The Spanish Virgin

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Ah now …” protested the man.

  “Och …” fumbled Heffernan.

  “You pay me another time,” said the man hurriedly, the pink blushes flooding the pimples of his face and drowning them.

  “Powerful, powerful,” muttered Heffernan, buttoning up his coat. “That’s what makes for the greatness of Ireland. In the three countries there’s not a place like this. We don’t forget our friends, do we? But I’ll pay you all right. Not now, but some other time.”

  “Och, I know you’ll pay me, tip-top, you will,” said the blushing man, looking at the ceiling.

  Tommy Heffernan found himself tracing his way through a kind of fog of benevolence and alcohol. The moon, moist and slippery as some divine oyster, lay in the pearly cloud crinkled shell of the night.

  “Now who the hell was that?” said the old man, when he came to himself again, and was throwing the shells away into the pail.

  The Corsican Inn

  I had walked an odd twenty miles out of Ajaccio and climbed into the ranges of the interior. I suppose that when I started out I was singing or whistling or humming to myself, or gritting my teeth together, pretending they were drums and drum-sticks. I was, no doubt, an exultant army marching to war, and even when I had begun to climb, my head must have been full of these noises. But there came a time when they all ceased and I went up mile after mile mechanically, scarcely aware of anyone or anything that I had passed; the invisible army had vanished into silence. Now I was mounting not only from ridge to ridge, wondering how it was possible for mortal road to go higher, but from silence to silence too: just as, when one walks in a cathedral, dead anthems of deepening stillness seem to come down from the walls to numb body and mind. These mountains were like cathedrals. At first they had seemed tumultuous in their confusion: then, as the road disposed valley and massif on either side, the summits were established with the majesty of towers. There were naves and aisles of granite and a transept of fine magnitude appeared upon which gleamed windows of rain. There were buttresses of out-flying spurs, and round green hills were put at their feet like chapels. Then I entered the silence of a dark moonless night.

  After some hours I came upon what I supposed to be a scattered mountain village. The few houses that I could see were dark and shut up. They were made of huge loose stones and were boarded up at the doors and windows. I groped up the road past the silent stone house, and there was not a light anywhere, not the bark of a dog, not the sound of a step. Everything seemed to stand in isolation as though there were no audible communication between one thing and another, not even a thin intermediary wind. I stopped at one of the houses and walked all round it, then at another and another. At last I saw a glimmer of light through a boarded door, and I knocked. There was no answer; I knocked again. That old stillness. Once more. This time my heart began to thump, for a small living man appeared. I asked him to direct me to the inn.

  I could not see his face, but his voice was discreet and courteous and without feeling. Nothing could dissuade him from conducting me to the inn. He walked tepidly beside me in the cold, up alleys cut in the rock, down wet lanes, and we did not meet a soul. We came to a small piazza, and in it were three trees and a tall white thing that seemed to fill the piazza with ice.

  “The War Memorial,” said my guide. “And there is the church and there the inn. Together. It is convenient.”

  Gripping me by the arm he led me to a bulging wall rimed with mist. I looked up and saw a building which could have accommodated five storeys, but which, in the Corsican fashion, had only three. There was no light in any of the four small windows. We felt our way to a cavernous door and there entered, first into a kind of cellar or stable, and then to a ladder up which we climbed, he leading and shouting the way. At this a door opened above and a square of yellow light came upon the wall. A woman’s voice spoke, and we heard her trudging towards us. A woman’s head, an enormous head tied up in something, looked over the banisters. She greeted us softly and absently, and held up a lamp which shone on her face. It was big and fair and old, with a hanging, downy chin. A black silk scarf was tied about her head and under her chin like a bonnet. She smiled in a meek wondering way. Her sheepish eyes only half looked at us. Her heavy body stood there as though the mind had gone from it. She said nothing until a door at the end of the passage blew open and let out a clangour of oaths and a current of smoke. This startled her into motion, and she trapsed before us into the room whence the oaths had come. She said:

  “Enter into the salon. Sit down. Rest yourself. Enter, monsieur.”

  I stood aside to let the little guide pass.

  “I beg of you,” he said, standing back. So I went in. The woman said:

  “Sit down. Rest yourself. Ah, you came on foot.”

  She stood looking at me with her slow eyes. Again, as if it were a prayer for herself as well as for me, she repeated:

  “Rest yourself.”

  I walked across the room to a chair by an empty fireplace. It was a large room with two beds in it, two iron tables, a wardrobe and a dresser. It was as though I had brought all the silences of the day into the room with me, for everyone stopped talking.

  There were two men eating their dinner at one of the tables, and they held their knives and forks in the air as they stared.… I cricked my neck to study a photograph on the wall beside me. It was an enlargement, foggy, cocoa-coloured, the portrait of a glum young soldier with frightened sheepish eyes. But below was a certificate for the Croix de Guerre; and another, signed by the President of the Republic, on which I read the words, “Mort pour la France.”

  As I turned in my chair, I saw the stooping woman watching me; those were her eyes that had looked at me from the photograph, and the soldier’s eyes that looked at me from her.

  Suddenly, as when music breaks out, everything in the room became alive and significant. All things and persons were bound by the invisible signals of life. We all watched one another and read one another’s eyes. We were caught in a web. The two men who were dining began to fidget and talk until one bawled out:

  “Teresa, bring me some bread! Name of God!”

  We all started. I saw a red-faced burly man, dressed in wrinkled black velvet, with his legs sprawled like great roots under the table. He ate loudly, with every bit of his body moving, feeding, breathing, gulping, getting down to it. He was a shaggy-haired fellow and had a ragged bush of moustache under a solid, humid nose. His foody teeth shone. He had a cindery beard of two or three days’ growth, and he lolled there crushing walnuts in his teeth and swearing, blaspheming, guffawing and drinking.

  “Holy Virgin!” he suddenly called out, and banged the table till the plates jumped. For no reason.

  This woke up the woman. She had been staring at me with her son’s frightened eyes. Her mouth had hung limply down agape. She winced at the oath like a struck animal, and scraped out of the room into the kitchen beyond.

  I looked over at the rowdy table and caught the man staring at me again. He had a walnut between his jaws and in his confusion he unthinkingly crushed the nut, swore and spluttered bits of shell out of his mouth. His companion, a young man who had finished his meal, and was silently adding up bills on bits of paper, looked up and said, nervously:

  “A bad one?”

  And laughed in a high forced way as though trying to keep the man in a good humour.

  Then I saw my guide almost for the first time. He sat with thin legs crossed, staring with his little black button eyes. He was very short and his head was too large for his body, and he wagged his head from side to side casually, as much as he could. But he was obliged to hold his chin very high and an air of polite indifference had been screwed into his fierce face by the fact that he wore a vivid red, yellow and blue scarf pulled tightly round his neck and puffed out well beyond his ears like a poodle’s bow. His curly black hair stood up on end. At any moment his eyes might have dropped out or he might have broken into tears, because of the pressure of his politeness
upon his consternation.

  “Brandy, Teresa! Holy Virgin, bring the bottle. Stingy woman, bring the whole dirty bottle!” shouted the rowdy man. “And water for his holiness! Holy water for the blessed babe!” giving his young companion a gay punch. The young man laughed a half-filled laugh, with no heart in it. In his confusion he began counting his bills aloud.

  “Twenty, twenty-five sixty, twenty-six thirty …”

  He had a sickly sort of handsomeness. The guide wagged his head twice and affected a nervous tolerant smile.

  The woman had come in and was standing at the door. She shuddered and glanced helplessly at the rowdy man and looked vaguely about the room for something she could not remember, a refuge in some little object. Wisps of her fair hair fell from her scarf, her bowed neck was freckled like buttery milk.

  “Water, bread and wine!” roared the man, banging the table as the woman came over to me to set the table, the oaths falling on her weak back. Her clothes flopped listlessly about her She repeated, fingering her blouse:

  “Rest yourself …” and half closed her eyes, as if she felt another blow coming. It fell.

  “Hey, Teresa, I’m a great boy for the Church. Am I not—for the Church!” And began ludicrously to chant prayers. The woman was in agony and her lips moved. “But I say, to hell with priests and churches. Burn the lot! Burn them all!”

  His eyes were bloodshot, and his face swollen with shouting. The appalled woman stuck her chin and bitterly stretched her mouth. She could not stop her mouth from pulling and stretching. She trudged out again to the kitchen, where the fish was being fried. The little guide was watching the rowdy man, listening to his absurd songs. Catching my inquiring glance, the little man smiled, protested another smile, pushed out his lips, raised his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders.

  She came in again through the smoky air. A bit of paper had caught on her sweeping skirt and was squeaking over the floor behind her. It caught on a splinter, let go and was left deserted on the floor. She brought two plates and a knife and a fork. She smiled and said, looking at me from her slow head:

  “That’s right. You came from Ajaccio, on foot!”

  “Yes, on foot.”

  “From Ajaccio …” and nodded her head as though she were counting the miles with a sweet, laborious content.

  But seeing the woman talking to me happily the rowdy man remembered another torture. He finished his glass of brandy, taking his time about it, and then filled another one.

  “What a price old father Nivaggioni paid for his funeral! He was one of the holy ones! God, he was pious! He might have spent a bit more down below, and now the dirty priest’s got the money! And you, too, sacred name of God, how many masses have you paid, eh?”

  The contented look waned quickly out of the woman’s face. Her lips shifted as if she would cry out, but her voice was dumb. She went to the dresser to get me a glass. The little pensive guide smoothed his brow, swallowed and, shrugging his shoulders and pulling down the corners of his mouth, appealed to me:

  “Qu’est ce que vous voulez?” and he nodded to the rowdy man, from whom came continuous rumblings of blasphemy which gradually diminished to some minutes of quietness after the storm. The guide and I breathed deeply, sighing together. This tired interval was nearly gay. In came the woman with a dish of trout, and I drew my chair to the table. The little guide’s mouth moved as I helped myself. His eye followed my hand reaching for the salt. He watched me put it back, saw me take the bread and rolled his eyes as my fork went upwards. But in that room we were all watching one another. Then, just as I was breaking a piece of bread, there was a roar and a crash of glass from the other table. The bread dropped from my hand, the little guide nearly fell off his chair. The woman appeared at the door, looking.

  “Blood,” sniggered the drunken man, staring stupidly at the floor.

  He had knocked over a bottle of red wine.

  “Blood of the Lamb,” he cried, and looked defiantly at everyone. Then he saw the woman, and his lips, like two damp red slugs, moved into an artful smile. She had her hand on her heart; unknowingly she made the sign of the Cross. He was to reach his zenith. He kicked the bits of broken glass, set the remains of the bottle rolling and, with a snigger, and a gesture indicating first the photograph of her son and the pool of red wine on the floor, shouted in mock heroic tones:

  “Mort pour la France!” and spat.

  The woman stopped. I saw her still eyes. She gathered light and strength into them like the flashing of a hundred spear-heads. Into her face a pallid obstinacy set, a loaded gaze that would not move. She went up towards him, head lowered like a bull’s, never taking her eyes off him. She dropped her cloth. She stood there. I have never seen anything more terrible than her stillness. Her eyes, like knives, cut through all those silences that I had seemed to bring with me into the room, cut through to this awful silence, to the ultimate bone. We, who had been caught in this web of furtive gazing, were about to be cut apart with violence. She would kill him, I thought. Dimly the rowdy man seemed to realize this. His fingers groped along the edge of the table. He pulled the napkin out of his neck. He looked recklessly round the room, rapidly in a whirl, trying not to see her, but he was caught between her eyes and those other eyes of hers in the photograph. There was no safe spot for his gaze to hide in. His bluster had gone like the air out of a pricked balloon.

  The son was gripping the side of the table. The little guide was on the edge of his chair, half on his feet. She seemed to grow to the stature of a wall, a hill, a mountain.

  “Giacomo,” at last murmured the rowdy man, sullenly, emptily. “Giacomo, I say, it’s late. And it’s dark. I am going. I am going home.”

  He got up from the table and, fumbling, put on his hat, examining it, and pretending that he did not know she was still there. He went out heavily through the doorway, and his swollen tongue was wordless. We all stood stiffly listening to the blundering of his feet step by step on the ladder that led to the cellar. We heard him muttering as he groped into the dark street where the Memorial stood, an obelisk of ice. We dared not move because still she had not moved. At last, to break the tension, my little guide said in a high unnatural voice:

  “Madame … that’s funny, I was just going to ask you, and that is why I came with this gentleman.… My saw. Have you by chance seen my saw, the little one that I left?”

  The pupils of his eyes were nearly bursting. She turned very slowly round and went into the kitchen. She came back with the saw in her hand and stood helplessly, not knowing what to do with it.

  The Petrol Dump

  A slaty storm rose from the south-west and obliterated all land and sky with splitting fog, soaking cloud and drilling rain. Even in the bay the sea was turgid and lit with foam; while against the rocks far out the waves exploded their deep mines of storm. North of Slyne Head the open sea was up-ended into on-coming ranges of water, that overturned upon the shore with enormous impact, and the shattered surf tore down their sides like the snow of an avalanche.

  After two days the wind shifted to the north—a good sign, the postboy said—and the storm fell away. The sea sank into the deep repose of its plains. Johnny Kerrigan put his sail up at four in the morning and went out on the ebb for the first time in a week.

  The same day, in the afternoon, the postboy bicycled across country, and leaving his machine against the wall of Kerrigan’s oatfield came across the strand with the letters just as Kerrigan was anchoring again in the bay.

  “What’s strange from the world beyant?” asked Kerrigan as he waded ashore.

  “Sorra a much,” said the postboy. “Ye heard three drums of petrol was washed ashore on the strand above, I believe.”

  “Troth, I did not then,” said Kerrigan, for the postboy took a lot of believing.

  “Three big drums then ’twas,” said the postboy. “An’ ’tis washed up they was in the strength of the storm, man. ’Twas Pat Kelly and Tom Malone saw them rolling in on the strand itself, and hauled th
em away in carts. ‘An’ begob,’ says I to myself, when I hears it, man, ‘sure that’s not the end of it either. Not at all. I’m thinkin’ ’tis the secret petrol dump was laid off the coast in the German war, an’ ’tis after breakin’ up, as I always said ’twould!’”

  “Powerful! Och, ’tis powerful,” said Kerrigan. And no one could tell from his face which he thought more powerful, the story or the petrol.

  The postboy walked back across the strand saying, “’Tis a shocking place for cockles.” He cycled away, a man of strange reputation. His shining bicycle glinted like a dragon-fly among the rocky bog-roads, he himself slight, straight, sharp, restlessly shooting glances this way and that. He cried greetings in the Gaelic to everyone on the road, to those bent among their sodden hay in the fields, to those drawing the damp turf from the bogs, to those driving their steaming black cattle. As you saw him pedalling against the hills and the wind with the mailbag on his back, he looked like some bright, elusive, laborious insect; and you remembered Johnny Kerrigan’s words, “’Tis the old postboy spinning news in his head and puttin’ the world astray.”

  With nearly everyone he met on the road he exchanged rumours; elaborated them or created them as the occasion demanded. He never missed an opportunity. Dragon-fly, he whisked from flower to flower. As he sped down the hills at the edge of the sea and looked over the broken bays you wondered what tales he was concocting. And this lean, red-faced man, with the rapid speech and the stinging gestures, whose violet eyes filled with tears in the excitement of telling a story, ended by half believing in his own inventions himself and rode in a mist of fact on an earth of fiction.

  All the same, that evening Johnny Kerrigan put a sling of rope over his shoulder and walked along the shore to the skull of dunes, stepped down to the rocks as the tide was low, and then came back to the point and so northward along that ragged shore into the ruined country. The sun like a cool red lamp sank into the fog. He walked six miles out and six back.