Nothing That Meets the Eye

by Patricia Highsmith

  “There isn’t any butter,” Mildred said in an agony of apology as Edith took her place at the table. She thought of running down for some, but felt it would be rude to make Edith wait. “It’s the same old-fashioned potato salad Mama used to make at home, though.”

  “It looks delicious. Don’t you ever have hot meals here at home?”

  “Why, most of the time. I try to eat a very balanced diet.” She knew what her sister was thinking now, that she lived off delicatessen sandwiches, probably. She passed Edith the coleslaw. “Here’s something very healthful, if you like.” Her throat closed up. She felt ready to cry again. “I’m sorry, Edie. I suppose you’d have preferred a hot meal.”

  “No, this tastes very nice. Now, don’t you worry,” Edith said, poking at the potato salad.

  At the end of the supper, Mildred realized she had not put out the dill pickles. Or the rollmops.

  “Would you like to step out tonight? Take a look at the big city?” Mildred came in from the kitchen, where she had just finished cleaning up.

  Edith was lying on the couch. “Well, maybe. I don’t think I can nap after all, with all the traffic going. I suppose it lets up at night, though.”

  “There’s a nice movie a few blocks uptown within walking distance,” Mildred said, feeling a sink of defeat. How would she ever break it to Edith that there was some kind of noise on Third Avenue all night long?

  They went to a shabby little movie house on Thirty-fourth Street, whose gay lights Edith had seen and fixed upon.

  “Is this your neighborhood theater?” Edith asked.

  “Oh, no. There’s any number of better theaters around,” Mildred answered rather shortly. Edith had chosen the place. She almost wished Edith had wanted to go up to Broadway. She’d have spent more money, but at least the theater would have been nicer, and Edith couldn’t have complained. Mildred was so tired, she dozed during some of the picture.

  That night, Mildred was aware that Edith got out of bed several times, to get glasses of water or to stand by the window. Mildred suggested that Edith get some cotton from the medicine cabinet to put in her ears. But Mildred slept so hard herself, even on the too-short sofa, most of her impressions might have come from a great distance.

  “Are they mixing cement at this hour?” Edith asked.

  “No, that’s our garbage disposal, I’m afraid,” Mildred said with an automatic little smile, though it was too dark for Edith to see her. She had dreaded this: the clatter of ash cans, the uninterrupted moaning of machinery chewing up cans, bottles, cartons, and anything else that was dumped into the truck’s open rear. Mildred bared her set teeth and tried to estimate just how awful it sounded to her sister: the clank of bottles now, the metallic bump of an emptied ash can carelessly dropped on the sidewalk, and under it all the relentless rrrr-rrrr-rrr-rrr. Quite bad, she decided, and quite ugly, if one wasn’t used to it. “They have their job to do,” Mildred added. “I don’t know what a big city like this would do without them.”

  “Um-m. Looks to me like they could do it in the daytime when nobody’s trying to sleep,” said Edith.

  “What?”

  Edith repeated it more loudly. “I don’t see how you stand it, even with the cotton in your ears.”

  “I don’t use cotton anymore,” Mildred murmured.

  Mildred did not feel too wide awake the next morning, and Edith said she hadn’t slept all night and was dead tired, so neither said very much. At the core of Mildred’s silence was both her ignominy at having failed as a hostess and a desire not to waste a second, for despite having gotten up early, they were a bit pressed to get off when they should. At eight o’clock sharp, the pneumatic drill burst out like a fanfare of machine guns: a big apartment house was going up directly across the street. Edith just glanced at Mildred and shook her head, but around 8:15, there was an explosion across the street that made Edith jump and drop something she had in her hands.

  Mildred smiled. “They have to blast some. New York has rock foundations, you know. You’d be surprised how fast they build things, though.”

  Edith’s suitcase was not closed for the last time until 8:27, and they arrived at the station with no time to spare.

  “I hope you can manage a longer visit on your return trip, Edith,” Mildred said.

  “Well, Arthur did say something about going back to Cleveland with me for a while, but we’ll let you know. I can’t thank you enough for the lovely time, Millie.”

  A pressed hand, a brushed cheek, and that was all. Mildred watched the train doors close down the platform, but she had no time to watch the train pull out. What time was it? Eight forty-nine on the dot, her wristwatch said. If she hurried, she might be at the office by nine as usual. Of course, Mr. Sweeney wouldn’t mind her being late on such a special morning, but for that very reason, she thought it would be nice to be prompt.

  She darted to the corner of Seventh Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street and caught the crosstown bus. She could catch the Third Avenue bus uptown and be at the office on Second Avenue in no time. At the Third Avenue bus stop, an anxious frown came on her face as she estimated the speed and distance of an oncoming truck, then ran. She ­mustn’t forget to buy stockings today during her lunch hour, she thought. And tonight, she ought to drop a note to Edith in Ithaca, telling her how she had enjoyed her stay, and inviting her again when she could make it. And a note to Arthur, of course, about the new baby. Maybe Edith and Arthur both could stay with her awhile, if they went back to Cleveland together. She’d be able to make them comfortable somehow.

  IN THE PLAZA

  He was born in a hut made of twigs and mud that leaned against a straw-colored hill. The road to the village went past the door, and at the age of one, he knew that the people who said “Hello” instead of “Adiós” were americanos and very rich. They gave money away for nothing, his father said. Money bought sweet rolls and candy sticks. So he had no time to play on the dirt floor with his older brother. He had no time to wonder, as his father and grandfather had wondered, sitting on the same wooden doorstep, whether the huddled hills were the backs of giant burros, as an old story told, or if the distant mountains that lay in great golden-tan curves held bubbles of air that might escape at the puncture of a pick and let the whole world down. He had time only to watch for americanos. He could tell them by their pale faces and their new clean clothes. When he saw one, he would rush out into the road, naked as he was, grin and say, “Ai-lo!” and hold out his palm. The coins always fell.

  At four, he loitered around the smaller plaza in the village, where the buses unloaded. He learned to say, “Can I help you, lady?” and “Can I help you, sir?” and always he was given centavos, because the words meant, Could he carry the suitcases that were as big as he was and weighed a lot more? If he talked fast, he could get money from all the turistas before the older boys, his brother Antonio among them, could carry off their suitcases. He learned to say, “That is the best hotel,” as he pointed up the road to a big white house, and if people went there, he trotted after them and collected a peso from the hotel manager. The rate at the hotel was one hundred and twenty-five pesos a day, but for the americanos this fortune was nothing.

  When he saw an American, he did not see a person at all, but centavo pieces and red-and-green peso notes. It fascinated him to watch them buy in the silver shops. They selected things quickly, as if they were eager to get rid of their money, and there was never any back-and-forth talk about the price. The women had even more pesos than the men. Every American was a moneybag he had merely to puncture with a smile and hold his hands out to. His only competition was a loose army of other small boys which roamed the village, but the competition was not serious because he, in distinction from all the rest, was cute. “Cute” was a word nearly all the Americans said when they gave him money. It meant he did not have to carry suitcases as the others did, that all he had to do was
smile and hold out his palm. His last name happened to be Palma, but several years were to pass before he learned the English word “palm.”

  In the evening, he impressed his parents by shouting the inglés he had learned. “Easy on that camera!” and “Put that with the rest!”

  “Por dios, Alejandro!” his pious mother exclaimed. She was beginning to worry about him. He was home only to sleep. Already he did not want to go to the cathedral because, he said, the Americans did not go and were much richer than the Mexicans.

  He was supposed to lay the money he had earned on the table every evening, as Antonio did, but Alejandro could always conceal most of it in his pockets, because his father was not clever. He could buy all the ice-cream sodas and chocolates he wanted. He could buy factory-made shirts in the marketplace. Never did he buy anything for his parents, like Antonio. Wasn’t it enough that what his father took from him enabled them to have coffee and fresh meat all the time? Without him, they would still be eating nothing but tortillas and frijoles that his father got in exchange for his wooden saddles and his mother’s serapes. The cleverest Mexicans, he told his parents, were not farmers of corn or makers of wooden saddles, but guides, silver shop owners and hotel owners, people who did things for the Americans. Therefore his parents were stupid. So was Antonio, who worked like a burro carrying suitcases but did not earn half what he did just by smiling. He taunted Antonio for his stupidity, in English that Antonio could not understand, and in the older boy arose a jealousy that became hatred.

  It was true that the town subsisted on money that came from the tourists. The village whored after money. Some of the natives had much money, some hardly any, but all paid the high prices for basic needs which the extravagance of the tourists had brought about. The tourists took the best houses and the best food because they had the money to pay for them, while the natives whose great-great-grandparents had been born here lived on what was left. It was ironic that this had happened to their village simply because the village happened to be so pretty. Beneath a superficial cheerfulness, hatred against the tourists ran like an underground stream that rose in the eyes of bent old men sometimes, and in the faces of small children who had not yet learned to hide it. Most American tourists moved too fast to detect it, but some Americans who had made the village their home detected it and then began to see it everywhere, even in the eyes of the stray dogs in the plaza and behind the smile of the hotel managers who spoke English perfectly. They could never escape it, except by drinking.

  Alejandro learned English almost as easily as Spanish and in time the languages were side by side in his mind. He listened for new English words and earned extra centavos if he asked the Americans what a certain word meant. He learned the value of dissembling friendship, of remembering names. If he smiled, waved a hand and called, “Hello, there, Mr. So-and-So!” to a tourist he had got money from before, he would be tossed more money. By tagging after a group of tourists, babbling English, he would be invited sometimes as a kind of court jester to one of the hotel dining rooms to share a meal his parents could not imagine even after he described it.

  One day when he was about seven, his offer to help a lady was accepted, and he had to carry a small bag up the longest hill to a hotel. He took his two-peso tip sullenly, and when he had walked back down the hill, he was resolved to become a guia, a guide. All the guides did was walk around and talk. So he went past the buses to the main plaza, where under the tall plane trees before the cathedral the guides made up their parties.

  “Can I show you the town, ladies and sirs?” he asked with the same winning smile he had used at the bus stop.

  He competed with boys much older than he, more capable of supporting the plump, middle-aged women who turned their ankles going down the steep cobblestones, but generally the women would say something to their men with the word “cute” in it; and he would be beckoned to. In the plaza also was his brother Antonio, who at fourteen had just graduated from porter to guide in the town’s curriculum. Antonio with his indifferent English and his square, serious face. Alejandro laughed at him and took his customers from under his nose. Antonio had memorized the whole guidebook and did not know how to pronounce the words right, and besides, what American on a holiday wanted such a sad lecture? Antonio and he were real rivals now and seldom spoke to each other. It was hard to believe they were brothers, solemn Antonio and the happy-eyed little Alejandro.

  Alejandro had trailed the guides often enough to know the things they pointed at and what they said, such as, “This cathedral costed ten billions of pesos,” but he varied the ordinary tour. With the gestures of an experienced host, his small figure led groups of ten and twelve from Silver Shop to A Picturesque Street, to Silver Shop (the guides made commissions on the purchases), to the Cathedral, to A Beautiful View, a tour neither too short nor too long, that ended happily at one of the two high-class bars in the plaza, where a drink made with two jiggers of tequila and mentioned in every guidebook was served. Alejandro became the most popular guide of the village. His age and size were a novelty, his customers told their friends to ask for him, and there were always those tourists who came every year and had known him since he was four, who took pleasure in introducing him to their friends who were seeing the village for the first time.

  He made from sixty to seventy pesos a day. The bulge of banknotes so delighted him, he got the habit of walking with one hand in his pocket to feel it, which emphasized his easy, jaunty poise. He bought brilliantine for his softly curling hair to make it shine with blue highlights. He bought trousers like the Americans wore, that sold for forty pesos in the market, kept them freshly washed and pressed and never forgot to close the zipper as many Mexican boys did, an omission he knew was remarked unfavorably by the American women. He struggled to read American magazines. He went to every American movie that came to the two picture houses in the town, and learned new words by comparing them with the Spanish written at the bottom of the screen. He cut and parted his hair after the fashion of American actors and dressed himself as nearly like them as he could.

  The word “cute” he heard less often now than “good-looking.” He was twelve years old. Already his face was lean and manly, with an astute expression that suggested more years than he had. His body was a lithe five feet five inches and weighed one hundred and fifteen pounds, in American measurements. Of all the young men of the village, he was the most handsome, and he noticed the effect of this on women. It was the furtive embraces of the American women as they caught at him slipping down the lanes, their hasty, shy pecks on his cheeks and lips after their second tequilas that awakened his desires. All the guides were familiar with this nervous lovemaking of the American women and laughed at it. Often they boasted to their comrades, as they pointed out this or that pretty American girl, that it had been she with whom they spent the night, half jokingly, half as if they expected to be believed.

  So did Alejandro boast, though he had seduced only one girl and she was a Mexican, Concha, the prettiest muchacha in the village. He had been eleven and she thirteen. But this was nothing. One little peck from an American woman, no matter how old or ugly she was, counted more, because she was American. And really, Mexican girls had never attracted him. He liked American girls with blond hair, like those he saw in the movies, and sometimes getting off the buses or driving into the village in their cars. He longed to seduce one. This desire began to be stronger even than his passion for money.

  His first American girl was a well-developed blue-eyed young lady of fifteen with blond hair that curled at the ends and hung partway down her back. It was the blond hair that fascinated him, the blank staring blue eyes that encouraged him. Her name was Mary Jane Howell, and she was with her mother. He took them and some other tourists around the village, then was invited to lunch at a hotel by Mrs. Howell, to whom he had been especially courteous. After lunch, Mrs. Howell wanted to go shopping, but Mary Jane said she would stay behind. Having d
irected Mrs. Howell to a silver shop, Alejandro returned to the hotel just as Mary Jane was stepping from behind a potted palm in the lobby with her eyes even wider, even more fixed.

  He gave her his most charming smile, copied from a certain American actor, on the left side of his face with his eyes narrowed to crescents of long black lashes. “I show you that map I told you upstairs, yes? There is much breeze down here, no?”

  “Yes!” she said.

  He could have spoken better English, but he knew when to use an accent. He followed her into the room, and almost before he could close the door, Mary Jane had locked her arms around his neck and planted a moist warm kiss on his lips.

  Hardly half an hour later, he was downstairs, walking automatically, though buoyantly, toward the plaza. His tongue leapt in his mouth to tell of his conquest, and in the next quarter hour he told it four times, in increasing detail, to as many guides and plaza loiterers as would listen. They believed him now, because he believed himself. The realization of his triumph was stronger in the plaza than it had been in Mary Jane’s room. A blond American girl! Later, when Mary Jane and her mother walked about the village, they were followed by the eyes of almost the entire male population.

  Thereafter came many American girls. There were a few rebuffs, but Alejandro could take success and failure with the same pleasant bow and smile—which often turned matters his way after all. He came to be known as the “bad boy” of the village, and enjoyed a worse reputation than he deserved. His walk was haughty, its tense grace suggestive of a well-cared-for tomcat, and he was always walking, roving the town. He held his narrow head high. Merely the glance of his dark eyes was half the conquest of the women he wanted.

  At fifteen, he received two or three letters a week from American girls, schoolteachers, married women, beginning, “Dearest Boy,” “Darling,” “My Spanish Angel,” ending with dirges of their boring existences in the States and a wish that the joys they had known might sometime, somewhere be relived. These letters he read conspicuously, sitting on the benches in the plaza where the plane trees dappled them with rich shadow and glaring sunspots. He put them in his hip pocket with the American stamp showing at the top, and strolled off in quest of more girls. Some of the letters he answered in careful English, most were not worth the trouble. He had found a new ambition. He wanted to marry an American woman, a wealthy one, and live like the prince he was for the rest of his life. There were many marriages between Mexican boys and American women in the village. One of their homes was the most palatial house he had ever seen. But he was still young, and it was difficult for a Mexican boy to marry an American woman before he was seventeen. He must act older, concentrate on the wealthiest and freest of the American women and charm them out of their senses.