Awakening of Miss Prim

by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

  Miss Prim squeezed her hostess’s hands.

  “I’ve always been a realistic woman, Herminia, and realistic women were once realistic little girls. I was very young when I read the book. At the time I didn’t like my mother, but I knew I had one. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t have one, but I could imagine the kind of mother I’d be when I grew up. And that mother was Marmee.”

  The editor of the San Ireneo newspaper stood up, went to her bookshelves, and took down a small brown volume with its title embossed in gold letters on the spine.

  “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for all of this,” she sighed.

  “There is,” said Miss Prim. “There’s no woman in the house. None at all.”

  After reflecting for a moment, Herminia approached Prudencia and resolutely held out to her the book, an 1893 edition of Little Women.

  “You say there’s no woman in the house? I think there is, Prudencia. Now there is.”

  Miss Prim had just left Herminia Treaumont at the newspaper office when she heard a pleasant, familiar voice behind her.

  “Prudencia, I’ve been meaning to call you for days. How are you? It seems incredible in a place as small as this, but I’d completely lost track of you.”

  She turned to find a smiling Horacio Delàs, dressed in a red scarf and shabby navy-blue coat and loaded down with parcels.

  “I was expecting you to kiss my hand, Horacio, but I see that’s not possible,” she joked.

  He bowed courteously, indicating all the parcels with a nod of his head.

  “I’d like nothing more than to kiss your hand, my dear, and would do so if I weren’t burdened with a terrible chore.”

  “Chore?”

  “What would you call the task of buying useless gifts for fifteen children and a dozen adults?”

  Miss Prim smiled. She found the man very likable. There was something in his manner, something warm and reassuring, that made her feel very much at ease.

  “A skill, maybe?”

  “Skill? Wait until you see your present before being so generous.”

  “You haven’t bought me one too, have you?” she asked, touched.

  “Of course I have. You wouldn’t expect us to leave you out at Christmas, as if you’d been a naughty child? Don’t be surprised if you receive a number of presents. I know for a fact that you’ve become very popular in this funny little community of ours.”

  Miss Prim shivered, with pleasure rather than from the cold, in her soft cashmere coat.

  “I’m sorry, Prudencia, I’m a swine keeping you outside in this cold. Why don’t you come to the bookshop with me? I’ve got to buy something for that old monk who keeps himself hidden away from us in his cell.”

  Miss Prim said she’d be delighted to spend some time shopping herself. The streets of San Ireneo were already adorned with Christmas decorations. Windows hung with garlands of holly and heather, lit candles, Nativity scenes and poinsettias drew passersby into the shops. Inside, shopkeepers offered customers cups of tea and hot chocolate, biscuits, doughnuts, and cupcakes dusted with sugar to look like snow.

  “What are you thinking of buying him?” asked Miss Prim once they were in the bookshop.

  “I’m a sentimental old man, you know,” sighed her friend. “I went to see him at the abbey the other day and we talked about our childhoods. He told me about his schooldays, his mother’s love, the catechism . . . ”

  “You’re going to buy him a catechism? Of the Council of Trent, I assume,” she interrupted with a smile.

  Without a word, Horacio went to a shelf and withdrew a small red book with a very worn cover. The librarian peered at the spine.

  “Abbé Fleury?”

  “The Historical Catechism, 1683, a first edition. A real gem.”

  “Quite,” said a soft, polite voice behind them. “You can’t imagine how hard it was to get hold of. It only arrived from Edinburgh this morning.”

  Miss Prim turned to see an extremely thin, severe-looking woman with mischievous, intelligent eyes.

  “You must be the famous Prudencia Prim. Please, allow me to introduce myself: I’m Virginia Pille, San Ireneo’s bookseller.”

  “Delighted to meet you, Mrs. Pille,” said Miss Prim, holding out her hand.

  “Please, call me Virginia. Everybody does.”

  “I think I should tell you, Prudencia, that you’re talking to the most powerful woman in the village,” whispered Horacio.

  The owner of the bookshop laughed, a clear and crystalline sound.

  “Nonsense, Horacio, everyone knows that Herminia is the most powerful woman in San Ireneo. Not a leaf stirs in this village without her knowledge.”

  “Maybe, but all the leaves that stir in this village belong to your books,” he said affectionately.

  Virginia laughed happily again.

  “You have a lovely bookshop,” said Prudencia, looking around. The old shelves were painted blue, charmingly rickety tables piled high with books bore penknife inscriptions, reading lamps were dotted about in corners, and there was a vintage silver samovar on the counter.

  “Thank you, I think so too. Can I offer you both a cup of tea?” asked the bookseller.

  While she was making the tea, Miss Prim inhaled deeply and asked: “Krasnodar?”

  Virginia lifted her gaze and peered at her with curiosity.

  “Yes. What a keen sense of smell! I have it picked, dried, and packed for me specially. I have some good friends in old Russia.”

  “In Sochi?”

  “That’s right. You know how it’s prepared?”

  Prudencia nodded with a smile, savoring the intense aroma of the tea as it pervaded the shop. She sat down at the small table behind the counter and contentedly admired the antique Meissen tea service and exquisitely mismatched silver teaspoons. For a woman like herself, she reflected, this was bliss.

  “I’m afraid you ladies are too refined for me,” sighed Horacio. “Please enlighten a poor man who’s been drinking ordinary tea all his life.”

  “As I understand it, in Sochi they pick only the top three leaves from the plant and discard the rest. It’s the secret of the flavor,” explained Miss Prim.

  “That, and the fact that it’s only harvested from May to September. The climate does the rest,” added the bookseller.

  Horacio took a sip of tea and warmly praised its quality. Then he indicated the ancient edition of the catechism. “So, how difficult was it to get hold of?”

  “For him, nothing could be too much trouble,” said the bookseller simply.

  Miss Prim, who had been leafing through some children’s books, turned to ask: “What’s so special about this monk? Why is he so popular?”

  Virginia looked at her friend in mute interrogation.

  “Doesn’t she know him?”

  He shook his head. Virginia looked down at the samovar lid, with which she was toying, before replying.

  “The most obvious answer is that, together with the man who employs you, he founded this community.”

  “And the less obvious answer?”

  “That he’s the only person I know who has one foot in this world and one foot in the other.”

  Miss Prim started.

  “You mean, he’s dying?”

  “Dying?” said Virginia, with another of her tinkling laughs. “No, I hope not! Why would you think that?”

  “Let’s see if we can explain it without shocking you, Prudencia,” interjected Horacio. “What Virginia means is that in this old Benedictine monk, Plato’s allegory of the cave has been realized. He’s the prisoner freed from the cave who returns here to the bleak world of shadows with the rest of us, after having seen the real world.”

  San Ireneo’s bookseller added quietly, looking at Miss Prim: “Horacio phrases everything in his own poetic way, Prudencia, but it’s really quite simple: our dear Father is a man who sees things the rest of us cannot.”

  Hearing these words, Prudencia felt a wave of weary indignation wash ove
r her. He could see things the others could not? It couldn’t escape one’s notice that there were more eccentrics in this village than seemed possible. On principle she mistrusted people who claimed to see the invisible. In the world she knew—a safe, clean, comfortable world—invisible things were invisible. If they couldn’t be seen, they didn’t exist. Of course, she had nothing against people seeking some kind of crutch to make life more bearable—spiritual beliefs, philosophies, children’s stories, emotions, feelings, sensations—as long as it was clear that such things were unreal or, if they were real, they existed only in the mind or heart of whoever experienced them. In the real world, as she conceived it, everything could be captured or recorded in some way. Whether through poetry or art, literature or music, everything had to be capable of being translated into the visible world. Invisible things, she repeated to herself, existed only in the imagination. And then the image of dark, mysterious mirrors suddenly flashed through her mind.

  “So you mean he’s a mystic?” she asked coldly.

  “If he is, he’s too humble to admit it,” said Horacio, signaling to the bookseller that she should pour him another cup of tea from the samovar. “But I have to say that if something exists, and I speak as a skeptic, he’s on strangely familiar terms with it, whatever it is.”

  Miss Prim smiled smugly.

  “And how do you deduce that? Is it something in his eyes? Does he have an aura around him?”

  “It’s not what one sees in his eyes,” said Virginia gently, “as much as what he sees in the eyes of others.”

  “You mean he can read your thoughts?” asked the librarian with a wry expression.

  “We mean that he knows what you are.”

  Miss Prim suddenly felt uneasy. She found the idea deeply troubling: an old man going around knowing what other people were. Not only troubling, but inappropriate. At best, it was a subtle, mysterious way of invading the privacy of others; at worst, it was gross deception. One way or another, there was something improper about it; improper and unpleasantly morbid. Miss Prim flatly refused to have someone know her essence. She refused both in principle and in practice.

  “And I thought you were a man of science,” she said sadly.

  “Ah, am I not?” her friend replied in mock surprise.

  “You can’t be, and at the same time believe that this man divines things.”

  “Of course I can’t. But that’s not what I said. What I said was that ‘this man,’ as you call him, knows things.”

  Virginia quietly began clearing the table.

  “But isn’t that one and the same?” insisted Miss Prim.

  “Definitely not. I challenge you to go and talk to him sometime.”

  “I don’t think I will, thank you.”

  “Why not? Are you afraid?”

  Prudencia looked peeved.

  “Afraid? Of a poor, elderly monk?”

  Horacio glanced at Virginia before replying.

  “Tell me, Prudencia. Is there a black hole in that young life of yours? Something you have to live with but would like to be rid of? A stain on your conscience? A fear not dealt with? A rumble of despair?”

  “And what if there is?” answered the librarian with her chin held high. “We all have not just one, but many of those.”

  “You’re right, we all do. But what I’m trying to say is that he knows what they are. He knows what’s in people’s minds—he can read them like a book.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Just go and see him. He may not say anything revelatory—he doesn’t always. But whatever he says, it will hit the mark, I assure you.”

  After paying for the book and thanking the bookseller for the tea and conversation, they left the shop and emerged onto the streets of San Ireneo, which were cold but aglow with Christmas lights.

  “I still maintain that I’m surprised to hear all this from a man who isn’t exactly gullible,” said Miss Prim.

  Laden down with yet another parcel—Abbé Fleury’s catechism—Horacio smiled affably.

  “That’s just it, Prudencia. My skepticism isn’t of the Pyrrhonist sort, but scientific. I accept any premise that has empirical evidence to support it.”

  “Really?” said the librarian. “So is there empirical evidence for this faculty you’ve mentioned that lets the old monk know what one is?”

  Her companion stopped and looked straight into her eyes.

  “Is there empirical evidence? Of course there is.”

  “And what is it, may I ask?”

  Miss Prim guessed what Horacio was going to say a split second before he said it.

  “The black holes in my own life, of course.”

  6

  News of Mr. Mott’s disappearance shattered the peace of San Ireneo with the abrupt violence of a punch in the solar plexus. Miss Prim heard about it at the butcher’s. She was buying an enormous turkey which she intended to roast for Christmas dinner—behind the cook’s back, though she wasn’t quite sure yet how she would accomplish this.

  “I never liked him,” declared the butcher. “I said as much when I saw the way he served his customers. He always seemed to be looking past you, like a caged lion dying to escape. Poor Miss Mott, men like that never change.”

  The librarian dashed out of the shop and ran to the schoolhouse. Reaching the front door, she stopped short, out of breath, not daring to ring the bell. She just stood, in silence, the huge turkey in her arms. Movements behind the net curtains, slow and furtive, raised her hopes that someone had seen she was there. A few minutes later the door opened and the Man in the Wing Chair, looking grave, asked if she would like to come in.

  “So he’s gone?” she said, still breathless from running with the heavy turkey.

  The classroom was deserted. There were no children, no overalls, or pencil boxes, or chalk at the blackboard, or maps, or wooden models for geometry. A shiver ran down the librarian’s spine. Who had left? Mr. or Mrs. Mott?

  “They’ve both gone,” said the Man in the Wing Chair slowly as the two of them each sank into a diminutive classroom chair, “but not together, I’m afraid. Maybe my mother was right, after all. I’m so sorry for Eugenia. She didn’t deserve this.”

  Miss Prim felt pity for the schoolteacher, though she still didn’t understand what had gone on.

  “Where has Miss Mott gone? What’s happened?”

  “Mr. Mott has done it again. He didn’t come home last night. He left her a note saying that he’d tried, but he felt trapped. She’s packed her bags and gone to her sister’s. I don’t think she’ll come back.”

  The librarian looked at her employer sympathetically. She slid out of her seat and went to sit beside him.

  “I think you’re too intelligent to feel guilty.”

  He looked up at her and smiled absently.

  “I don’t feel guilty, I feel responsible. Eugenia is a very romantic, fragile woman. She’s so sensitive. I should have been more cautious and given her better advice.”

  On hearing the word sensitive, Miss Prim flinched.

  “What’s wrong with sensitivity?”

  “Absolutely nothing. It’s a wonderful quality, but it’s not ideal for thinking.”

  “Do you mean that we sensitive people don’t know how to think?”

  The Man in the Wing Chair looked at her again, this time with curiosity.

  “Ah, so we’re talking about you, are we?”

  Prudencia reddened and began to rise from her chair, but he stopped her.

  “Of course we’re not talking about me,” she said, head held high, “it’s just that I don’t understand what sensitivity’s got to do with imprudence, naìveté, or lack of judgment, which is what I think you mean when speaking about poor Miss Mott.”

  “Sensitivity is a gift, Prudencia, I’m perfectly well aware of that. But it’s not a suitable tool for guiding thought, when it can be disastrous. It’s the same with ears and food. A wonderful organ, the ear. A miracle of design, intended down to its las
t cell to facilitate hearing, but try using it to eat with and see how you get on.”

  She laughed, causing her companion to give a genuine smile for the first time.

  “So you think that Eugenia Mott was trying to eat with her ears and you weren’t strong, or skillful, or responsible enough to tell her so? Is that it?”

  “It doesn’t sound very flattering, but I suppose that is it.”

  After a few moments’ reflection, Miss Prim suddenly rose and turned to face her employer.

  “Well, let me tell you, you’re incredibly arrogant.”

  He looked up, shocked by this outburst and the triumphant grin on her face.

  “Are you trying to start an argument?” he asked in disbelief. “Because if you are, I have to warn you, this is the wrong day for it.”

  “Not at all,” she replied. “I’m just trying to help. You should know that the world doesn’t run on your advice. It might seem strange, but that’s the way it is. Yes, you may impress some and dazzle others with your learning and those good manners, even when you’re being self-important, but don’t delude yourself. The people around you listen but that doesn’t mean they always do what you say.”

  The Man in the Wing Chair now looked confused. Taking advantage of this, she went on.

  “There’s no point denying it. This morning you got up convinced that Eugenia Mott’s unhappiness was entirely down to you and your supposed irresponsibility. This not only places a huge, unwarranted burden on your shoulders but also shows an excessive regard for your own opinion, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Would it make any difference if I did mind?”

  Miss Prim paused, apparently pleased with the effect of her words. She realized she’d managed to change his mood. Miss Mott’s plight was very sad and Miss Prim felt profoundly sorry. But she was sure that he had acted loyally and properly in advising the teacher as he had, and Miss Prim wasn’t prepared to let him berate himself. Now he was slightly angry with her, but at least he no longer appeared dejected and his voice had recovered the beat of war drums that had so alarmed her when they’d first met. But this wasn’t enough. She had to continue the attack. And she knew exactly how to do it.