emerge from the kitchento light their lanterns and dip their hands in the water of the holy well. Mme Sevastopolo embraced Dimi and asked him, when he got back to London, to visit the graves of her relatives. ‘They are all interred at Shooter’s Hill. Perhaps you know this hill?’
As soon as the last group of them moved away, still talking, the men’s voices higher than the women’s, Babikian a kind of alto continuo to be heard above the rest, the bright lights were all lowered, not for reasons of economy, but to return the house to its usual state of half-mourning, the seclusion of the Fener.
The next day his aunt asked him whether it had crossed his mind that he might marry Evgenia.
Our Lives Are Only Lent To Us
N one of the native inhabitants of San Tomás de las Ollas saved any money and this was a moral imperative, although it worked differently from ours. We would think it a sign of respectability to ‘put by’ now so as not to be an encumbrance to our relatives later. We wouldn’t wish to be a burden to our folks. Mrs Clancy put it this way at the get-together, the chicken-fry, which she, as the wife of the representative of the local manager of Providence Williams Marketing (Central American Division) gave from time to time to the American and European community; and in this she showed herself a sympathetic hostess because all the community were much occupied with assurance and its twin sister death, but the native inhabitants, although they too thought about death, had little interest in either saving or assurance. If they accumulated a little money by chance they used it to employ a less fortunate member of their family to do something they found disagreeable and did not wish to do themselves. The benefit to theirrelatives came earlier but was not less welcome for that.
All this serves as an explanation of a visit Mrs Sheridan paid one morning in October to her chauffeur Pantaleón – or rather to his wife – for it was a visit of congratulation on the birth of a new baby. Mrs Sheridan was the widow of a banker who had invested in silver mines (but the mines were nationalised now); her house, with faded shutters and faded pepper trees, was pointed out to strangers on the corner of the main square.
Pantaleón did not ‘live in’ and was not required to work on saints’ days, so that, as Mrs Sheridan did not drive a car, it had taken some organisation for her to make the call at all since in San Tomás it was not possible to travel in a car some days and walk on others; you were either a walker or a driver and it would not have done to come to the vivienda in Calle López Mateos on foot. She had had to ask Señor Azeula, an engineering executive with Mr Clancy’s firm, to call for her.
‘Thank you, Don Salvador,’ she said as they arrived opposite the crumbling, well-like entrance.
‘I’ll stop by for you in ten minutes,’ said Mr Azuela, always available, clever but difficult to like, with his gold teeth and blue suit, opening wide the car door.
Mrs Sheridan walked steadily, not picking her way, out of the entrance shadow across the brilliant sun of the courtyard. Pantaleón’s wife was not at the communal stone wash-tub and Pantaleón himself was not to be seen. Directed by enthusiastic neighbours, Mrs Sheridan found him in the tiny inner patio, sunk in a basket chair, hisface covered with soap; an elderly man was shaving him with a cut-throat razor.
‘Don’t get up, Pantaleón,’ she said but he had done so already, knocking over the chair. His gentle Indian face under the mask of white suds creased with distress. Mrs Sheridan shook hands with the elderly man, who wiped his hands on the seat of his trousers for the purpose – ‘my uncle’; and with two other quarter cousins, not at all young, who had been cleaning respectively his right and left shoe.
‘I am temporarily employing these people so that they can share in a little good fortune I have had,’ Pantaleón explained in
As soon as the last group of them moved away, still talking, the men’s voices higher than the women’s, Babikian a kind of alto continuo to be heard above the rest, the bright lights were all lowered, not for reasons of economy, but to return the house to its usual state of half-mourning, the seclusion of the Fener.
The next day his aunt asked him whether it had crossed his mind that he might marry Evgenia.
Our Lives Are Only Lent To Us
N one of the native inhabitants of San Tomás de las Ollas saved any money and this was a moral imperative, although it worked differently from ours. We would think it a sign of respectability to ‘put by’ now so as not to be an encumbrance to our relatives later. We wouldn’t wish to be a burden to our folks. Mrs Clancy put it this way at the get-together, the chicken-fry, which she, as the wife of the representative of the local manager of Providence Williams Marketing (Central American Division) gave from time to time to the American and European community; and in this she showed herself a sympathetic hostess because all the community were much occupied with assurance and its twin sister death, but the native inhabitants, although they too thought about death, had little interest in either saving or assurance. If they accumulated a little money by chance they used it to employ a less fortunate member of their family to do something they found disagreeable and did not wish to do themselves. The benefit to theirrelatives came earlier but was not less welcome for that.
All this serves as an explanation of a visit Mrs Sheridan paid one morning in October to her chauffeur Pantaleón – or rather to his wife – for it was a visit of congratulation on the birth of a new baby. Mrs Sheridan was the widow of a banker who had invested in silver mines (but the mines were nationalised now); her house, with faded shutters and faded pepper trees, was pointed out to strangers on the corner of the main square.
Pantaleón did not ‘live in’ and was not required to work on saints’ days, so that, as Mrs Sheridan did not drive a car, it had taken some organisation for her to make the call at all since in San Tomás it was not possible to travel in a car some days and walk on others; you were either a walker or a driver and it would not have done to come to the vivienda in Calle López Mateos on foot. She had had to ask Señor Azeula, an engineering executive with Mr Clancy’s firm, to call for her.
‘Thank you, Don Salvador,’ she said as they arrived opposite the crumbling, well-like entrance.
‘I’ll stop by for you in ten minutes,’ said Mr Azuela, always available, clever but difficult to like, with his gold teeth and blue suit, opening wide the car door.
Mrs Sheridan walked steadily, not picking her way, out of the entrance shadow across the brilliant sun of the courtyard. Pantaleón’s wife was not at the communal stone wash-tub and Pantaleón himself was not to be seen. Directed by enthusiastic neighbours, Mrs Sheridan found him in the tiny inner patio, sunk in a basket chair, hisface covered with soap; an elderly man was shaving him with a cut-throat razor.
‘Don’t get up, Pantaleón,’ she said but he had done so already, knocking over the chair. His gentle Indian face under the mask of white suds creased with distress. Mrs Sheridan shook hands with the elderly man, who wiped his hands on the seat of his trousers for the purpose – ‘my uncle’; and with two other quarter cousins, not at all young, who had been cleaning respectively his right and left shoe.
‘I am temporarily employing these people so that they can share in a little good fortune I have had,’ Pantaleón explained in
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