Sky over El Nido by C M Mayo
Toolan, David
THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT Sky over El Hide Stories C. M. Mayo University of Georgia Press, $22.95, 164 pp. David Toolan C. M. Mayo lives in Mexico City, and dedicates this work, a fir,st...
...Chabela cannot tell ("I could not read the rest...
...The sense of these taut tales—as opposed to their obvious craft and surface polish—then catches up with you, in a kind of delayed reaction...
...The final story, "Rainbow's End," is a whirl in every sense, and sends you scrambling back to a name (Peter Rainbow) barely recalled from a walk-on part in the earlier story "Willow"—and then full circle to the first story...
...In Mayo's world those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, provided they are feisty enough, have fewer illusions than the spoiled rich, and fare better...
...The haywire circuits of our whole electrically but not ethically connected global village stand exposed in Mayo's work...
...The rhythm of the reportage exactly captures his growing dedication to the animal (does he love the woman or her cat more...
...I thought I might tap on the glass, call out its name...
...Caught in an unexpected blizzard on a cross-country skiing outing, Jane vainly tries to hold onto the safe and well-defined world that she and Bobby left three days ago...
...Then it yawned...
...David Toolan C. M. Mayo lives in Mexico City, and dedicates this work, a fir,st collection of stories, to her grandfather, Frank R. Mayo, "who knew how to travel the world...
...Another, much sadder study of this theme is to be found in "Majesty," the story of Ana, a painfully footloose little girl on holiday with her absentee mother at a Phoenix luxury hotel, who keeps boasting to anyone who will listen that "I can have whatever I want...
...Mayo is a chip off the old block...
...But for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was...
...Could that have been her mother, a week before she died, rollerblading through New York's Central Park with a black man, "wearing striped stretch pants and a white sweatshirt that said free the...
...Sorry, the glossy celebrity magazines lie...
...At least they have more fun...
...But I never have, not once in my life," says the now stricken, once love-sick playboy-poet in "The Jaguarundi...
...The piece is utterly haunting...
...It was just a game (what got into her...
...The title story gives us the big, sadistic laugh that Argentine jail guards get from prisoners who, forgetting they are about to be tortured or "disappeared," demand maple syrup with their breakfast waffles...
...These thirteen stories span a remarkably variegated set of characters and situations around the world, from upscale jet-setters to the proletariate...
...I call my maid: Bring me a cucumber and a knife...
...The lasting, deeper meaning, you begin to sense, often lies between the lines, in what is not said...
...It sounds like this happens often...
...what?—someone she doesn't even know, a maid's drowning child...
...Before you are through, though, Lola is "ready" for something neither she nor the reader expects...
...David Toolan,SJ., is an associate editor of America.e editor of America...
...She's a travel agent behind a "Formica-top desk with a telephone, a fax, a vase of brilliant paper flowers," she reminds herself as if it were a dream, and Bobby "sells something—computers, or restaurant supplies, or was it bank accounts...
...it will ruin the party...
...Shasta...
...Important things—soulful things— are always disappearing around bends in these elliptical stories, and the haunted searchers of memory often miss the signs—of life, of love, of "ordinary un-happiness" or impending catastrophe...
...She is aware of the riffle of the jacaranda's leaves, the smell of yellow-green grass cuttings, of a great empty space beneath her rib cage" as she dives into the swimming pool to save— who...
...I clapped my hands again, louder this time, and its eyes flicked open...
...as well as the emptiness in his strangely austere life...
...Those who delusively count on permanence had better watch out...
...The narrator, once upon a time a common cane-cutter, is Juventino Perez Lopez, third husband of Chabela del Rio y de la Fuente Contreras, and thanks to a little graft now the governor of Veracruz and an immensely rich man...
...The first story introduces us to the globetrotting, thrice-married Chabela del Rio y de la Fuente Contreras, who is having trouble getting out of bed this day...
...The moral: little shark eats big shark—the best comment on structural readjustment I've read in years...
...I am not surprised...
...In much of this story, he's taking care of his mistress's small, pet jaguar while she's away—living like a monk (with a fat portfolio)—writing unsent poems to her and quietly running through her husband's liquor supply...
...They rarely do...
...Place, time, and people thus stick to your ribs long after you've put a story down...
...In "The Wedding" you think you're once again privy to the disconnected ruminations of another rich Mexico City matron—who in this case is unaccountably avoiding her granddaughter's wedding Mass...
...Sky over El Nido won the 1995 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction...
...three frightened zebras that had escaped from the London zoo...
...we move to cocktail hour in a nameless African nation, as a fastidious G-7 banker tries to explain to the thug who rules the country, between swatting away malarial mosquitos and a burst of machine gun fire (to shoot a whimpering dog), why 73 percent of the next year's sweet potato crop will have to be exported (balance of payments problems...
...Small or large catastrophes, though, sometimes bring release...
...In "The Third Day," disaster interrupts an ordinary young life on the slopes of Mt...
...I clapped my hands, but the jaguarundi didn't move...
...and in "What Fish This Fish...
...Her daughter Carmen, she of the perfectly polished, very long nails, will not understand...
...They're lost, their former identities now whited out, dissolved, and what incongruously races through Jane's mind is that moment years ago when she lured a little Mexican boy to leap off a roof (to his death...
...Not surprisingly, we learn that Chebela's mother, she of the zebras and rollerblading, liked Juventino a lot—two of a kind as it were (though he is grateful grandma didn't leave them those worn Aubussons...
...Years later, after living aimlessly in Cairo and Tangiers, the affair with this woman by then a blank, he seeks out the jaguar, then locked up in a zoo behind glass...
...Churchill," and rescued (or had she...
...On each eyelid, I place a slice of cool...
...An elusive something else disturbs the air...
...Mayo evokes the smells, tastes, and weather of these settings as palpably as she probes the moods of her characters...
...At the overt level, flux and fragmentation rule...
...For years she has been measuring her own success against the chaos she'd concocted for her friend's life—all fantasy...
...I thought I would see another jaguarun-di...
...Accident and coincidence accumulate, turning into either harsh destiny or, ironically, into something akin to an eerie providence...
...And this date with Bobby was to be just a game, too—only as chance would have it, the weather turned, and their map, matches, sunblock, and fruitbars are no match for it...
...she disappeared around a bend...
...The sybaritic Chabela is ostensibly trying to recollect her (now deceased) mother—the woman who reneged on leaving Chabela those Aubusson carpets she'd promised, the wild wife of the ambassador to the Court of Saint James who, while Hitler's bombs rained down, rushed out into the street in her blue silk bathrobe, "a cigar jammed into the side of her mouth like Mr...
...There she is, "running across the grass faster than she can remember running in years and years...
...The jaguarundi looked at me without moving...
...In "Willow," a young New York bond trader returning to visit an old high school classmate in Wisconsin and finds that nothing is what she imagined it to be...
...Chance events work their will—sometimes lethally, sometimes playfully and humorously—in many of these stories...
...Its food dish was covered with flies...
...The plot lines that Mayo's characters imagine they are living, that they (or an omniscient narrator) describe so vividly, frequently aren't to the point...
Vol. 123 • October 1996 • No. 17
