Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

Some of the crowd of strangers down below sauntered away. The elevator began to function again, and the huge weight creaked slowly up the side of the house. Across the court, Jaime’s family could be heard crying and calling inside their flat. After a few moments, the boy’s mother, as if she were too distracted to stay indoors, or as if she had to divert her attention to inconsequential things, rushed out on her balcony and called to someone in the apartment above ours. On a chair in the sun was Jaime’s white sailor suit, which he was to have worn to church. It had long trousers and a navy-blue collar. It had been washed and ironed, and left to dry out thoroughly in the sun. On a stool beside it was his hat, a round sailor hat with “España” in letters of gold on the blue band.

“Look at his suit, all ready!” cried Jaime’s mother, as if one tragedy were not enough. “And his palms!” She disappeared into the dark apartment, and ran out again to the hard light of the morning carrying the palms Jaime was to have taken to church for the blessing. They were wonderfully twisted and braided into a rococo shape, and dangling and shining all over them were gilt and silver baubles that glinted in the sun.

“Terribly bad luck,” said Señor Pinedo. I stared at him, surprised at this most Anglo-Saxon understatement. “If the palms had been blessed earlier,” he went on, “this might not have happened, but, of course, they couldn’t have known. Not that I have beliefs like an old woman.” He gazed at the palms in an earnest way, looking like Salvador Dalí. “Doña Elvira believes they keep off lightning. I wouldn’t go so far. But I still think …” His voice dropped, as if he were not certain, or not deeply interested in, what he did think.

Someone called the mother. She went inside, crying, carrying the palms and the sailor suit. A few of the people around the courtyard had drifted indoors, but most of them seemed reluctant to leave the arena, where — one never knew — something else of interest might take place. They looked down through the tangle of clotheslines to the damp stones of the court, talking in loud, matter-of-fact voices about the accident. They spoke of hospitalization, of amputation — for the rumor that Jaime’s hand was to be amputated had started even before I came out — and of limping and crutches and pain and expense.

“The poor parents,” someone said. A one-armed child would be a terrible burden, and useless. Everyone agreed, just as, on my first day, they had all agreed with Señora Pinedo that it was bad to drug one’s children.

Señor Pinedo, beside me, drew in his breath. “Useless?” he said loudly. “A useless child? Why, the father can claim compensation for him — a lifetime pension.”

“From the angels?” someone shouted up.

“From the building owners, first,” Señor Pinedo said, trying to see who had spoken. “But also from our government. Haven’t any of you thought of that?”

“No,” said several voices together, and everyone laughed.

“Of course he’ll have a pension!” Señor Pinedo shouted. He looked around at them all and said, “Wasn’t it promised? Weren’t such things promised?” People hung out of windows on the upper floors, trying to see him under the overhang of the balcony. “I guarantee it!” Señor Pinedo said. He leaned over the railing and closed his fist like an orator, a leader. The railing shook.

“Be careful,” I said, unheard.

He brought his fist down on the railing, which must have hurt. “I guarantee it,” he said. “I work in the office of pensions.”

“Ah!” That made sense. Influence was something they all understood. “He must be related to little Jaime,” I heard someone say, sounding disappointed. “Still, that’s not a bad thing, a pension for life.” They discussed it energetically, citing cases of deserving victims who had never received a single céntimo. Señor Pinedo looked around at them all. For the first time since I had known him, he was smiling happily. Finally, when it seemed quite clear that nothing more was to happen, the chatter died down, and even the most persistent observers, with a last look at the blood, the cobbles, and the shuttered windows of Jaime’s flat, went indoors.

Señor Pinedo and I were the last to leave the court. We parted, and through the partition I heard him telling his wife that he had much to do that week, a social project connected with the hurt child. In his happiness, he sounded almost childlike himself, convinced, as he must convince others, of the truth and good faith of the movement to which he had devoted his life and in which he must continue to believe.

Later, I heard him repeating the same thing to the pension tenants as they passed his door on the way to church. There was no reply. It was the silence of the dining room when the bulletins were being read, and as I could not see his listeners’ faces, I could not have said whether the silence was owing to respect, delight, apathy, or a sudden fury of some other emotion so great that only silence could contain it.

A t the beginning of the afternoon, just before the luncheon gongs were due to be sounded at the pensions and villas along the cliff, a lull would descend on the beach. It was July; the beach was a baking stretch of shore on the south coast of Spain. At this hour, the sun shone straight overhead. To the west, Gibraltar wavered in heat. The cliffs behind the beach held the warmth of the day and threw it back to the sand. Only the children, protected with sun oil and porous straw hats, seemed not to mind; they paddled in the scummy surf, dug the blistering sands, and communicated in a private language. Heat fell on the bamboo roof of the pavilion and bar. The bar and the tables and the sticky, salty, half-naked tourists were covered alike with zebra stripes of light and shade. Nowhere was cool enough or dark enough. The glasses on the tables were filled to the brim with ice. No one said much.

In the neutral area of tables between the English tourists and the French sat the Tuttlingens, from Stuttgart, and Mrs. Owens, who was American. They lived in the same pension , Villa Margate (whose owner, like many of the permanent residents of this corner of Spain, was English), and, being neither English nor French, had drifted together. Mrs. Owens watched the beach, where her son, aged five, was busy with bucket and spade. She and the Tuttlingens, bored with one another, wished the luncheon gong would be struck at the Margate, so that they would have an excuse to separate.

“She is an extraordinary woman,” Dr. Tuttlingen suddenly remarked. “Heat does not bother her. Nothing does.”

The others stared, and nodded, agreeing. Mrs. Parsters, a white towel draped on her neck like a boa, was coming toward them. She wore her morning costume — a chaste swimming suit made of cretonne, and flopping carpet slippers. Leaving the slippers above the waterline, Mrs. Parsters had put one bare foot into the surf. The bathing, she said, was impossible. “It’s not that it’s warm, and it’s not that it’s cold. It’s all the damned insects and jellyfish, not to mention the orange peelings from the cruise ship that went by this morning.”

As far as anyone sitting in the pavilion could tell, Mrs. Parsters was speaking only to Bobby, her dog, part of whose ancestry was revealed in a noble spitz tail he wore furled on his back like a Prince of Wales plume. A few of the languid tourists looked over, but it was clear, even to innocent newcomers, unfamiliar with beach protocol, that Mrs. Parsters had nothing to say to any of them. She stopped at the pavilion steps and surveyed the scattered children, all of them busy, each child singing or muttering softly to himself.