered,” Señor Pinedo said to me one day when I was visiting the Pinedos in their room. “Murdered by the Reds.” He looked at the dead leader’s face, at the pose, with its defiant swagger, the arms folded over the famous blue shirt. “Was there ever a man like that in your country?” Under the picture, on a shelf, he kept an old, poorly printed edition of José Antonio’s speeches and a framed copy of the Call to Arms, issued on the greatest day of Señor Pinedo’s life. Both these precious things he gave me to read, handling the book with care and reverence. “Everything is here,” he assured me. “When you have read these, you will understand the true meaning of the movement, not just foreign lies and propaganda.”

  Everything was there, and I read the brave phrases of revolution that had appealed to Señor Pinedo at seventeen. I read of a New Spain, mighty, Spartan, and feared abroad. I read of the need for austerity and sacrifice. I read the promise of land reform, the denunciation of capitalism, and, finally, the Call to Arms. It promised “one great nation for all, and not for a group of privileged.”

  I returned the book and the framed declaration to Señor Pinedo, who said mysteriously, “Now you know,” as if we shared a great secret.

  That spring, there was an unseasonable heat wave in Madrid; by the time Easter approached, it was as warm as a northern June. The week before Palm Sunday, the plane trees along the Calle de Alcalá were in delicate leaf, and on the watered lawns of the Ministry of War roses drooped on thin tall stalks, like the flowers in Persian art. Outside the ministry gates, sentries paced and wheeled, sweating heroically in their winter greatcoats.

  The table in the entrance hall of the pension was heaped with palms, some of them as tall as little trees. Señorita Elvira planned to have the entire lot blessed and then affixed to the balconies on both sides of the house; she believed them effective against a number of dangers, including lightning. The Chief of State, dusted and refreshed after a spring-cleaning, hung over the palms, gazing directly at a plaster Santa Rita, who was making a parochial visit. She stood in a small house that looked like a sentry box, to which was tacked a note explaining that her visit brought good fortune to all and that a minimum fee of two pesetas was required in exchange. It seemed little enough in return for good fortune, but Señor Pinedo, who sometimes affected a kind of petulant anticlericalism,
would have no part of the pink-faced little doll, and said that he was not planning to go to church on Palm Sunday—an announcement that appeared to shock no one at all.

  On Saturday night, four of us accidentally came home at the same time and were let into the building and then into the pension by the night porter. Señor Pinedo had been to the cinema. The stills outside the theater had promised a rich glimpse of American living, but in line with some imbecility of plot (the hero was unable to love a girl with money) all the characters had to pretend to be poor until the last reel. They wore shabby clothes, andwalked instead of riding in cars. Describing the movie, Señor Pinedo sounded angry and depressed. He smelled faintly of the disinfectant with which Madrid cinemas are sprayed.

  “If I belonged to the Office of Censorship,” he said, “I would have had the film banned.” Catching sight of Santa Rita, he added, “And no one can make me go to church.”

  Later, from my side of the partition, I heard him describing the film, scene by scene, to his wife, who said, “Si, claro” sleepily, but with interest, from time to time. Then they said their prayers. The last voice in the room that night came from the radio. “Viva Franco!” it said, signing off. “Arriba España!”

  It seemed to me not long afterward that I heard the baby crying. It was an unusual cry—he sounded frightened—and, dragged abruptly awake, I sat up and saw that it was daylight. If it was José María, he was outside. That was where the cry had come from. Señor Pinedo was out of bed. I heard him mutter angrily as he scraped a chair aside and went out to the balcony. It wasn’t the baby, after all, for Señora Pinedo was talking to him indoors, saying, “It’s nothing, only noise.” There was a rush of voices from the courtyard and, in our own flat, the sound of people running in the corridor and calling excitedly. I pulled on a dressing gown and went outside.

  Señor Pinedo, wearing a raincoat, was leaning over the edge of the balcony. In the well of the court, a little boy lay on his back, surrounded by so many people that one could not see the cobblestones. The spectators seemed to have arrived, as they do at Madrid street accidents, from nowhere, panting from running, pale with the fear that something had been missed. On the wall at right angles to ours there was a mark that, for a moment, I thought was paint. Then I realized that it must be blood.

  “It was the elevator,” Señor Pinedo said to me, waving his hand toward the big iron block that now hung, motionless, just below the level of the second-floor balconies. “I knew someone would be hurt,” he said with a kind of gloomy triumph. “The boys never left it alone.”

  The little boy, whose name was Jaime Gámez, and who lived in the apartment directly across from our windows, had been sitting astride the block, grasping the cable, and when the elevator moved, he had been caught between the block and the wall.

  “One arm and one leg absolutely crushed,” someone announced from the courtyard, calling the message around importantly. The boy’s father arrived. He had to fight through the crowd in the court. Taking off his coat, he wrapped Jaime in it, lifted him up, and carried him away. Jaime’s face looked white and frightened. Apparently he had not yet begun to experience the pain of his injuries, and was simply stunned and shocked.

  By now, heads had appeared at the windows on all sides of the court, and the balconies were filled with people dressed for church or still in dressing gowns. The courtyard suddenly resembled the arena of a bullring. There was the same harsh division of light and shadow, as if a line had been drawn, high on the opposite wall. The faces within the area of sun were white and expressionless, with that curious Oriental blankness that sometimes envelops the whole arena during moments of greatest emotion.

  Some of the crowd of strangers down below sauntered away. The elevator began to function again, and the huge weight creaked slowly up the side of the house. Across the court, Jaime’s family could be heard crying and calling inside their flat. After a few moments, the boy’s mother, as if she were too distracted to stay indoors, or as if she had to divert her attention to inconsequential things, rushed out on her balcony and called to someone in the apartment above ours. On a chair in the sun was Jaime’s white sailor suit, which he was to have worn to church. It had long trousers and a navy-blue collar. It had been washed and ironed, and left to dry out thoroughly in the sun. On a stool beside it was his hat, a round sailor hat with “España” in letters of gold on the blue band.

  “Look at his suit, all ready!” cried Jaime’s mother, as if one tragedy were not enough. “And his palms!” She disappeared into the dark apartment, and ran out again to the hard light of the morning carrying the palms Jaime was to have taken to church for the blessing. They were wonderfully twisted and braided into a rococo shape, and dangling and shining all over them were gilt and silver baubles that glinted in the sun.

  “Terribly bad luck,” said Señor Pinedo. I stared at him, surprised at this most Anglo-Saxon understatement. “If the palms had been blessed earlier,” he went on, “this might not have happened, but, of course, they couldn’t have known. Not that I have beliefs like an old woman.” He gazed at the palms in an earnest way, looking like Salvador Dalí. “Doña Elvira believes they keep off lightning. I wouldn’t go so far. But I still think …” His voice dropped, as if he were not certain, or not deeply interested in, what he did think.

  Someone called the mother. She went inside, crying, carrying the palms and the sailor suit. A few of the people around the courtyard had drifted indoors, but most of them seemed reluctant to leave the arena, where—one never knew—something else of interest might take place. They looked down through the tangle of clotheslines to the damp stones of the court, talking in loud, matter-of-fact voices about the accident. They spoke of hospitalization, of amputation—for the rumor that Jaime’s hand was to be amputated had started even before I came out—and of limping and crutches and pain and expense.

  “The poor parents,” someone said. A one-armed child would be a terrible burden, and useless. Everyone agreed, just as, on my first day, they had all agreed with Señora Pinedo that it was bad to drug one’s children.

  Señor Pinedo, beside me, drew in his breath. “Useless?” he said loudly. “A useless child? Why, the father can claim compensation for him—a lifetime pension.”

  “From the angels?” someone shouted up.

  “From the building owners, first,” Señor Pinedo said, trying to see who had spoken. “But also from our government. Haven’t any of you thought of that?”

  “No,” said several voices together, and everyone laughed.

  “Of course he’ll have a pension!” Señor Pinedo shouted. He looked around at them all and said, “Wasn’t it promised? Weren’t such things promised?” People hung out of windows on the upper floors, trying to see him under the overhang of the balcony. “I guarantee it!” Señor Pinedo said. He leaned over the railing and closed his fist like an orator, a leader. The railing shook.

  “Be careful,” I said, unheard.

  He brought his fist down on the railing, which must have hurt. “I guarantee it,” he said. “I work in the office of pensions.”

  “Ah!” That made sense. Influence was something they all understood. “He must be related to little Jaime,” I heard someone say, sounding disappointed. “Still, that’s not a bad thing, a pension for life.” They discussed it energetically, citing cases of deserving victims who had never received a single céntimo. Señor Pinedo looked around at them all. For the first time since I had known him, he was smiling happily. Finally, when it seemed quite clear that nothing more was to happen, the chatter died down, and even the most persistent observers, with a last look at the blood, the cobbles, and the shuttered windows of Jaime’s flat, went indoors.

  Señor Pinedo and I were the last to leave the court. We parted, and through the partition I heard him telling his wife that he had much to do that week, a social project connected with the hurt child. In his happiness, he sounded almost childlike himself, convinced, as he must convince others, of the truth and good fait
h of the movement to which he had devoted his life and in which he must continue to believe.

  Later, I heard him repeating the same thing to the pension tenants as they passed his door on the way to church. There was no reply. It was the silence of the dining room when the bulletins were being read, and as I could not see his listeners’ faces, I could not have said whether the silence was owing to respect, delight, apathy, or a sudden fury of some other emotion so great that only silence could contain it.

  BY THE SEA

  At the beginning of the afternoon, just before the luncheon gongs were due to be sounded at the pensions and villas along the cliff, a lull would descend on the beach. It was July; the beach was a baking stretch of shore on the south coast of Spain. At this hour, the sun shone straight overhead. To the west, Gibraltar wavered in heat. The cliffs behind the beach held the warmth of the day and threw it back to the sand. Only the children, protected with sun oil and porous straw hats, seemed not to mind; they paddled in the scummy surf, dug the blistering sands, and communicated in a private language. Heat fell on the bamboo roof of the pavilion and bar. The bar and the tables and the sticky, salty, half-naked tourists were covered alike with zebra stripes of light and shade. Nowhere was cool enough or dark enough. The glasses on the tables were filled to the brim with ice. No one said much.

  In the neutral area of tables between the English tourists and the French sat the Tuttlingens, from Stuttgart, and Mrs. Owens, who was American. They lived in the same pension, Villa Margate (whose owner, like many of the permanent residents of this corner of Spain, was English), and, being neither English nor French, had drifted together. Mrs. Owens watched the beach, where her son, aged five, was busy with bucket and spade. She and the Tuttlingens, bored with one another, wished the luncheon gong would be struck at the Margate, so that they would have an excuse to separate.