The Means of Escape

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘So you’ll be going soon … to Oazaca, is it?’ said Mrs Sheridan. ‘You must meet Colonel Terence first …’ She was truly interested in what Mrs Clancy’s niece was saying but her mind seemed to drift across the high shadowy ceiling, circling back always to its first point: I have been here thirty-six years and I am still no more than a guest.

  ‘Pantaleón’s father and mother came down from a mountain village,’ she added. ‘He’s pure Indian, one supposes, but his little cousin didn’t look like him at all. She reminded me of a wax doll or a golden doll.’

  As she left the house Mrs Sheridan met Mr Clancy rounding the corner of the huerta; he apologised for missing her in the usual half-shout which he kept for the open air. The garden was beautifully kept, with thick tropical grass in which the paths seemed like partings, and among the figs and bananas there were papery late roses, never quite fresh, never quite withered.

  ‘You want to watch that Pantaleón of yours,’ said Mr Clancy while they were still at a distance from the waiting car. ‘You may have noticed he’s treating all his relatives lately; he’s been shutting off the irrigation channels in your garden and diverting the water into his own patch; he’s raising pumpkins and I daresay he reckons to make a killing on flowers for the Day of the Dead. No harm, I’d say, in having a word with him; the truth is, he’s studied your mentality; he’d never take money, but water’s different; he knows where you can’t be moved and where you’re prepared to stretch a bit’.

  The mercado of San Tomás was not particularly old, neither was it picturesque. It was not visited by tourists nor by visiting experts from the Craft Section of the National Institute of Fine Arts. It had been erected, together with the little-used bullring, by a benefactor, a successful banderillero who had retired and died in his native town. It was a crazy structure of wood, a forest of rotting planks and struts, patched up with old doors from nearby building sites. The centre, where the meat and fish were sold, was to be avoided by all but the strongest minded; the butchers hewed the carcasses as Samuel did Agag; they threw the entrails and the reproachful eyes behind the stall; a piece of meat, in any shape, was still meat to the poorer customers. It was here that Esperanza and her great-uncle sold (when they could get them) fish and eels from the lake. Then came a wooden maze where fruit and sugar-cane, aphrodisiacs, charms, spices and penicillin tablets were arranged in heaps on green leaves, and often sold by pinches or handfuls. The sweet stall was hopelessly outmoded, with a dusty showpiece of a hospital operation table, patient and surgeon all executed in sugar; there was a section for clothes and household goods and shoes soled with pieces of Dunlop tyre – you could buy one shoe at a time in the mercado, or half a cigarette; and the whole thing petered out into a circumference of hopelessly ruined structures where old women offered oranges freshly cut and sprinkled with red pepper, or bootlaces and matches. Only the breadth of a street away glittered the supermercado, where everyone with the least pretensions to status or to spending money went to see and be seen. And yet the old mercado provided a precarious livelihood for perhaps a hundred people and gave many others a chance to scramble through on the right side of starvation.

  Rosario, Pantaleón’s wife, kept (sporadically, when she had the leisure) a toy stall with a stock-in-trade of pottery figures mixed up with plastic trash and objects filched from cornflake packets, while behind hung a selection of religious pictures; the guardian angel leading two children in buttoned boots past a precipice, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Sacred Heart, all illuminated with gold and silver paper. Only the pottery figures showed the native Mexican genius, the philosophy of the Toby jug, the gentle teasing of the world, bringing it down to the scale of pitchers and cups and household objects. There were whistles with ears, pink horses and purple angels with stripes and flowers made into jugs with rough dabs of glaze. In the dark recesses behind the shop were the obscene figures, combinations of men and animals, which were bought by out-of-towners on a spree.

  ‘They’re artists’ work,’ said the sweet-faced niece who, unlike most visitors, had penetrated, escorted by Mr Azuela, into the dingy mercado. ‘It’s delightful to think they make them with such a sense of form and colour for children to play with.’

  ‘It is the children who make them here. Not the children who play with them,’ replied Mr Azuela. ‘Their fingers are small and they learn early. Rosario’s cousin, Esperanza, makes these when she isn’t selling fish or minding the baby.’

  Rosario sat smiling broadly and peacefully.

  ‘Let me purchase you something,’ said Mr Azuela politely. ‘A cochinito – a piggy bank. Perhaps this one with purple roses.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem economic only to have one opening,’ said the sweet-faced girl, turning the rough pottery pig over and over. ‘How would you get your money out again?’

  ‘Only by breaking it, señorita,’ said Rosario decisively. ‘That is the gracia of the little pig; when you have saved you must break everything and spend everything; then you can begin again.’

  The Colonel sat alone with the starling. He had had them lift its cage down and put it on the broad stone coping that ran round the patio. The bird was capricious. If anyone spoke to it, or if there was any noise about the place, it would listen intently, only moving slightly from one leg to another. Its favourite sounds were intermittent ones – hammering or sneezing, or the slapping of tortillas, or a pig being killed. Then, after about a quarter of an hour’s silence it would wheeze like a mechanism about to strike and begin to talk, but the speech, as the doctor had said, was not outward-going but inward; its cheeks filled with air, its chest swelled, but its beak remained shut.

  ‘I’m not going to be licked by a darned bird,’ thought Colonel Terence and, uncertainly and rustily at first, he began to follow it word by word …

  ‘Salud, Salud … pretty Joey – I want to get out of this place – estraight home … estraight home …’

  Then he sank down sweating in the dark green shade of the vines. ‘I’ll take a rest when the bird does,’ he thought.

  Mrs Sheridan did not really find it awkward to ‘speak’ to Pantaleón; indeed, like an old married couple they could express many things without words, in a way which satisfied them both.

  ‘Every man’s obligation is to do what he can for his family,’ said Pantaleón with spacious gestures. ‘Nature and religion both demand this. The señora is aware that failure of the family hearth is the cause of many evils in this world. If men and women act without scruple it is because they have forgotten what God has made due to the family.’

  ‘All the same, I think you should cancel the order for the two extra mattresses: you might not find it possible to earn quite as much extra money in the future as you have done in the past.’

  It was just before Christmas when the old mercado caught fire; earlier in the year, when the whole population was seated outside till late at night catching the cool air, someone would have noticed at once; that night, however, the first indication was the ruinous sound of cracking and snapping as the outer supports went. The actual smell of burning went unnoticed at first; few nights went by in San Tomás when someone did not let off fire-crackers to celebrate something, even if it was only a win in the football pools, and the fire-crackers were nearly always followed by scorching of some kind. But the bitter stench of burning wood grew stronger and then smoke rolled down some of the tiny narrow streets which radiated from the market towards the Plaza Mayor; almost in a moment it was mixed with a still more pungent smell of burning meat and fish.

  San Tomás had no fire engine of its own; the only fire engine had been adapted from a crop sprayer by Providence Williams; it was kept in the Clancys’ carport along with the Clancy cars and Mrs Clancy’s runabout. The provision of this public service helped to promote good relations between the Mexicans and Providence Williams, and it demonstrated the benefits of efficiency since Mr Clancy’s ‘team’ of ambitious juniors kept it in good running order, thinking it was the old man’s hobby.
The crew were volunteers from the town, but two of the Company’s staff had to be on board to drive and to direct operations; and Mr Clancy himself kept the ignition key.

  ‘El Señor Clancy no está. This is Chela, the cook, speaking. The family are out.’

  ‘I must have him, woman, we need him; we need the fire engine.’

  Chela could hear the sound of voices and the radio in the background and knew that the Jefe of Police was speaking from the Café Central. The Jefe was, in any case, her cousin on her mother’s side, Mrs Clancy having been shrewd enough to see the advantage of having a cook related to the police.

  ‘It’s you, Salvador, Madre de Dios, what’s burning?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘At the Quinta Terence. Ring him at the Colonel’s.’

  Like wild animals from a cut cornfield, the stallholders whose only home was their upturned stalls staggered out of the burning market. They made gestures to show that others were still left inside. The patiently accumulated goods, the savings of a lifetime, were devoured one by one; the sarapes, woven of raw sheep’s wool with the oil still left in it, blazed up with a suffocating smell of ancient sacrifice. The owner, weeping, dragged at the burning fragments; meanwhile, people came running round corners and up the callejuelas, as if blown from nowhere; Pantaleón was there among others, his mouth moving and his arms sweeping grandly but anything he had to say was quite inaudible in that din. He was like one of the masked jumping figures in a fiesta, still in the white coat in which he had driven Mrs Sheridan out to dinner. He was trying to explain about the question of the mattresses and about the relatives to whom, after all, he had not been able to offer the hospitality of his house. Someone handed him a bucket; they were filling them one by one at the single cold tap in the patio of one of the viviendas; people were colliding with each other; the children darted between their legs and burned their fingers in the stream of brilliantly coloured melted sweets.

  ‘It’s nice to see a wood fire,’ said the guests at Colonel Terence’s. ‘If they stick to the new government regulations … if we’re not allowed to cut down a single tree for firewood …’

  ‘That’s a problem I’m hoping to study at first hand,’ said the serious and sweet-faced girl.’ Up in the mountain villages, in spite of all that the commissions could do, I understand that currently they’re still burning down trees to plant themselves another little patch of maize …’

  ‘You will never go up to the mountain villages, señorita,’ said Mr Azuela, flickering at her his gold teeth, his lizard’s eyes.

  ‘Why ever not, what makes you say this?’

  ‘You undertook this training for the best possible motive – because you have a pitiful heart; you pity those who need help and, in consequence, you help those who need pity. You will find enough material here, I think, without making the journey to the mountains.’

  The telephone rang. It rang from the table beside the Colonel’s chair and Mr Clancy with quiet deliberation leaned forward and held up his hand.

  ‘No one will answer this telephone call for the Colonel,’ he said. ‘It can wait; we can all wait until such time as the Colonel can find words to answer it. I think we’re all in danger of forgetting, in the enjoyment of our host’s very good food and wine – I wish Chela could fix huevos rancheros like your cook does, Colonel – we’re in danger of forgetting Doctor Smith’s very explicit instructions about the recovery of your voice. I’ve noticed that you’ve spoken less than usual this evening; now’s your opportunity – don’t force it, simply take your time while you search for the words.’

  But the Colonel must have been tired that evening or perhaps it wasn’t one of his ‘nights’ for his new-found skill seemed to have deserted him; although he made a visible struggle, glancing out into the lighted patio where the bird-cage hung, the telephone rang on and on unanswered.

  The new mercado at San Tomás de las Ollas was built as a spontaneous gesture by Providence Williams Marketing (Central American Division). It is designed by a modern architect with a German name from Mexico City, is made of reinforced concrete with murals of glass mosaic and is accepted, even by reactionaries, as a very real improvement. The funeral of Esperanza and her great-uncle was paid for by Mrs Sheridan, who spared herself nothing, not even (under the firm guidance of Rosario) the most distressing details; there was no photograph available to put in the lace-framed holder on the white coffin, so the undertaker obligingly produced one from his reserve stock; it was of a blonde, simpering little girl. ‘It is cute,’ said the undertaker. Thus even the image of Esperanza perished completely from the earth. The new fire station is at this moment under construction; the money is being raised by members of the American and European communities, a very large donation having been given by Colonel Terence and the serious, sweet-voiced Mrs Terence.

  Before the site was cleared, however, the old mercado rose for a short time a little way from its ashes; the poorest of the stallholders, to whom the loss of their tiny stock (nothing was insured) meant ruin, set up improvised fit-ups among the charred heaps of rubbish and tried to make enough to tide them over Christmas.

  Mrs Sheridan went down in honour bound to spend what she could; she was escorted – since Pantaleón’s duties in the garden seemed to be more absorbing than ever – by Mr Azuela.

  ‘This question of the interaction of two cultures is not well understood,’ said Mr Azuela, slowing down competently for the school crossing. ‘Some think that one will destroy the other, some think that the two will unite and create something new, as the Spanish civilisation did with that of the Indian and the Jew. In my view, both are wrong. The two cultures are complementary, but in the way that death is to life. The two cannot exist together but just as surely they cannot exist without each other.’

  Rosario was squatting broadly behind her stall, her head wrapped in her tapaboca against the morning air, which she thought it unhealthy to breathe. There was in fact a streaming white mist that morning which mingled with the smell of frying doughnuts and condensed on everything it touched. Rosario was offering for sale the clay figures for the Nacimiento – the Christmas crib. Whoever had made them, they were all there – angels, kings, peasants and knife grinders, shepherds and their strange-looking dogs, the Holy Innocents terribly streaked with bright red paint. Mrs Sheridan smiled at Rosario, chose about a dozen figures and then hesitated.

  ‘And the señora will buy the Holy Child,’ Rosario asked with calm confidence. ‘Certainly you will want the Jesucristo.’

  ‘But it’s so big, Rosario,’ cried Mrs Sheridan, for the infant Jesus had clearly been salvaged from another ‘set’ and was over a foot long. Made of rough earthenware, he towered over the delicate miniatures.

  ‘What does it matter if He is big,’ said Rosario, wrapping up the figure swiftly in a piece of greyish-white paper. ‘After all, He is the King of the whole world.’

  Mrs Sheridan looked round at the mercado, at the ruined black stumps of wood, which seemed bewildered, and the silent black stumps of old men and women.

  ‘Oh, Rosario, I’m so sorry! – so very sorry about everything!’

  ‘You mustn’t worry so much,’ said Rosario. ‘That is a fault … venimos prestados – our lives are only lent to us.’

  Desideratus

  Jack Digby’s mother never gave him anything. Perhaps, as a poor woman, she had nothing to give, or perhaps she was not sure how to divide anything between the nine children. His godmother, Mrs Piercy, the poulterer’s wife, did give him something, a keepsake, in the form of a gilt medal. The date on it was September the 12th, 1663, which happened to be Jack’s birthday, although by the time she gave it him he was eleven years old. On the back there was the figure of an angel and a motto, Desideratus, which, perhaps didn’t fit the case too well, since Mrs Digby could have done with fewer, rather than more, children. However, it had taken the godmother’s fancy.

  Jack thanked her, and she advised him to stow it away safely, out of reach of the other
children. Jack was amazed that she should think anywhere was out of the reach of his little sisters. ‘You should have had it earlier, when you were born,’ said Mrs Piercy, ‘but those were hard times.’ Jack told her that he was very glad to have something of which he could say, This is my own, and she answered, though not with much conviction, that he mustn’t set too much importance on earthly possessions.

  He kept the medal with him always, only transferring it, as the year went by, from his summer to his winter breeches. But anything you carry about with you in your pocket you are bound to lose sooner or later. Jack had an errand to do in Hending, but there was nothing on the road that day, neither horse nor cart, no hope of cadging a lift, so after waiting for an hour or so he began to walk over by the hill path.

  After about a mile the hill slopes away sharply towards Watching, which is not a village and never was, only a single great house standing among its outbuildings almost at the bottom of the valley. Jack stopped there for a while to look down at the smoke from the chimneys and to calculate, as anyone might have done, the number of dinners that were being cooked there that day.

  If he dropped or lost his keepsake he did not know it at the time, for as is commonly the case he didn’t miss it until he got home again. Then he went through his pockets, but the shining medal was gone and he could only repeat, ‘I had it when I started out.’ His brothers and sisters were of no help at all. They had seen nothing. What brother or sister likes being asked such questions?