A Tourist-Guide Mexico
ROSATO, MARY
A Tourist-Guide Mexico The Sign of Taurus. By William Fifield. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 320 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Mary Rosato William Fifield, in The Sign of Taurus, has produced a collage...
...The title refers to the astrological symbol —the bull—and there's a lot of that...
...The thin dryness of the man makes him the most memorable person of the easily forgotten lot...
...The Countess' attitude toward Guido progresses from that of disinterested entrepreneur to that of motherly concern until the moment in her hotel room when she sheds ancient tweeds and slips into the traditional "something comfortable...
...So much for spiritualism...
...With the donning of traditional costume and glass, topaz-colored ring, she goes schizoid and is alternately believer and skeptic, arrogant visionary and timid old woman, victimizer and victim...
...His job is to loiter and lurk, gather information, relay it to the Countess and eventually deliver the customer to match...
...Scattered throughout, to lend authenticity to her discourses on philosophy, telepathy, clairvoyance and transference, are the names of such men as Hegel, Kant, Mesmer, Crookes and Wallace...
...At no point, even in the most agonizing moments (to judge from the transliterated sounds) during a trance, does she achieve the stature of a Madam Flora, for example, in Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Medium...
...If Fifield intended to present a credible portrait of a woman torn between this world and the supernatural, he has failed...
...He is a copra grower living near Aca-pulco and something of the country seems to have penetrated his bones...
...As far as the excitement of the bullfight goes, the author adds nothing new to the now rather voluminous body of literature...
...Whatever has been done here has been done better by Hemingway...
...During a seance, for example, the medium arranges the table so that of the two people on either side of her, only one is actually holding her hand...
...his daughter, Judith —all of whom are superimposed on the fabric of the novel...
...As for summoning up ectoplasm, the medium unobtrusively swallows (that's quite a trick) a few yards of gauze and then, at the most effective moment, regurgitates it for her audience...
...Librado Primavera, matador...
...The Countess puts on her brogues, tosses aside crystal-ball and young man and, with Frau Storker, she sails back to Europe...
...The whole thing revolves around Countess Potolska and her experiences with the occult...
...Assisting the Countess in her crystal-gazing, palm-reading routines is Guido...
...Just for the record, there is one seduction scene, one rape, and one consummated love affair, which seem to have been appended with an eye on the reading public, rather than arising from the characters and situations themselves...
...When she flap-flaps on the scene in her sensible brogues, self-deception, illusion and romance fly out the window...
...Avenida Juarez, Puebla...
...Vilchis, picador...
...From that moment on she vies with other, younger women for Guido's attention...
...There are other characters: Obre-gon, a raiser of brave bulls...
...Running around the perimeter, like a frame, is Mexico...
...Handsome, charming and extremely adaptable, the youthful ex-fascist makes a most successful tout...
...Proper nouns and foreign phrases carry the burden of creating time, climate and setting...
...A phony, tourist-guide Mexico composed of place names— Reforma, Xochimilco, Cuernavaca, Teotihuacan, Tres Marias...
...There isn't much of a plot...
...Reviewed by Mary Rosato William Fifield, in The Sign of Taurus, has produced a collage with all its bits and fragments showing, rather than an integrated novel...
...Mexico is an enigmatic country, but for Fifield it is simply uncomfortable...
...The other hand is free for table-rapping, bell-ringing, etc...
...However, the figure of Riordan is well-drawn...
...The Countess is a sticklike, knuckle-twisting puppet, subject to depression, fatigue and probably aching bunions...
...Impoverished and in a strange land, she decides to utilize her past researches into the frauds and trickeries practiced by fortunetellers to become one herself...
...Frau Storker, a refugee tourist guide, deals in nothing but facts and is the epitome of dull reality...
...He serves as a foil against whom the Countess advances her endless arguments in favor of a belief in psychic phenomena...
...Pasted up, large, in the middle of the masonite is the adjectival silhouette of an old, Jewish, Polish, Countess refugee-become-for-tune-teller, spinning the wheel of the zodiac...
...She is saved from a fatal foolishness by the arrival of an old stolid friend, Frau Storker...
...He dabs away at a flat, sunburned landscape that might just as well be Waco, Texas...
...According to Fifield, clothes do make the woman...
...There's a fertility symbol, lusty young Guido, aspiring from a lower corner...
...And there are brave bulls, not so brave bullfighters, a bull fight and much aficionado chitchat spatter-dashed about...
...Riordan...
...For those interested in "do-it-yourself" spiritualism there are one or two tricks worth mentioning...
Vol. 43 • July 1960 • No. 29
