La Perla

‘My son will read and open books, and my son will write and know how to write. And my son will do arithmetic, and all this will set us free because he will know – he will know, and through him we too will know.’ This was Kino’s radiant prophecy, after fishing for the Pearl of the World off the coast of the Gulf of California. It was ‘as perfect as the moon’, ‘as big as a seagull’s egg’, ‘it absorbed the light and filtered it, refracting it into a silvery glow’. Selling it would have meant ushering in a new destiny. The impoverished Mexican fisherman owned nothing but a canoe; he lived in a thatched hut with his wife Juana and infant Coyotito on the outskirts of a ‘town with brick and plastered houses’. There, the news ‘swept in like a foaming wave’, ‘faster than children can rush to tell the tale’. Then, people from all walks of life, “people with things to sell and favours to ask”, began to take an interest in Kino. Suddenly, the Pearl entered ‘into everyone’s dreams, reflections, plans, desires, daydreams, needs, appetites and longings; and since there was only one person standing in their way—and that was Kino—he strangely ended up being everyone’s enemy. The news stirred up something infinitely dark and evil in the heart of the city’. Shifty and deceitful merchants sought to drive down its value; greedy and pompous doctors offered to look after it; furtive, savage shadows visited the hut to ransack it, threatening the fisherman’s very life as dusk fell. “This pearl is like a sin. Throw it away, Kino,” Juana pleaded, sensing the impending ruin. But echoing in the young Indian’s ears was the Song of the Pearl, which had drowned out that of the Family: “So beautiful it was, so delicate, and it had its own music – a music of promise and joy, a guarantee for the future.” Everything comes crashing down; almost nothing is spared. The house, the canoe and the family’s peace of mind – forced to flee to the mountains and hunted down by two hounds and ‘a man on horseback with a rifle’. Kino had lost one world without gaining another, whilst the Song of Evil ‘whirled round in his head’ and ‘clashed with the Song of the Pearl’.

Luigi Sampietro, editor at Bompiani for the new edition of John Steinbeck’s "La perla" (translated by Bruno Maffi), writes: “The paradox of fairy tales, and of a parable such as La perla, is that the magic of the moment – the revelation – persists throughout the entire narrative: first as a simple miracle and then as a luminous shadow gradually fading away, until the two protagonists encounter the tragic dimension of existence.” A book in which words form a soundtrack, silence symbolises the absolute – the voice of God – and nature, ever-present, echoes the events.

 

John Steinbeck
, "The Pearl
", Bompiani, 112 pp., 12 euros