Awakening of Miss Prim

by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

  Miss Prim reddened, drew her feet away from the fire, and curled them beneath her on the armchair.

  “Of course you don’t have to. But we’ve talked about Herminia so often that I’m amazed you’ve never mentioned it, that’s all.”

  “That’s all,” he echoed in a low voice.

  They both sat staring into the fire for a few minutes. From the depths of the house came the distant, familiar sound of a clock chiming three times.

  “Everyone knows that sentimental women are also nosy and malicious,” the librarian said suddenly. “So tell me, why did you and she part?”

  The Man in the Wing Chair looked at her with amusement.

  “If there’s one thing I’m sure of, Prudencia, it’s that you’re not a nosy person.”

  Miss Prim smiled and got up to remove her coat.

  “No, I’m not, but I’m keen on sociology, remember? I’m interested in human nature.”

  “Sociologists aren’t interested in human nature. They just study human behavior in social groups, which is more limited and much less interesting.”

  The librarian regarded her employer calmly. She was determined not to be provoked. It wouldn’t be easy, of course—nothing with him ever was—and she would be naive to expect otherwise.

  “Did you leave her?”

  “No.”

  “That’s gallant of you, but it’s not true.”

  “If you know it’s not true then why are you asking me? You don’t know me at all if you think I’m going to brag about leaving a woman,” he said sharply.

  Miss Prim bit her lip and shifted position. This was going to be hard, very hard, extraordinarily hard.

  “I’m sure you would have had a compelling reason. I know I have no right to ask about it.”

  “You’re right. You don’t.”

  Under normal circumstances she would have left it there. Deeply embarrassed, she would have mumbled an apology and fled upstairs. But these were definitely not normal circumstances. This evening Miss Prim felt possessed by a feverish urge to question him, to press beyond the bounds of courtesy, prudence, even common sense. She wanted to know the truth, she needed to know it and she wouldn’t back down.

  “Was it because of your ideas? Because you’re deeply religious and she isn’t?”

  He stared thoughtfully at the cup his employee was resting on her knees. Then he gave a gentle shake of the head and smiled.

  “Ideas, Prudencia? You think faith is an idea? An ideology? Like market economics, or communism, or animal rights?” Now his tone was slightly mocking.

  “In a way, yes,” she replied stiffly. “It’s a way of seeing the world, a view on how existence should be, as well as a big help in easing life’s problems.”

  “Is that really what you think?”

  “Of course. And partly because of you. Why else would a sensible, intelligent, rational person try to convert?”

  With a half smile, he leaned his head in his hands.

  “Try? You are absolutely priceless, Miss Prim.”

  “That’s not intended as a compliment, is it?” she murmured sadly.

  The Man in the Wing Chair rose and went to the fireplace. He picked up the poker, stirred the fire, and stared into the flames.

  “Nobody tries to convert, Prudencia. I told you once, but you clearly didn’t understand. Have you ever seen an adult playing with a child, running away and pretending to be caught? The child thinks he’s caught the adult, but anyone watching knows perfectly well what’s really happened.”

  “Console-toi, tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m’avais trouvé, isn’t that so?” she said softly. “ ‘You would not seek me if you had not found me’?”

  “Exactly. You’ve read Pascal. Nobody begins the search unless they’ve already found what they’re looking for. And no one finds what they’re looking for—the One they’re looking for—if that One doesn’t take the initiative and allow Himself to be found. It’s a game in which one player holds all the cards.”

  “You make it sound as if belief was impossible to resist, but that’s not true. You can say no. The child can say to the adult: ‘I’m not playing, leave me alone.’ ”

  The Man in the Wing Chair drained his cup. Then, adjusting his position, he stared directly at his employee.

  “Of course you can say no. And in many ways that makes life much simpler. It’s common even for someone who says yes to look back and realize that he’s said no many times during his life.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Life is much simpler when you say no? Life is much simpler and easier to bear if you believe it doesn’t end in a coffin underground. You can’t deny it; it’s common sense.”

  He got up and tended the fire again.

  “As a theoretical belief it can serve as a wild card for a time, undoubtedly. But theoretical beliefs don’t save anyone. Faith isn’t theoretical, Prudencia. Conversion is about as theoretical as a shot to the head.”

  Miss Prim again bit her lip. The conversation was not going as she’d hoped. This was all proving very revealing, but she didn’t want to talk about conversion, she didn’t want to talk about religion at all. The only thing she wanted to know was why the “shot to the head” had caused his relationship with Herminia Treaumont to end.

  “So was that the reason?” she asked stubbornly. “Was that why you left her?”

  He looked at her in silence for a few seconds, as if trying to guess what lay behind the question.

  “Would you think it ridiculous if it were?”

  “I’d think you didn’t really love her.”

  “No, that’s where you’re wrong,” he said firmly. “I did love her. I loved her very much. But the day came, or maybe the moment, I don’t know, when I realized that she was asleep, whereas I was fully, absolutely, and totally awake. I’d climbed like a cat up onto a roof and I could see a beautiful, terrible, mysterious landscape stretching out before me. Did I really love her? Of course I did. Perhaps if I’d loved her less, cared for her less, I wouldn’t have had to leave her.”

  Miss Prim, who had begun to feel a familiar pain in her stomach, cleared her throat before replying.

  “I thought the religious were closer to other people than anyone else.”

  “I can’t speak for anyone else, Prudencia. I only know what it’s meant to me and I don’t claim to speak for others. It’s been my touchstone, the line that’s split my life in two and given it absolute meaning. But I’d be lying if I said it’s been easy. It’s not easy, and anyone who says it is is fooling themselves. It was catharsis, a shocking trauma, open-heart surgery, like a tree torn from the ground and replanted elsewhere. Like what one imagines a child experiences during the beautiful, awesome process of birth.”

  The Man in the Wing Chair paused.

  “And there’s something else,” he continued, “something to do with looking beyond the moment, with the need to scan the horizon, to scrutinize it as keenly as a sailor studies his charts. Don’t be surprised, Prudencia. My story is as old as the world. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last. I know what you’re thinking. Would I turn back if I could? No, of course not. Would a newly awoken man willingly go back to the sleepwalking life?”

  Miss Prim pulled her dressing gown tightly around her and stared at her hands, toasted pink by the heat of the fire. So in the end, it was all true. How naive she’d been to think that it was only a part of his personality. How dim of her not to sense that whatever it was that had changed him, it was something powerful, something profound and troubling. Herminia was right. She had never seen that look blazing in his eyes before. The force, the conviction, the strange, savage joy.

  “Then there’s no hope,” she whispered with regret. “Is there?”

  He gave her a long, pensive look before replying.

  “Hope, Prudencia? Of course there’s hope. I have hope. My whole life is pure hope.”

  She rose and picked up the tray.

  “It’s very late.
If you don’t mind, I’m going back to bed. I’m tired and, unlike you, I do lack hope tonight.”

  Before the Man in the Wing Chair could reply, Miss Prim had closed the library door quietly behind her.

  3

  Prudencia Prim folded her jade-green kimono neatly and laid it in her suitcase. The reality was, she thought sadly as she slipped a pair of shoes into a cotton shoe bag, her work no longer detained her. Her employer’s library was now perfectly catalogued and organized. The history books stood on the history shelves, the tomes on philosophy were lined up where they should be, and all the volumes of prose and poetry were in their proper sections; science and mathematics were now in their rightful places to the millimeter; and the section on theology—the great passion in that house, the absolute ruler of the library—shone imposingly, neat, and perfect. Glimpsing her red-rimmed eyes in the mirror from time to time, she recalled her first conversation, months earlier, with the Man in the Wing Chair.

  Do you know what this is, Miss Prim?

  No, sir.

  De Trinitate.

  St. Augustine?

  Smiling wistfully, Miss Prim kept on with her packing. She wasn’t going to go away immediately. She intended to leave enough clothes in the wardrobe for a few days, just enough time to say her good-byes and calmly decide what to do next. She couldn’t stay. Not now that she knew what she felt; not now that she also knew her feelings would never, could never, be reciprocated. But where would she go? And, above all, how would she explain her departure? Slowly she went to her bedroom window, pulled back the curtains, and looked out. It was a cold morning and the snow shone like polished marble in the sunlight. She’d woken late. After all, after the previous night’s conversation there wasn’t much left to do other than face her employer and tell him she was leaving.

  Despite the overwhelming sadness and disappointment, she also felt relief. The last few days had been too turbulent for a woman like her, accustomed to order, balance, and neatness. She’d brooded too much, worried too much, gone over the words again and again, assessed the gestures, registered smiles, analyzed glances. Romance, she reflected wisely, could be an unbelievably heavy burden for the female psyche. What she needed now was somewhere pleasant and remote where she could rest, a refuge where she could write, an Eden where she could surround herself with beauty and admire emerald-green lawns and wisteria in flower.

  Of course, she was also in pain: she didn’t want to—couldn’t—deny it. It had been a long time since she had experienced such anguish, had such difficulty organizing her thoughts, felt so acutely the impossibility of scanning the horizon and seeing any glint of light in the darkness ahead. But it would all pass. Miss Prim was sure of it. She knew herself well enough to estimate how long the sadness would last. By the spring, or the beginning of summer at most, the sun would come out again.

  Tentatively, the librarian opened the door to the study. “Could I have a quick word?”

  Bent over a document, the Man in the Wing Chair indicated that she should enter and sit down. She obeyed. For a few minutes, just long enough to rehearse in her mind how she would inform him of her departure, the only sound in the room was the crackling of the fire in the hearth.

  “Look at this, Prudencia,” he said, holding out what appeared to be a facsimile of two small papyrus fragments.

  With a sigh Miss Prim peered at the Man in the Wing Chair’s face. There was no sign of tension or anxiety, no hint that their conversation in the early hours had affected him in any way.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, noticing how pale his employee was. “You look tired.”

  The librarian assured him that she was fine and that her pallor was due to lack of sleep.

  “We did talk till quite late last night, that’s true. Look at this,” he said, indicating the manuscript. “What do you think? Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  Miss Prim examined it closely.

  “What is it?”

  “A facsimile of P52, commonly known as the Rylands Papyrus.”

  “Let me guess . . . A little piece of the Book of Wisdom? Or the Book of Daniel?”

  “No luck, it’s neither. They’re verses from the Gospel of John. Look closely, they’re written in koine Greek. See these lines?”

  ΡΗΣΩ ΤΗ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ ΠΑΣΟ ΩΝ ΕΚ ΤΗΣ ΑΛΗΘΕΙ

  ΑΣ ΑΚΟΥΕΙ ΜΟΥ ΤΗΣ ΦΩΝΗΣ ΛΕΓΕΙ ΑΥΤΩ Ο

  ΠΙΛΑΤΟΣ ΤΙ ΕΣΤΙΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ ΚΑΙ ΤΟΥΤΟI

  “I’m sure even a distinguished Jacobin like yourself has heard this before. Would you like me to translate it for you?”

  Not deigning to reply, she continued to study the two tiny yellowed fragments.

  “Is it very ancient?”

  “The oldest found so far. It’s been dated to around AD 120. It was found in the desert in Egypt by Bernard Grenfell, a British Egyptologist. The consensus is that it’s from around thirty years later than the original written by John in Ephesus. Does that seem a bit much? Come over here, I’ll show you something.”

  He opened an enormous filing cabinet at the other end of his study, and began taking out what Miss Prim could see were facsimiles of papyri, parchments, and codices.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked, pointing to one of them.

  She shook her head.

  “It’s one of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Have you ever heard of them?”

  Miss Prim again shook her head.

  “We owe them to Grenfell too. He and Arthur Hunt, another British archaeologist, found them at the end of the nineteenth century in a rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. They excavated many fragments from great works of antiquity. I think you’ll be delighted with the one you’re holding now. It’s an extract from Plato’s Republic.”

  “Really?” she said, impressed.

  “Really. Do you know how many years separate Plato from the first fragments we have of his works?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I’ll tell you: approximately one thousand two hundred. The texts we have of Plato’s thought and, through them, of Socrates’s—the works we’ve all read and studied—are copies made over ten centuries after the originals were written.”

  He extracted a thick manuscript from the filing cabinet.

  “And this? Any idea what it might be?”

  The librarian, who now seemed to have forgotten the reason for her visit, scrutinized the manuscript.

  “Let’s see,” she said with a smile. “I can decipher this. It’s Latin, at least. Tacitus?”

  The Man in the Wing Chair shook his head.

  “Julius Caesar. De Bello Civili—The Civil War. This is the Laurentianus Ashburnhamensis, the oldest remaining manuscript of this work. Do you know when it dates from? No, of course you don’t. It’s from the tenth century, a little over a thousand years after Julius Caesar wrote the original. The oldest copy we have of the Commentaries on the Gallic War is from around nine hundred and fifty years after it was originally written.”

  “This is all so interesting!” she murmured.

  Her employer took up the copy of the Rylands Papyrus again.

  “Interesting doesn’t come close, Prudencia. It’s absolutely fascinating. Now do you understand what the Rylands Papyrus is? Do you know how many copies just in koine Greek we have of the Four Evangelists’ writings? Around five thousand six hundred. Do you know how many we have of the Commentaries on the Gallic War, for instance? Ten copies. Only ten. And now, look closely,” he said, glancing over another facsimile. “How do you get on with Homer?”

  Miss Prim assured him that if she were ever condemned to life in prison she’d want to take Homer with her. While the Man in the Wing Chair continued talking animatedly of papyri, parchments, and copies, she remembered with sadness why she was there. She would miss him, that was obvious; and not just him, but everything to do with him—the chats, the reading, the debates, the children, the books, and San Ireneo itself.

  “Now that you�
��ve finished work on the library,” her employer was saying at that moment, “maybe you could help me catalogue all of this. I’m giving a lecture in London next month on the Bodmer Papyri.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” replied Miss Prim, heroically resisting the urge to ask what a Bodmer Papyrus was.

  He looked at her, dumbfounded.

  “Why not?”

  She crossed her legs with a deliberate movement and took a deep breath before answering.

  “Because I think my work here is finished. I came to tell you, I’ve decided to leave. I’ve completed the job, so I can’t see any reason to stay.”

  Without a word, the Man in the Wing Chair gathered up the documents and returned them to the filing cabinet. Then he went over to the fireplace, freed an armchair from its heap of books, and gestured for his employee to sit.

  “Has something happened that I should know about, Prudencia?” he asked.

  “Not at all.”

  “Has somebody in this house offended or upset you?”

  “I’ve always been treated wonderfully well here.”

  “Maybe it’s me. Have I said something that’s bothered you? An instance of the insensitivity you continually accuse me of?”

  Miss Prim bowed her head so as to hide her face.

  “It has nothing to do with you,” she whispered.

  “Look at me, please,” he said.

  The librarian raised her head, and at that moment it occurred to her that she would have to come up with an excuse or explanation immediately if she didn’t want him to find out or at least guess why she was leaving.

  “I have to go to Italy,” she said suddenly.

  “To Italy? Why?”

  Quivering with nerves, Miss Prim played with her amethyst ring.

  “It’s to do with my qualifications. No woman’s education is complete without living in Italy for a time.”

  “Surely you don’t need any more qualifications? What would be the purpose?” he asked in consternation. “Are you trying to beat some record?”

  Seeing his expression of bewilderment, she smiled faintly.

  “You obviously don’t listen to your mother,” she said, her eyes glistening. “She has a fine theory that living in Italy has a beneficial influence on the conversation and manners of members of the female sex.”