Awakening of Miss Prim

by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

  “What does he do with his time?” she asked before raising her glass to her lips again.

  “Study.”

  “No one can make a living from studying.”

  “He’s also a teacher.”

  “To fifteen children whom he doesn’t even charge for their tea.”

  “True, but that’s only one of his occupations. If you want to know what his main source of income is, I can tell you that he’s very highly regarded as an expert in dead languages; he contributes to a great many publications, and once or twice a year he gives series of lectures at various universities. As well as all that, which brings more prestige than money, he manages a large part of his family’s assets. Actually, he doesn’t need much to live on. He’s a frugal man, as you’ve no doubt noticed.”

  “Series of lectures? I didn’t know that Latin and Greek were such a big deal,” said Miss Prim with a giggle.

  Horacio gave her a look of surprise and consternation.

  “Latin and Greek? My dear Prudencia, once again you leave me speechless. Your Man in the Wing Chair is fluent in around twenty languages, half of them dead. And when I say dead, I don’t mean just Aramaic and Sanskrit. I’m talking about Ugaritic, Syrio-Chaldean, Carthaginian Punic, and old Coptic dialects such as Sahidic and Fayyumic. As I said, you’re in the employ of a man who’s far from ordinary. You see him go to the abbey every morning because he’s devoted to the ancient Roman liturgy. And he lives isolated in this small place occupying himself with parochial concerns because he was inspired by the old man in the abbey—who now almost never ventures outside—and is in fact the founder of this colony of sorts.”

  “Colony? What do you mean?”

  For the second time Horacio stared at his guest in amazement.

  “Prudencia, are you telling me that you had no idea that San Ireneo was a refuge for exiles from the hustle and bustle of modern life? It’s precisely what attracts such diverse people from so many different places! I’m beginning to think you accepted the job absolutely blind. I can’t believe you hadn’t seen that there was something unusual about our way of life until now.”

  Emboldened by the brandy, Miss Prim confessed that she had noticed something. She’d been there long enough to take stock, form an opinion, and build up a mental picture of the place, if only a rather impressionistic one. Admittedly, she’d really only managed a rough sketch. She had, however, observed one or two peculiarities. In that one remote village, families of very different backgrounds had settled. They all owned their own houses, land, or small businesses. Primary goods were produced in the village, and there was a flourishing, prosperous local trade. She hadn’t spotted it at first, partly because she hadn’t had to buy much. If she wanted tights, shoes, or any other personal items she simply made a note of it and bought whatever she needed on her fortnightly visits to the city. She then aired her flat, watered her plants, chatted with her mother, had coffee with friends, did some shopping, and returned in the evening.

  Gradually, however, she began to sense that there was something hidden beneath the surface of the community. In the area around San Ireneo de Arnois there were no factories, large businesses, or offices. All the shops sold high-quality goods, produced locally. The clothes and shoes bore the signatures of three or four tailors and shoemakers; the small stationery shop, charmingly, sold goods made to order; the food shops were friendly establishments bursting with produce, handmade preserves, fresh milk, and bread just baked at the bakery on the corner. At first, Miss Prim thought she detected an environmentalist zeal, but soon realized she was wrong. Whatever was nourishing this village, it was far from green in hue. A quiet, peaceful community of home and business owners, that’s what it was. Life in San Ireneo was small-scale and, Miss Prim thought to herself, also unusually harmonious.

  “Are they Distributists, or something?”

  “They are, as well as many other things. Really, I am amazed, Prudencia. I’d have expected you to inform yourself before coming here,” admonished her host.

  “Do people who believe that sort of thing still exist? I thought those old ideas of returning to a simple, traditional, family-based economy had vanished long ago.”

  “They definitely still exist. You’re in the place where almost all of them live in this country. And they’re not only from this country. Or hadn’t you also noticed the intriguing variety of surnames we have here?”

  “I’m surprised you’re one of them. I’d never have dreamed you were a utopian.”

  Horacio took a generous gulp of brandy and regarded her affectionately.

  “It would be utopian to imagine that the present-day world could go into reverse and completely reorganize itself. But there’s nothing utopian about this village, Prudencia. What we are is hugely privileged. Nowadays, to live quietly and simply you have to take refuge in a small community, a village or hamlet where the din and aggression of the overgrown cities can’t reach; a remote corner like this, where you know nevertheless that about a couple of hundred miles away, just in case”—he smiled—“a vigorous, vibrant metropolis exists.”

  Pensively, Miss Prim placed her empty glass on the table.

  “This does seem like a very prosperous place.”

  “It is, in all senses.”

  “So you’re all refugees from the city, romantic fugitives?”

  “We have escaped the city, you’re right, but not all for the same reasons. Some, like old Judge Bassett and I, made the decision after having got all we possibly could out of life, because we knew that finding a quiet, cultured environment like the one that’s grown up here is a rare freedom. Others, like Herminia Treaumont, are reformers. They’ve come to believe that contemporary life wears women out, debases the family, and crushes the human capacity for thought, and they want to try something different. And there’s a third group, to which your Man in the Wing Chair belongs, whose aim is to escape from the dragon. They want to protect their children from the influences of the world, to return to the purity of old customs, recover the splendor of an ancient culture.”

  Horacio paused to pour himself another glass of brandy.

  “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, Prudencia? You can’t build yourself a world made to measure, but you can build a village. In a way, all of us here belong to a club of refugees. Your employer is one of the few inhabitants with family roots in San Ireneo. He came back a few years ago and set it all up. You may not know it, but his father’s family has lived here for centuries.”

  Miss Prim, who had been listening closely to her friend’s explanation, now sighed in resignation.

  “Horacio, is there anything else I should know about this village?”

  “Of course there is, my dear,” he replied with a wink before draining his glass. “But I’m not going to tell you what it is.”

  * * *

  I. G. K. Chesterton

  6

  “Well? Why did you take the job?” the Man in the Wing Chair asked Miss Prim a few days later. He was nonchalantly eating a slice of pineapple.

  She did not reply. Busy cleaning and labeling a five-volume edition of the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, she pretended not to hear the question. It was a luminously bright day, and sunbeams lit up the thick layer of dust on the books and the subtle honey tones in her hair.

  “Come now, Prudencia, you heard me perfectly well. Tell me, why would a woman with all your qualifications accept an obscure little job like this?”

  Miss Prim looked up, realizing she wasn’t going to be able to avoid a conversation. Apart from what was essential to her duties as librarian, she hadn’t said a word to her employer since the incident in the kitchen on her birthday. She didn’t want to speak to him, she really didn’t. Deep down she felt a profound conviction that she shouldn’t speak to him. For some reason, she became absurdly nervous and could hardly conceal her annoyance if they came across each other in a room or passed in the corridor. She peered at him from the corner
of her eye as he calmly ate his piece of fruit in the November sun. Then she looked down and decided to answer him.

  “I think it was to escape the noise.”

  The Man in the Wing Chair couldn’t help smiling.

  “Miss Prim, since we first met you’ve never disappointed me with any of your replies. It’s a wonderful thing to ask you questions. There’s not the slightest trace of small talk in you. So it was the noise . . . Do you mean the noise of the city?”

  Prudencia, a volume of the Venerable Bede still clasped in her hand, looked at him with pity.

  “I mean the noise of the mind, the clamor.”

  He looked at her with interest.

  “The clamor?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Go on, be a little more specific,” said the Man in the Wing Chair, offering her a slice of pineapple.

  Miss Prim untied her apron, put down the book and the feather duster, and accepted the fruit. Meanwhile, he moved two old armchairs over to the window and politely invited her to sit down.

  “Please tell me about the clamor, Miss Prim. I would never have imagined that a head as neat and delicate as yours might have contained any turmoil.”

  “Have you never experienced a kind of inner noise?”

  Before answering, he carefully cut another slice of pineapple, divided it in two, and handed her a piece.

  “Actually, I’ve heard it almost all my life.”

  Surprised, she stopped eating.

  “Really? You don’t seem like that sort of person. How did you manage to silence it?”

  Dazzled by the sunlight, the Man in the Wing Chair closed his eyes and rested his feet on an old planter.

  “I haven’t managed to.”

  “So you still hear it?”

  “I didn’t say that. All I said was that I haven’t managed to.”

  “But if you haven’t, that means you still hear it,” insisted Miss Prim, puzzled.

  “Let’s say I’ve largely stopped hearing it, but it’s not an achievement I can ascribe to my own efforts. A woman as well educated as you ought to recognize the distinction.”

  “You seize every opportunity to criticize my education, don’t you?” she said tartly. “Why do you do it?”

  He turned his head and looked at her for a moment before answering.

  “Can’t you guess? You’re the perfect product of the modern education system, Prudencia. For someone in permanent opposition to that system, like me, it’s an irresistible provocation. Also,” he added teasingly, “I’d like to remind you that I’m quite a bit older than you.”

  Miss Prim took another piece of pineapple and regarded the man beside her with a mischievous glint in her eye.

  “I estimate you must be at least as old as the Venerable Bede.”

  “Let’s say I’m a good few years older than you.”

  “Let’s say you’re five years and six months older, to be precise.”

  The Man in the Wing Chair opened his eyes just in time to see her rise quickly and cross the room. He followed her, with half a pineapple in one hand and a knife in the other.

  “Tell me about the noise, Miss Prim.”

  “Why should I?” she snapped.

  “Because I’d like to get to know you. You’ve been here almost two months and I hardly know anything about you.”

  Turning away, the librarian climbed the old wooden library ladder and began reshelving the Ecclesiastical History.

  “There’s not much I can tell you.”

  “You could at least try.”

  “If I do, will you leave me in peace to get on with my work?”

  “You have my word.”

  With a sigh, Miss Prim turned around and sat down cautiously on the third rung.

  “I’m warning you, I don’t know, really, how to explain it,” she began. “Let’s just say there are days—fortunately not many—when it feels as if the inside of my head is whirling like a spin dryer. I’m not very pleasant to be with then, and I don’t sleep too well either. It’s as though there’s a void in my mind, a void where there should be something, but where there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, just a deafening noise.”

  She paused, saw her employer’s look of concern and smiled gently. “Don’t make that face, it’s not serious. Lots of people have it. It can be controlled with pills. But you say you’ve felt it. You should know what I mean.”

  “Why do you think it doesn’t go away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  The librarian tied her hair back neatly at the nape of her neck before responding.

  “Sometimes I think it has to do with loss.”

  At this she hesitated, but his intently interested look made her go on.

  “How shall I explain it? In some ways I’ve always considered myself a modern woman—free, independent, highly qualified academically. You know, we both know, that you look down on me for it.” The Man in the Wing Chair made a gesture of polite protest which she ignored. “But I have to admit that I’ve also always felt burdened by nostalgia, by a desire to stop time, to recapture things that have been lost. A sense that everything, absolutely everything, is on a journey from which there’s no return.”

  “What does everything mean to you?”

  “The same as it does to you, I assume. All of life, beauty, love, friendship, even childhood, especially childhood. Before, not so long ago, I used to think I possessed a sensibility from another century. I was convinced I’d been born at the wrong time and that that was why vulgarity, ugliness, lack of delicacy all bothered me so much. I thought I was longing for a beauty that no longer existed, from an era that one fine day bade us farewell and disappeared.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m working for someone who effectively lives immersed in another century, and it’s made me realize that that was not what my problem was.”

  The Man in the Wing Chair gave a burst of such happy, infectious laughter that she flushed with pleasure.

  “I should fire you for that. I told you I knew what I was doing when I said I’d have to forgive you on more than one occasion.”

  Smiling, Miss Prim stood up and began meticulously dusting a battered edition of St. Anselm of Canterbury’s Monologion.

  “Your turn now,” she said. “Why did you hear the clamor?”

  He took a few moments to reply.

  “For the same reason everyone does, I suppose. It’s the sound of war.”

  “That metaphor is so typical of you,” she interrupted, laughing. “But what caused your war? You have to admit there’s always a cause: an illness, a moral failing, sometimes an unmanageable temperament or unstable personality, or fear of death or the passing of time . . . What is it with you?”

  “You’re wrong, Prudencia, it’s just due to one thing, not many. And it’s not something but rather the absence of something, a missing piece. And when a piece is missing, from a puzzle, for instance, when the key piece is missing, nothing works. Do you like puzzles?”

  “I’m like most people when they’re not good at something; I don’t enjoy what I can’t master.”

  “People who love puzzles,” he went on, “can spend whole nights trying to fit a single piece. My sister used to do that. You could wake up at dawn and find her still engrossed in a puzzle. Obviously I don’t mean a child’s jigsaw, but one of those wonderful pictures with thousands and thousands of tiny pieces. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well, what I’m trying to explain is that there are people, Prudencia, who suddenly realize that they’re missing a key piece of the puzzle and can’t complete it. They feel that something won’t work, or maybe that absolutely nothing will work, until they find or, better still, are allowed to find the missing piece.”

  “That sounds like esotericism or Gnosticism,” she murmured.

  “Not at all; it’s not about obscure knowledge, wisdom only for the initiated. Instead, it’s th
e kind of discovery that Edgar Allan Poe describes in The Purloined Letter. Have you read it? Yes, of course you have. Well, in the story, the missing piece or purloined letter is there, in the room with you, right in front of you, but you can’t see it, you’re not aware of its presence. Until one day . . . ”

  Miss Prim shifted uncomfortably on the stepladder.

  “I must get back to the Monologion,” she said, recovering her calm, distant professional tone.

  The Man in the Wing Chair regarded her with curiosity.

  “As usual, Miss Prim scuttles back into her shell as soon as she senses the threat of the supernatural. Why does it bother you so much to talk about things you don’t believe in? It’s not very reasonable.”

  Already engaged in dusting another book, she was silent. What could she say? Talking about things she didn’t believe in didn’t bother her at all; she had no doubt that something that didn’t exist could have no effect on her. It wasn’t the supernatural that she feared, it was the influence that the conversation and conviction of the Man in the Wing Chair might have on her. How could she explain that what she feared was coming to believe in something that didn’t exist simply because he believed in it?

  “Don’t worry, Prudencia. No man can convert himself or another by the power of the will alone. We’re second causes, remember? Hard as we might try, the initiative isn’t ours.”

  “I’m not a Thomist,” she said abruptly, annoyed at feeling that she’d exposed her fears.

  Astonished, he looked at her much as a father would at a daughter who’d just boasted of not being able to read.

  “That, Miss Prim, is your big problem.”

  7

  A few days later, an apology from the Feminist League arrived in the shape of a dozen Comte de Chambord roses. A dozen roses would have been quite sufficient as a means of conveying apologies, but a dozen Comte de Chambord was more than an apology, it was an exquisite peace offering. The librarian immediately detected the expert hand of Hortensia Oeillet in the choice of flower, and that of Herminia Treaumont—who else?—in the Elizabethan verse on the card.