The Pearl by John Steinbeck - PDF

PENGUIN BOOKS The Pearl Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty- ve miles from the Paci c Coast – and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best ction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he in...

PENGUIN BOOKS The Pearl Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty- ve miles from the Paci c Coast – and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best ction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next ve years he supported himself as a labourer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his rst novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Paci c Grove, he published two Californian ctions, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and nancial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed course regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the Californian labouring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937) and the book considered by many his nest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a lm maker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play–novelette The Moon is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Journal (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he travelled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966) and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The ‘East of Eden’ Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights(1976) and Working Days: The Journals of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962. Linda Wagner–Martin is Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she teaches modern and contemporary American literature, women’s studies, and courses in biography and autobiography. Among her recent books are Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography (1994), The Modern American Novel (1989) and Sylvia Plath: A Biography (1987). She is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States and its companion anthology of women’s writing. JOHN STEINBECK The Pearl With an Introduction by Linda Wagner-Martin Drawings by José Clemente Orozco PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, NSMC, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd,5Watkins Street, Denver Ext 4, Johannesburg 2094, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered O ces: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England First published in the USA by The Viking Press, 1947 First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd 1948 Published with The Red Pony in a Viking Compass edition 1965 Published in Penguin Books 1976 The Pearl published in Penguin Books 1993 This edition published in the USA in Penguin Books 1994 Published in Great Britain in Penguin Classics 2000 1 Copyright 1945 by John Steinbeck Copyright renewed Elaine Steinbeck, John Steinbeck IV and Thom Steinbeck, 1973 Introduction copyright © Linda Wagner-Martin, 1994 All rights reserved Introduction originally published in Woman’s Home Companion as ‘The Pearl of the World’ Drawings by José Clemente Orozco The moral right of the author of the introduction and of the illustrator has been asserted Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser Contents Introduction by Linda Wagner-Martin Suggestions for Further Reading The Pearl Introduction In 1939, John Steinbeck—who was considered a radical California writer, best known at the time for In Dubious Battle, his 1936 novel about unions and strike activity— found himself on the cover of Time Magazine. His new novel, The Grapes of Wrath, was a runaway success, making him the target for hate mail and FBI scrutiny, as well as commercial fame. In this long narrative about the dispossessed Okies (farmers from Oklahoma, devastated by years of drought on land that was a part of the so-called Dust Bowl) who traveled to California in search of any kind of work on pro table farms, Steinbeck seemed again to sympathize with collective strategies, to hint that communist cooperation was the way to settle economic inequities in the United States. Besides being a best-seller,The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize for ction in 1940. And it was quickly made into a lm starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, a lm that many viewers found objectionable (it was the rst American-made movie to show a pregnant woman on camera, for example; and it was assuredly and consistently about poor people, those whose lifestyles were so primitive that Americans with enough money for movie tickets did not like to be reminded that fellow citizens lived this way). Steinbeck would have enjoyed the fame and money that his ction brought him, but the persecution that resulted from his writing about the poor, people marginalized by the changing industrial patterns of the times, frightened him. The modest and soft-spoken Steinbeck, who had spent years and considerable personal energy studying ocean ecology, had trouble de ning himself as a subversive, an unpatriotic man who was a threat to the national interest. Seemingly at the top of his profession with the appearance of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck instead found himself going through torturous self-assessment. By 1944–1945, when he wrote his novella The Pearl, he had pretty much decided that his view of himself was more credible than the versions the media, or the FBI, had created. But these years of personal questioning, and personal quest, had caused Steinbeck to come to terms with what wealth meant, with what an obsession with wealth (and in his case, perhaps, fame) could do to a community, as well as to the identity of the person experiencing that wealth and fame. As he had done before, he drew his personal convictions into the frame of the story he was writing, and when he chose the title for The Pearl, he intended readers to recall the biblical “pearl of great price.” In that parable, the jewel for which the merchant trades everything he owns becomes the metaphor for Heaven. Everything in a person’s earthly existence is worthless when compared with the joys of living with the Eternal Father in His Kingdom, or so the gospel of Matthew states. In Steinbeck’s parable, however, when “the great pearl, perfect as the moon… as large as a sea-gull’s egg,” is found by the illiterate and innocent Mexican man Kino, his discovery became a way for Steinbeck to assess the American dream and to nd it wanting. To become successful, to gain possessions and prominence, to become a force within a community—these were aspects of the dream that everyone recognized and few questioned. But for Steinbeck, the great notoriety of The Grapes of Wrath had been traumatic. After its publication, he turned inward and interrogated the values he had assumed he shared with most Americans. As a result of his experience, he saw that the established people in communities cared little about anyone else’s misfortunes but would do whatever they could to keep prestige and position for themselves. The lives of the simple Kino and his wife, Juana, illustrate the fall from innocence of people who had assumed that nding wealth would erase their problems. Steinbeck had earlier written about such characters in his short story “Flight” and in Tortilla Flat (the paisanos—now Chicanos—of Monterey), as he would later write about a more racially mixed group in Cannery Row (Mack and his friends). He wrote, ironically, that these characters’ good points—“kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling”—were the traits most likely to lead to failure in the dog-eat-dog capitalistic system. Steinbeck’s life had been one of lower middle-class values as he learned the craft of writing. Born in 1902 in Monterey County, California, he grew up with Mexican American friends, and became fascinated by their lack of concern for more prestigious WASP values. He felt pulled between the two cultures. As a college student, he studied at Stanford University, majoring in marine biology, a science that attracted him by its beauty and systemic order. In 1925 he dropped out of school to work his way to New York City through the Panama Canal. There he worked as a journalist and practiced the art of writing, publishing a ctionalized life of Sir Henry Morgan (Cup of Gold) in 1929.  Returning to California, for two winters Steinbeck lived alone in the High Sierra mountains, writing and developing a philosophy that showed his respect for the symmetry and sensibility of the natural world. His personal pantheism replaced any other organized religion (in Cannery Row, his version of the Lord’s Prayer begins “Our Father who art in nature”). He then worked in a trout hatchery and on fruit ranches (laboring with Mexican Americans in the orchards), and as a surveyor, an apprentice painter, and a chemist. In 1932 he published Pastures of Heaven, a collection of short stories about the working-class people who lived in the secluded valley of that name. In 1935, after he had sold the screen rights to Tortilla Flat, his ction about the paisanos of Monterey, he took a trip to Mexico for several months. As a native Californian, Steinbeck was aware of how much Mexico meant to the American culture that surrounded him, and he was curious about—and interested in—the country. It was becoming clear to him that any system of morality—one of the things for which he had searched during his years working outside the privileged occupations in the States—could sometimes be more easily found among the poor than among the nancially successful. If Steinbeck was cynical, his cynicism at least had its roots in his real-life experiences. One result of that Mexican experience was Of Mice and Men, his 1937 novella that became a successful play, where he again probed the tragedy inherent in lives crippled by the brutality of poverty and ignorance. In Lennie’s case, his retarded mind combined with his powerful physique led inexorably to predictable tragedies.  Between the often frightening reactions to The Grapes of Wrath and his earlier ction, and Steinbeck’s work on The Pearl in 1944, came other experiences that helped to con rm his feelings about the values of the poor who knew little except how to be genuine, truthful, and usually moral. He served as a journalist during World War II, living in danger on the Italian front. In contrast to that bleak, chaotic time, he had one of his most idyllic periods when, in the spring of 1940, he sailed with Ed Ricketts, his friend and partner in a small biological laboratory, from Monterey up the west shore of the Gulf of California to Angeles Bay and then across to Puerto San Carlos east and south to Agiabampo Estuary. During the six weeks of their travels in Baja, collecting marine and terrestrial organisms and animals, they lived among the Mexican people, whom they liked because of their tough yet humane values. So important was this journey to Steinbeck at this time in his life, rocked by the unexpected criticism of his work and slanderous innuendos, that, with Ricketts, he wrote Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. What he had thought to be the peace of California life, with its live-and-let-live attitude toward people of color, came to an abrupt halt in 1942 and 1943, when Los Angeles was racked by race riots. In the east-side barrios, Mexican and Mexican American adolescents and young men had formed pachucos, or gangs, and as uniforms wore wide-brimmed hats and long-tailed coats, complete with ankle-length watch chains. Dressed in these zoot suits, the Mexican men were targets for racial discrimination. The trial of twenty-four pachucos in the summer of 1942 for the murder of Jose Diaz near “The Sleepy Lagoon” swimming hole led to many convictions, and the men had served two years of their sentences before the second-degree murder convictions were overturned for lack of evidence. Even more visible were the ten days of the so-called Zoot Suit Race Riots in June of 1943, when U.S. servicemen from the Navy training facility in the barrio attacked the zoot-suited Mexicans. Abetted by police, the servicemen went free while the Mexicans were arrested. Like the unreasonable persecution of the Okies, this turn against people of Mexican background puzzled and angered Steinbeck. During the early 1940s Steinbeck also wrote screenplays for four lms, among them the documentary The Forgotten Village, about the con icts between modern medicine and superstitious folk cures in a Mexican town. During the lming of that project, he returned to Mexico twice, and when he took his wife, Gwyn, for a third visit, friends there suggested that he write a screenplay for a lm to be produced and lmed in Mexico, a lm that might create a true picture of Mexican life because it could bypass the Hollywood studios. Emilio Fernandez, Mexico’s best-known auteur, and Gebrial Figuora, his cinematographer, wanted to make the lm with Steinbeck. The Pearl, then, grew out of this invitation to write a text suitable for lming, and Steinbeck’s strategies in it are often lmic: his use of only a few characters, action pared to key scenes that involve intensely emotional interchanges, and ways for readers/viewers to visualize that emotion. He also used a cinematic point of view, with some sections presented in close-up and others at medium or distant range. Like an objectively presented documentary text, The Pearl focused on showing the reader/viewer what life for Kino and Juana was like. Some of the elements of the story are drawn from The Forgotten Village (i.e., the rapacious physician), but the source of the narrative is much more clearly the tale of the young Mexican boy who nds a pearl of great value, a legend that Steinbeck narrated in Sea of Cortez. For the next several years, through his World War II experiences and his own unhappy personal life, Steinbeck searched for a story suitable for a Mexican-made and directed lm. Dissatis ed as he had become with American materialism and the pressure to be loyal to a system that oppressed the poor, Steinbeck focused on the chance to write something truthful. He also hoped his screenplay would promote understanding among races. As he thought about the pearl story, however, the legend seemed much too simple. In the Sea of Cortez narrative, the boy nding the pearl was intent on using it for money to buy drink, sex, and clothes. The tragedy in this version of the tale was that the pearl dealers in La Paz (the ironically named Village of Peace) would not give him a reasonable price for the pearl, and after realizing that he was the victim of their collusion, he buried the jewel. Owning such valuable property, he became the target for attack, and that night he was beaten. The next night, when he stayed with a friend, both boys were beaten; later, when he traveled away from the village, he was again tracked and beaten. So he returned to La Paz, dug up the pearl, cursed it, and threw it into the sea. In Steinbeck’s words, “He was a free man again with his soul in danger and his food and shelter insecure. And he laughed a great deal about it.” While a reader might question what was comic about an endangered soul and insecure living, one of Steinbeck’s points was that, as a single man, his protagonist could take chances with life. His existence was not threatened by his giving up the fortune. What was important about the legend as Steinbeck recalled it is that the boy had the sense to get rid of the object that was going to cost him his life. The original pearl story, then, is a parable of materialism, an example of the dangers of prosperity in a culture that thinks nothing of killing for money. But the pearl story as Steinbeck wrote it several years later is di erent, and it shows how complex his own state of mind was at this time of conjunction of war experience, Hollywood lm experience, material success from The Grapes of Wrath and other ventures, with all the good things tempered radically by the deaths he had observed in the theater of war, as well as by the death of his marriage. The year 1944 was a time of personal change for John Steinbeck, and he was apprehensive about that change. His personal situation in uenced his creation of The Pearl. When Steinbeck wrote his version of the story, he made the young man into the older Kino, a responsible married man with a wife and child to provide for. Kino is probably named for Eusebius Kino, the Jesuit missionary and explorer in the Gulf region (it was he who proved that lower California was a peninsula—a baja—rather than an island). In Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck had shown his knowledge of many of the explorers and missionaries, both Mexican and American, involved with the settlement of the Baja. That journal too has a spiritual overlay, as Steinbeck used it to explore several sets of principles for leading a good life. Juana, the name he chose for Kino’s wife, means “woman,” and as such she becomes the answerer, the solace for her husband’s disappointed idealism. As in his earlier ction, particularly in the characters of Ma and Pa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck drew male and female as complementary characters, with the woman having wisdom, common sense, and authority to balance the man’s more wistful and sometimes unrealistic hopes. With tempered sympathy, Steinbeck acknowledges that Kino is obsessed with hanging on to the pearl, and that in equating it with his pride, he fails to see that his more useful role toward his family would be protecting them. When he confesses that the pearl has become his soul. Kino admits that he will endanger his family rather than relinquish his prize, and his abuse of Juana when she tries to get rid of the pearl illustrates his growing fanaticism. In that unexpected violence, Steinbeck shows how far from any Jungian individuation Kino’s wealth has taken him—he is a monster of a male ego, not a caring and supportive husband. But behind Kino’s obviously rash behavior stands the tranquil wife, who watches over him while he sleeps and starts the re each morning. Though all-knowing and all-caring, Juana in her role as submissive wife does not have enough power to make Kino listen to her warnings. Juana is also the mother of Kino’s most prized possession, his son, Coyotito. Kino says that his wish in nding the pearl and recognizing its value is that Coyotito be educated, that he become a savior gure to lead his village out of the abject poverty in which it exists. For most of the novella, Kino is so lled with this urgent hope that he does not hear Juana’s counsel; her role becomes signi cant only near the end of the tragic tale, when the formative events have already occurred. Rather, Kino is led by an internal song he calls “The Song of the Family,” a melody that haunts him with its sound; “this is safety, this is warmth, this is the Whole.” In some respects, The Pearl is a parable of a personal journey toward that indivisible unity, or “wholeness,” described by Carl Jung. Kino’s dilemma over the pearl may also be read as a metaphor for his struggle to claim his unconscious self and integrate the “shadow” side, the femaleness within his male identity. He must come to see life, at least in part, as Juana does. Narratively, Steinbeck complicates the parable of the pearl of great price when he adds the vulnerability of the baby, rst introducing the child’s helplessness in the scorpion scene. No matter how attentive his parents are, no matter that both are within arm’s reach of the child, they cannot prevent the insect’s biting him. Once bitten, the child becomes the object of attention, an icon to test people’s values. The villagers know his worth to Kino and Juana; they understand Juana’s desire that he receive formal medical treatment, and they follow the young family to the house of the doctor. But when the white man refuses to treat the child, they also understand that money is his only god, and Kino obviously is poor. Later, when the doctor reverses his position and comes to Kino’s hut (only to poison the child and then give him an antidote—both visits serving as the means for him to look for the pearl’s possible hiding place), the community also understands that duplicity. During the night, the physician sends someone to steal the jewel. He has put the family’s real jewel, their son, at risk in the process of enabling himself to pro t from Kino’s simple luck. Extending the plot to include a child, then, creates a kind of vulnerability that putting either Kino or Juana in danger would not have conveyed. The perversion of sheer innocence, and its ravishment, sets in motion a dynamic like that of medieval morality plays. Steinbeck, well read in medieval texts, created his own version of the fourteenth-century alliterative poem Pearl, an elegy by the anonymous poet for the death of his daughter before she was two years old. In this 1212-line poem, the sorrowful poet persona sees a vision of his child as the young woman she would have become. As a result of the dream or mystical experience, he plunges into a river, attempting to join his child in her blessed, heavenly state. His journey, a plunge into the dark night of the soul, leads to his awakening, and to his eventual acceptance of the child’s loss. The poem closes with the poet’s renunciation of his earthly pain: “Upon this hill this destiny I grasped, / Prostrate in sorrow for my pearl. / And afterward to God I gave it up.” As the poet moves past his understandable grief for the loss of his child, he comes to realize the limits of human will and the con nes of human consciousness. He places his trust in God. Steinbeck transfers the resonance of the medieval legend to his own Pearl and forces the reader to see that Kino’s journey to safeguard the pearl becomes an allegory of spiritual struggle. In the course of protecting the precious jewel, Kino kills a man who is nameless, formless, a kind of evil in himself—and he does so without remorse. As he takes more and more evil into his own behavior, nally killing three more men as he rationalizes that he must perform these acts to guard the pearl that will improve the lot of his family, Kino endangers his own morality. The explorations of his namesake in the Baja wilderness are tame compared with Kino’s exploration of the levels of human sin. In the shifting value of the pearl—from great material worth into an objecti cation of sheer evil—Steinbeck leads the reader to see that its eventual loss will be a necessity. Again, by focusing on the family dynamic, Steinbeck adds both life and complexity to his narrative. Kino is not an individual Everyman; he is husband and father as well as man. In fact, being parents complicates all decision making for both Kino and Juana: Kino justi es his wanting the money from the pearl to better his son’s life; his is no sel sh desire. Relinquishing the jewel consequently becomes almost impossible, for to give up the money the pearl will bring means relegating Coyotito to the kind of life he and his family have always known. But in a cyclic way, with so much hope invested in Coyotito, his vulnerability frightens both his parents. Juana insists that the doctor see him; Kino, at the farthest edge of his imagining—with the idea that his son could receive an education—begins to understand personal fear. His premonition of wrongdoing, that he has taken on something much larger than he can control, starts with that hopeful idea.  Kino’s older brother, Juan Tomás, is another important addition to Steinbeck’s reworking of the original legend. The reactions of Juan Tomás support Kino’s almost inarticulate recognition of what is happening to him, giving the reader a way to verify that Kino’s understanding is accurate. Because Steinbeck’s setting for The Pearl is almost dreamlike, and certainly unspeci c as to geographic location, to provide this con rming voice is necessary: This is a community, a set of people, a family; and yet for all the strength of their unity, they cannot stave o the evil that haunts Kino once he possesses the pearl. Juan Tomás as the older brother has a wider understanding: He knows that Kino has been cheated, but he also knows that they have all been cheated, through history. His is the voice of reason, the voice of continuity, and the voice of caution. Early in the novella he warns Kino that he has no model for what he is attempting—and he concludes that such ambition must be wrong, for no one else has attempted such an act. Despite this warning, however, Juan Tomás is loyal to Kino; and Steinbeck is careful to set the inner circle of family and friends against the broader, suspect community. People in the inner circle want Kino to succeed, even though their imaginations are stunned with the thought of his undertaking. They serve as a Greek chorus to echo, and reify, Kino’s thoughts. They literally follow him to see what he is going to do next, and their presence (and the mu ed echo of their words as they explain to those farther away what is happening) serves as validation. In form, then, as well as in the undercurrent of doom that pervades The Pearl, Steinbeck creates the e ects of the Greek tragedies he admired. Linguistically, however, he abjured the stately and restrained language of Euripides and Sophocles. Yet in shaping voices for his Mexican speakers, he created a digni ed speech that resonates with pain. Steinbeck had a di cult task in capturing a non- English-speaking culture in his own language, yet the chief movement in the narrative occurs in the dialogue, in the voiced interchanges among the Mexican characters. Kino must ask to see the doctor. When he is refused, and his paltry eight seed pearls are handed back through the fence to accompany the lie that the doctor is out, he gives up any attempt to speak and relies on force as he bashes his hand against the wrought-iron fence that closes against him. When he asks the pearl dealer for more money, his hesitant speech again cripples him—but Steinbeck makes it clear that no matter what his eloquence, the dealers’ coalition would have kept the price low. In the moving scenes between Kino and Juana, few words are used, even though those scenes are decisive points in the narrative. To replace verbal meaning, Steinbeck creates a technique suitable for a lm script but unexpected in a written text: He uses music both to express mood and to replace dialogue. His “Song of the Family,” a positive and encouraging sound, is set against the “Song of Evil” or the “Song of the Pearl.” What happens in the struggles among the refrains anticipates the narrative con icts. Steinbeck uses these musical motifs to suggest the complexity of Kino’s decisions, as in his description of the “Song of the Family” underlying the “Song of Danger,” when Kino is ready to take on the three trackers after he has hidden Juana and Coyotito in the cave. His slow descent into the morass of evil, naked so that his white clothing does not give him away, is surely a metaphor for the person going to meet the test of his life, for his soul, alone. As Steinbeck forces the reader to listen for something other than language in The Pearl, he moves back toward an earlier culture of oral communication instead of written. (Jackson Benson notes that Steinbeck was reading folktales in Spanish as he began writing The Pearl, evidently looking for a tonal base that would allow him the resonance of that language without leaving the English his readers expected.) His use of the parable form was another means of insisting that Kino’s story was archetypal, common to all human interaction. Steinbeck often used literary forms in ironic ways: Here, the parable that instructs non- believers in what they must do to enter the kingdom of heaven takes on a kind of sly cynicism as it becomes a vehicle to picture a corrupt and murderous culture. The morality inscribed in The Pearl is a reverse kind of instruction: Kino has done nothing wrong except fail to recognize evil when it appears (in the object of the beautiful pearl). He can live as pure a life as he knows, but nothing will bring sanity back into his existence except getting rid of the object of beauty. His community cannot help him; neither can he help himself, unaware and unsuspecting as he is. The irony of Steinbeck’s pearl narrative is that no god appears to save Kino, his child, or his family. He must save himself—and he can do that only by reconciling the female with the male, only by listening to Juana.  His wife speaks wisely throughout the narrative when she tells him repeatedly that the pearl is evil and would destroy them, but it remains for Kino to learn to live with tragedy before he can hear her. (Steinbeck shows Juana’s broad philosophical base when he remarks that she draws on a “combination of prayer and magic, her Hail Marys and her ancient intercession.”) As the book ends, Kino’s o ering her the pearl so that she can throw it away is his apology for his obtuseness, his sinful error in failing to understand that greed can corrupt the soul. Her refusing the jewel so that he can empower himself by casting it into the sea is Juana’s means of allowing Kino to reclaim some part of his badly damaged manhood. This interplay between husband and wife suggests that their marriage will survive the death of their child, but Steinbeck has also created such a poignant tenor of mourning that few readers expect either Kino or Juana to recover their earlier happiness. The metaphoric qualities of The Pearl convey much of its meaning. For some readers, the bleak ending of the novella is despairing—and disspiriting. For others, responsive to Steinbeck’s musical motifs and the obvious harmony in the resolve of Juana and Kino to get rid of the pearl, the ending is a relief, a release, as the couple attempt to go back to their earlier life. Steinbeck suggests that Kino has learned to accept defeat, and his attitude toward the tragic death of Coyotito is the appropriate one of ineradicable grief for the loss of a human being, rather than the anger at his own loss of his male heir.  Steinbeck has also made it clear that losing the pearl is inevitable: Power accrues to those who already have it. Neither Kino nor his family nor his community have any chance of hanging on to the prize fortune has accidentally given them. Understanding that they are fortunate to have their lives, given the rapacity of most human beings (even, or particularly, the doctor), Kino and Juana are reconciled to live their poor lives with gratefulness. It is less a happy ending than it is a stoically resolved one. The narrative that Steinbeck thought he would write was subtly changed in his telling. His recent biographer Jackson Benson sees The Pearl as a re ection of the synthesis taking place within Steinbeck. His ongoing scienti c studies provided the ideas that “would form a bridge from his early work, poetic and visionary, to the so-called sociological works of the middle period, from In Dubious Battle to The Pearl.” Benson calls attention to the discrepancy in nomenclature: These works are literature, not sociology. But in them Steinbeck’s concern for the real lives of characters that might exist dominates his portraiture. His personal sympathy for the down-and-out of society—whether in the States or in Mexico—led him to draw their circumstances vividly. Steinbeck’s ction provides convincing details, so that the reader believes in the characters’ dilemmas. In the weeks he spent in 1944 getting ready to write The Pearl, Steinbeck found “the little book” more di cult to complete than he had expected. To a friend, he wrote that he had visited the “beautiful” ruins of Mitla and Monte Alban near Oaxaca, as well as San Miguel Allende, commenting on the strangeness of his impressions and his sense that he was experiencing a personal rebirth. After he had nished Cannery Row, and Gwyn had given birth to their son, Thom, he was able to begin work on The Pearl in earnest. Once the family was settled down and living together, Steinbeck felt that his life was once more whole, and Gwyn then helped write the theme music from what he described as “ancient Indian music long preceding the Conquest.” Working on The Pearl was an unusual process, one that absorbed much of Steinbeck’s energies. He commented about its being so experimental that he feared it would fail; in a letter to friends, he called the story “folklore” and noted that he had tried “to give it that set-aside, raised-up feeling that all folk stories have.” Once The Pearl was nished, in late January of 1945, he wrote with his usual modesty, “It’s a brutal story but with ashes of beauty I think.” The process of lming the work dragged on through the summer of 1945, but in 1947 and 1948, it became the rst Mexican-made lm to be commercially distributed in the States. The Pearl was published in 1947 to coincide with the lm’s release, though it had earlier appeared as The Pearl of the World in the December 1945 issue of The Woman’s Home Companion. The reaction to Steinbeck’s nativity story—with Kino, Juana, and Coyotito as his Holy Family—was unimpressive. Although some critics today consider it one of his best postwar accomplishments, it was often dismissed when it was reviewed at all as too slight an e ort to warrant serious criticism. Louis Owens speaks to that body of what he calls “contradictory criticism” of The Pearl, ranging from calling the novella “defective” to a “triumph.” In contrast, readers of the 1990s came to appreciate the work’s broadly based sympathies, its rare understanding of otherness, its insistence on a man’s achieving his own psychological health, and its eloquent lyricism that remains in the reader’s eye and ear as if it were almost a visualization of Kino and Juana’s travail. Suggestions for Further Reading Benson, Jackson J., ed. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. —. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Viking, 1984. Britch, Carroll, and Cli Lewis. “Shadow of The Indian in the Fiction of John Steinbeck.” In Rediscovering Steinbeck: Revisionist Views of His Art, Politics, and Intellect, ed. Cli Lewis and Carroll Britch. Lewiston, Va.: Edwin Mellen, 1989, pp. 125–154. Davis, Robert Murray, ed. Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cli s, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. DeMott, Robert J. Steinbeck’s Reading. New York: Garland, 1984. Fontenrose, Joseph. “Sea of Cortez.” In Davis, Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 122–134. Garza, Rodolfo O. de la, et. al., eds. The Mexican American Experience: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1986. Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. John Steinbeck, The Years of Greatness, 1936–1939. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Hughes, R. S.John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Jung, Carl G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, ed. Sir Herbert Read, et. al. 2nd ed., vol. 9 of The Collected Works ofC. G. Jung (New York: Bollingen Foundation, Inc., 1975). Kiernan, Thomas. The Intricate Music: A Biography of John Steinbeck. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, 1981. Millichap, Joseph R. Steinbeck and Film. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983. Morris, Harry. “The Pearl: Realism and Allegory.” In Davis, Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 149–162. Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Simmonds, Roy S. “Steinbeck’s The Pearl: Legend, Film, Novel.” In Benson, The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, pp. 173–184. —. “Steinbeck’s The Pearl: A Preliminary Textual Study.” Steinbeck Quarterly 22 (Winter-Spring, 1989), pp. 16–34. St. Pierre, Brian. John Steinbeck, the California Years. San Francisco, Calif: Chronicle Books, 1983. Steinbeck, Elaine, and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, New York: Viking, 1975. Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945. —. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking, 1939. —. “My Short Novels.” In Benson, The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, pp. 15–17. —. The Pearl. New York: Viking, 1947. —. with Edward F. Ricketts. Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. New York: Viking, 1941. —. with Edward F. Ricketts. The Log from The Sea of Cortez, ed. Richard Astro. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973. Timmerman, John H. “The Shadow and the Pearl: Jungian Patterns in The Pearl.” In Benson, The Short Novels ofJohn Steinbeck, pp. 143–161. The Pearl “In the town they tell the story of the great pearl” how it was found and how it was lost again. They tell of Kino, the sherman, and of his wife, Juana, and of the baby, Coyotito. And because the story has been told so often, it has taken root in every man’s mind. And, as with all retold tales that are in people’s hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere. “If this story is a parable, perhaps everyone takes his own meaning from it and reads his own life into it. In any case, they say in the town that…” 1 Kino awakened in the near dark. The stars still shone and the day had drawn only a pale wash of light in the lower sky to the east. The roosters had been crowing for some time, and the early pigs were already beginning their ceaseless turning of twigs and bits of wood to see whether anything to eat had been overlooked. Outside the brush house in the tuna clump, a covey of little birds chittered and urried with their wings. Kino’s eyes opened, and he looked rst at the lightening square which was the door and then he looked at the hanging box where Coyotito slept. And last he turned his head to Juana, his wife, who lay beside him on the mat, her blue head shawl over her nose and over her breasts and around the small of her back. Juana’s eyes were open too. Kino could never remember seeing them closed when he awakened. Her dark eyes made little re ected stars. She was looking at him as she was always looking at him when he awakened. Kino heard the little splash of morning waves on the beach. It was very good—Kino closed his eyes again to listen to his music. Perhaps he alone did this and perhaps all of his people did it. His people had once been great makers of songs so that everything they saw or thought or did or heard became a song. That was very long ago. The songs remained; Kino knew them, but no new songs were added. That does not mean that there were no personal songs. In Kino’s head there was a song now, clear and soft, and if he had been able to speak of it, he would have called it the Song of the Family.  His blanket was over his nose to protect him from the dank air. His eyes icked to a rustle beside him. It was Juana arising, almost soundlessly. On her hard bare feet she went to the hanging box where Coyotito slept, and she leaned over and said a little reassuring word. Coyotito looked up for a moment and closed his eyes and slept again. Juana went to the re pit and uncovered a coal and fanned it alive while she broke little pieces of brush over it. Now Kino got up and wrapped his blanket about his head and nose and shoulders. He slipped his feet into his sandals and went outside to watch the dawn. Outside the door he squatted down and gathered the blanket ends about his knees. He saw the specks of Gulf clouds ame high in the air. And a goat came near and sni ed at him and stared with its cold yellow eyes. Behind him Juana’s re leaped into ame and threw spears of light through the chinks of the brushhouse wall and threw a wavering square of light out the door. A late moth blustered in to nd the re. The Song of the Family came now from behind Kino. And the rhythm of the family song was the grinding stone where Juana worked the corn for the morning cakes. The dawn came quickly now, a wash, a glow, a lightness, and then an explosion of re as the sun arose out of the Gulf. Kino looked down to cover his eyes from the glare. He could hear the pat of the corncakes in the house and the rich smell of them on the cooking plate. The ants were busy on the ground, big black ones with shiny bodies, and little dusty quick ants. Kino watched with the detachment of God while a dusty ant frantically tried to escape the sand trap an ant lion had dug for him. A thin, timid dog came close and, at a soft word from Kino, curled up, arranged its tail neatly over its feet, and laid its chin delicately on the pile. It was a black dog with yellow-gold spots where its eyebrows should have been. It was a morning like other mornings and yet perfect among mornings. Kino heard the creak of the rope when Juana took Coyotito out of his hanging box and cleaned him and hammocked him in her shawl in a loop that placed him close to her breast. Kino could see these things without looking at them. Juana sang softly an ancient song that had only three notes and yet endless variety of interval. And this was part of the family song too. It was all part. Sometimes it rose to an aching chord that caught the throat, saying this is safety, this is warmth, this is the Whole. Across the brush fence were other brush houses, and the smoke came from them too, and the sound of breakfast, but those were other songs, their pigs were other pigs, their wives were not Juana. Kino was young and strong and his black hair hung over his brown forehead. His eyes were warm and erce and bright and his mustache was thin and coarse. He lowered his blanket from his nose now, for the dark poisonous air was gone and the yellow sunlight fell on the house. Near the brush fence two roosters bowed and feinted at each other with squared wings and neck feathers ru ed out. It would be a clumsy ght. They were not game chickens. Kino watched them for a moment, and then his eyes went up to a ight of wild doves twinkling inland to the hills. The world was awake now, and Kino arose and went into his brush house. As he came through the door Juana stood up from the glowing re pit. She put Coyotito back in his hanging box and then she combed her black hair and braided it in two braids and tied the ends with thin green ribbon. Kino squatted by the re pit and rolled a hot corncake and dipped it in sauce and ate it. And he drank a little pulque and that was breakfast. That was the only breakfast he had ever known outside of feast days and one incredible esta on cookies that had nearly killed him. When Kino had nished, Juana came back to the re and ate her breakfast. They had spoken once, but there is not need for speech if it is only a habit anyway. Kino sighed with satisfaction—and that was conversation. The sun was warming the brush house, breaking through its crevices in long streaks. And one of the streaks fell on the hanging box where Coyotito lay, and on the ropes that held it. It was a tiny movement that drew their eyes to the hanging box. Kino and Juana froze in their positions. Down the rope that hung the baby’s box from the roof support a scorpion moved slowly. His stinging tail was straight out behind him, but he could whip it up in a ash of time. Kino’s breath whistled in his nostrils and he opened his mouth to stop it. And then the startled look was gone from him and the rigidity from his body. In his mind a new song had come, the Song of Evil, the music of the enemy, of any foe of the family, a savage, secret, dangerous melody, and underneath, the Song of the Family cried plaintively. The scorpion moved delicately down the rope toward the box. Under her breath Juana repeated an ancient magic to guard against such evil, and on top of that she muttered a Hail Mary between clenched teeth. But Kino was in motion. His body glided quietly across the room, noiselessly and smoothly. His hands were in front of him, palms down, and his eyes were on the scorpion. Beneath it in the hanging box Coyotito laughed and reached up his hand toward it. It sensed danger when Kino was almost within reach of it. It stopped, and its tail rose up over its back in little jerks and the curved thorn on the tail’s end glistened. Kino stood perfectly still. He could hear Juana whispering the old magic again, and he could hear the evil music of the enemy. He could not move until the scorpion moved, and it felt for the source of the death that was coming to it. Kino’s hand went forward very slowly, very smoothly. The thorned tail jerked upright. And at that moment the laughing Coyotito shook the rope and the scorpion fell. Kino’s hand leaped to catch it, but it fell past his ngers, fell on the baby’s shoulder, landed and struck. Then, snarling, Kino had it, had it in his ngers, rubbing it to a paste in his hands. He threw it down and beat it into the earth oor with his st, and Coyotito screamed with pain in his box. But Kino beat and stamped the enemy until it was only a fragment and a moist place in the dirt. His teeth were bared and fury ared in his eyes and the Song of the Enemy roared in his ears.  But Juana had the baby in her arms now. She found the puncture with redness starting from it already. She put her lips down over the puncture and sucked hard and spat and sucked again while Coyotito screamed. Kino hovered; he was helpless, he was in the way. The screams of the baby brought the neighbors. Out of their brush houses they poured—Kino’s brother Juan Tomás and his fat wife Apolonia and their four children crowded in the door and blocked the entrance, while behind them others tried to look in, and one small boy crawled among legs to have a look. And those in front passed the word back to those behind—“Scorpion. The baby has been stung.” Juana stopped sucking the puncture for a moment. The little hole was slightly enlarged and its edges whitened from the sucking, but the red swelling extended farther around it in a hard lymphatic mound. And all of these people knew about the scorpion. An adult might be very ill from the sting, but a baby could easily die from the poison. First, they knew, would come swelling and fever and tightened throat, and then cramps in the stomach, and then Coyotito might die if enough of the poison had gone in. But the stinging pain of the bite was going away. Coyotito’s screams turned to moans. Kino had wondered often at the iron in his patient, fragile wife. She, who was obedient and respectful and cheerful and patient, she could arch her back in child pain with hardly a cry. She could stand fatigue and hunger almost better than Kino himself. In the canoe she was like a strong man. And now she did a most surprising thing. “The doctor,” she said. “Go to get the doctor.” The word was passed out among the neighbors where they stood close packed in the little yard behind the brush fence. And they repeated among themselves, “Juana wants the doctor.” A wonderful thing, a memorable thing, to want the doctor. To get him would be a remarkable thing. The doctor never came to the cluster of brush houses. Why should he, when he had more than he could do to take care of the rich people who lived in the stone and plaster houses of the town. “He would not come,” the people in the yard said. “He would not come,” the people in the door said, and the thought got into Kino. “The doctor would not come,” Kino said to Juana. She looked up at him, her eyes as cold as the eyes of a lioness. This was Juana’s rst baby—this was nearly everything there was in Juana’s world. And Kino saw her determination and the music of the family sounded in his head with a steely tone. “Then we will go to him,” Juana said, and with one hand she arranged her dark blue shawl over her head and made of one end of it a sling to hold the moaning baby and made of the other end of it a shade over his eyes to protect him from the light. The people in the door pushed against those behind to let her through. Kino followed her. They went out of the gate to the rutted path and the neighbors followed them.  The thing had become a neighborhood a air. They made a quick soft-footed procession into the center of the town, rst Juana and Kino, and behind them Juan Tomás and Apolonia, her big stomach jiggling with the strenuous pace, then all the neighbors with the children trotting on the anks. And the yellow sun threw their black shadows ahead of them so that they walked on their own shadows. They came to the place where the brush houses stopped and the city of stone and plaster began, the city of harsh outer walls and inner cool gardens where a little water played and the bougainvillaea crusted the walls with purple and brick-red and white. They heard from the secret gardens the singing of caged birds and heard the splash of cooling water on hot agstones. The procession crossed the blinding plaza and passed in front of the church. It had grown now, and on the outskirts the hurrying newcomers were being softly informed how the baby had been stung by a scorpion, how the father and mother were taking it to the doctor. And the newcomers, particularly the beggars from the front of the church who were great experts in nancial analysis, looked quickly at Juana’s old blue skirt, saw the tears in her shawl, appraised the green ribbon on her braids, read the age of Kino’s blanket and the thousand washings of his clothes, and set them down as poverty people and went along to see what kind of drama might develop. The four beggars in front of the church knew everything in the town. They were students of the expressions of young women as they went in to confession, and they saw them as they came out and read the nature of the sin. They knew every little scandal and some very big crimes. They slept at their posts in the shadow of the church so that no one crept in for consolation without their knowledge. And they knew the doctor. They knew his ignorance, his cruelty, his avarice, his appetites, his sins. They knew his clumsy abortions and the little brown pennies he gave sparingly for alms. They had seen his corpses go into the church. And, since early Mass was over and business was slow, they followed the procession, these endless searchers after perfect knowledge of their fellow men, to see what the fat lazy doctor would do about an indigent baby with a scorpion bite. The scurrying procession came at last to the big gate in the wall of the doctor’s house. They could hear the splashing water and the singing of caged birds and the sweep of the long brooms on the agstones. And they could smell the frying of good bacon from the doctor’s house. Kino hesitated a moment. This doctor was not of his people. This doctor was of a race which for nearly four hundred years had beaten and starved and robbed and despised Kino’s race, and frightened it too, so that the indigene came humbly to the door. And as always when he came near to one of this race, Kino felt weak and afraid and angry at the same time. Rage and terror went together. He could kill the doctor more easily than he could talk to him, for all of the doctor’s race spoke to all of Kino’s race as though they were simple animals. And as Kino raised his right hand to the iron ring knocker in the gate, rage swelled in him, and the pounding music of the enemy beat in his ears, and his lips drew tight against his teeth—but with his left hand he reached to take o his hat. The iron ring pounded against the gate. Kino took o his hat and stood waiting. Coyotito moaned a little in Juana’s arms, and she spoke softly to him. The procession crowded close the better to see and hear. After a moment the big gate opened a few inches. Kino could see the green coolness of the garden and little splashing fountain through the opening. The man who looked out at him was one of his own race. Kino spoke to him in the old language. “The little one—the rst born—has been poisoned by the scorpion,” Kino said. “He requires the skill of the healer.” The gate closed a little, and the servant refused to speak in the old language. “A little moment,” he said. “I go to inform myself,” and he closed the gate and slid the bolt home. The glaring sun threw the bunched shadows of the people blackly on the white wall. In his chamber the doctor sat up in his high bed. He had on his dressing gown of red watered silk that had come from Paris, a little tight over the chest now if it was buttoned. On his lap was a silver tray with a silver chocolate pot and a tiny cup of eggshell china, so delicate that it looked silly when he lifted it with his big hand, lifted it with the tips of thumb and fore nger and spread the other three ngers wide to get them out of the way. His eyes rested in pu y little hammocks of esh and his mouth drooped with discontent. He was growing very stout, and his voice was hoarse with the fat that pressed on his throat. Beside him on a table was a small Oriental gong and a bowl of cigarettes. The furnishings of the room were heavy and dark and gloomy. The pictures were religious, even the large tinted photograph of his dead wife, who, if Masses willed and paid for out of her own estate could do it, was in Heaven. The doctor had once for a short time been a part of the great world and his whole subsequent life was memory and longing for France. “That,” he said, “was civilized living”—by which he meant that on a small income he had been able to keep a mistress and eat in restaurants. He poured his second cup of chocolate and crumbled a sweet biscuit in his ngers. The servant from the gate came to the open door and stood waiting to be noticed. “Yes?” the doctor asked. “It is a little Indian with a baby. He says a scorpion stung it.”  The doctor put his cup down gently before he let his anger rise. “Have I nothing better to do than cure insect bites for ‘little Indians’? I am a doctor, not a veterinary.” “Yes, Patron,” said the servant. “Has he any money?” the doctor demanded. “No, they never have any money. I, I alone in the world am supposed to work for nothing—and I am tired of it. See if he has any money!” At the gate the servant opened the door a tri e and looked out at the waiting people. And this time he spoke in the old language. “Have you money to pay for the treatment?” Now Kino reached into a secret place somewhere under his blanket. He brought out a paper folded many times. Crease by crease he unfolded it, until at last there came to view eight small misshapen seed pearls, as ugly and gray as little ulcers, attened and almost valueless. The servant took the paper and closed the gate again, but this time he was not gone long. He opened the gate just wide enough to pass the paper back. “The doctor has gone out,” he said. “He was called to a serious case.” And he shut the gate quickly out of shame. And now a wave of shame went over the whole procession. They melted away. The beggars went back to the church steps, the stragglers moved o , and the neighbors departed so that the public shaming of Kino would not be in their eyes. For a long time Kino stood in front of the gate with Juana beside him. Slowly he put his suppliant hat on his head. Then, without warning, he struck the gate a crushing blow with his st. He looked down in wonder at his split knuckles and at the blood that owed down between his ngers. 2 The town lay on a broad estuary, its old yellow plastered buildings hugging the beach. And on the beach the white and blue canoes that came from Nayarit were drawn up, canoes preserved for generations by a hard shell-like water-proof plaster whose making was a secret of the shing people. They were high and graceful canoes with curving bow and stern and a braced section midships where a mast could be stepped to carry a small lateen sail. The beach was yellow sand, but at the water’s edge a rubble of shell and algae took its place. Fiddler crabs bubbled and sputtered in their holes in the sand, and in the shallows little lobsters popped in and out of their tiny homes in the rubble and sand. The sea bottom was rich with crawling and swimming and growing things. The brown algae waved in the gentle currents and the green eel grass swayed and little sea horses clung to its stems. Spotted botete, the poison sh, lay on the bottom in the eel-grass beds, and the bright-colored swimming crabs scampered over them. On the beach the hungry dogs and the hungry pigs of the town searched endlessly for any dead sh or sea bird that might have oated in on a rising tide. Although the morning was young, the hazy mirage was up. The uncertain air that magni ed some things and blotted out others hung over the whole Gulf so that all sights were unreal and vision could not be trusted; so that sea and land had the sharp clarities and the vagueness of a dream. Thus it might be that the people of the Gulf trust things of the spirit and things of the imagination, but they do not trust their eyes to show them distance or clear outline or any optical exactness. Across the estuary from the town one section of man groves stood clear and telescopically de ned, while another mangrove clump was a hazy black-green blob. Part of the far shore disappeared into a shimmer that looked like water. There was no certainty in seeing, no proof that what you saw was there or was not there. And the people of the Gulf expected all places were that way, and it was not strange to them. A copper haze hung over the water, and the hot morning sun beat on it and made it vibrate blindingly. The brush houses of the shing people were back from the beach on the right-hand side of the town, and the canoes were drawn up in front of this area. Kino and Juana came slowly down to the beach and to Kino’s canoe, which was the one thing of value he owned in the world. It was very old. Kino’s grandfather had brought it from Nayarit, and he had given it to Kino’s father, and so it had come to Kino. It was at once property and source of food, for a man with a boat can guarantee a woman that she will eat something. It is the bulwark against starvation. And every year Kino re nished his canoe with the hard shell-like plaster by the secret method that had also come to him from his father. Now he came to the canoe and touched the bow tenderly as he always did. He laid his diving rock and his basket and the two ropes in the sand by the canoe. And he folded his blanket and laid it in the bow.  Juana laid Coyotito on the blanket, and she placed her shawl over him so that the hot sun could not shine on him. He was quiet now, but the swelling on his shoulder had continued up his neck and under his ear and his face was pu ed and feverish. Juana went to the water and waded in. She gathered some brown seaweed and made a at damp poultice of it, and this she applied to the baby’s swollen shoulder, which was as good a remedy as any and probably better than the doctor could have done. But the remedy lacked his authority because it was simple and didn’t cost anything. The stomach cramps had not come to Coyotito. Perhaps Juana had sucked out the poison in time, but she had not sucked out her worry over her rst-born. She had not prayed directly for the recovery of the baby—she had prayed that they might nd a pearl with which to hire the doctor to cure the baby, for the minds of people are as unsubstantial as the mirage of the Gulf. Now Kino and Juana slid the canoe down the beach to the water, and when the bow oated, Juana climbed in, while Kino pushed the stern in and waded beside it until it oated lightly and trembled on the little breaking waves. Then in co-ordination Juana and Kino drove their double-bladed paddles into the sea, and the canoe creased the water and hissed with speed. The other pearlers were gone out long since. In a few moments Kino could see them clustered in the haze, riding over the oyster bed. Light ltered down through the water to the bed where the frilly pearl oysters lay fastened to the rubbly bottom, a bottom strewn with shells of broken, opened oysters. This was the bed that had raised the King of Spain to be a great power in Europe in past years, had helped to pay for his wars, and had decorated the churches for his soul’s sake. The gray oysters with ru es like skirts on the shells, the barnacle-crusted oysters with little bits of weed clinging to the skirts and small crabs climbing over them. An accident could happen to these oysters, a grain of sand could lie in the folds of muscle and irritate the esh until in self- protection the esh coated the grain with a layer of smooth cement. But once started, the esh continued to coat the foreign body until it fell free in some tidal urry or until the oyster was destroyed. For centuries men had dived down and torn the oysters from the beds and ripped them open, looking for the coated grains of sand. Swarms of sh lived near the bed to live near the oysters thrown back by the searching men and to nibble at the shining inner shells. But the pearls were accidents, and the nding of one was luck, a little pat on the back by God or the gods or both. Kino had two ropes, one tied to a heavy stone and one to a basket. He stripped o his shirt and trousers and laid his hat in the bottom of the canoe. The water was oily smooth. He took his rock in one hand and his basket in the other, and he slipped feet rst over the side and the rock carried him to the bottom. The bubbles rose behind him until the water cleared and he could see. Above, the surface of the water was an undulating mirror of brightness, and he could see the bottoms of the canoes sticking through it. Kino moved cautiously so that the water would not be obscured with mud or sand. He hooked his foot in the loop on his rock and his hands worked quickly, tearing the oysters loose, some singly, others in clusters. He laid them in his basket. In some places the oysters clung to one another so that they came free in lumps. Now, Kino’s people had sung of everything that happened or existed. They had made songs to the shes, to the sea in anger and to the sea in calm, to the light and the dark and the sun and the moon, and the songs were all in Kino and in his people— every song that had ever been made, even the ones forgotten. And as he lled his basket the song was in Kino, and the beat of the song was his pounding heart as it ate the oxygen from his held breath, and the melody of the song was the gray-green water and the little scuttling animals and the clouds of sh that itted by and were gone. But in the song there was a secret little inner song, hardly perceptible, but always there, sweet and secret and clinging, almost hiding in the counter-melody, and this was the Song of the Pearl That Might Be, for every shell thrown in the basket might contain a pearl. Chance was against it, but luck and the gods might be for it. And in the canoe above him Kino knew that Juana was making the magic of prayer, her face set rigid and her muscles hard to force the luck, to tear the luck out of the gods’ hands, for she needed the luck for the swollen shoulder of Coyotito. And because the need was great and the desire was great, the little secret melody of the pearl that might be was stronger this morning. Whole phrases of it came clearly and softly into the Song of the Undersea.  Kino, in his pride and youth and strength, could remain down over two minutes without strain, so that he worked deliberately, selecting the largest shells. Because they were disturbed, the oyster shells were tightly closed. A little to his right a hummock of rubbly rock stuck up, covered with young oysters not ready to take. Kino moved next to the hummock, and then, beside it, under a little overhang, he saw a very large oyster lying by itself not covered with its clinging brothers. The shell was partly open, for the overhang protected this ancient oyster, and in the lip-like muscle Kino saw a ghostly gleam, and then the shell closed down. His heart beat out a heavy rhythm and the melody of the maybe pearl shrilled in his ears. Slowly he forced the oyster loose and held it tightly against his breast. He kicked his foot free from the rock loop, and his body rose to the surface and his black hair gleamed in the sunlight. He reached over the side of the canoe and laid the oyster in the bottom. Then Juana steadied the boat while he climbed in. His eyes were shining with excitement, but indecency he pulled up his rock, and then he pulled up his basket of oysters and lifted them in. Juana sensed his excitement, and she pretended to look away. It is not good to want a thing too much. It sometimes drives the luck away. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with God or the gods. But Juana stopped breathing. Very deliberately Kino opened his short strong knife. He looked speculatively at the basket. Perhaps it would be better to open the oyster last. He took a small oyster from the basket, cut the muscle, searched the folds of esh, and threw it in the water. Then he seemed to see the great, oyster for the rst time. He squatted in the bottom of the canoe, picked up the shell and examined it. The utes were shining black to brown, and only a few small barnacles adhered to the shell. Now Kino was reluctant to open it. What he had seen, he knew, might be a re ection, a piece of at shell accidentally drifted in or a complete illusion. In this Gulf of uncertain light there were more illusions than realities. But Juana’s eyes were on him and she could not wait. She put her hand on Coyotito’s covered head. “Open it,” she said softly.  Kino deftly slipped his knife into the edge of the shell. Through the knife he could feel the muscle tighten hard. He worked the blade lever-wise and the closing muscle parted and the shell fell apart. The lip-like esh writhed up and then subsided. Kino lifted the esh, and there it lay, the great pearl, perfect as the moon. It captured the light and re ned it and gave it back in silver incandescence. It was as large as a sea-gull’s egg. It was the greatest pearl in the world. Juana caught her breath and moaned a little. And to Kino the secret melody of the maybe pearl broke clear and beautiful, rich and warm and lovely, glowing and gloating and triumphant. In the surface of the great pearl he could see dream forms. He picked the pearl from the dying esh and held it in his palm, and he turned it over and saw that its curve was perfect. Juana came near to stare at it in his hand, and it was the hand he had smashed against the doctor’s gate, and the torn esh of the knuckles was turned grayish white by the sea water. Instinctively Juana went to Coyotito where he lay on his father’s blanket. She lifted the poultice of seaweed and looked at the shoulder. “Kino,” she cried shrilly. He looked past his pearl, and he saw that the swelling was going out of the baby’s shoulder, the poison was receding from its body. Then Kino’s st closed over the pearl and his emotion broke over him. He put back his head and howled. His eyes rolled up and he screamed and his body was rigid. The men in the other canoes looked up, startled, and then they dug their paddles into the sea and raced toward Kino’s canoe. 3 A town is a thing like a colonial animal. A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate from all other towns, so that there are no two towns alike. And a town has a whole emotion. How news travels through a town is a mystery not easily to be solved. News seems to move faster than small boys can scramble and dart to tell it, faster than women can call it over the fences. Before Kino and Juana and the other shers had come to Kino’s brush house, the nerves of the town were pulsing and vibrating with the news—Kino had found the Pearl of the World. Before panting little boys could strangle out the words, their mothers knew it. The news swept on past the brush houses, and it washed in a foaming wave into the town of stone and plaster. It came to the priest walking in his garden, and it put a thoughtful look in his eyes and a memory of certain repairs necessary to the church. He wondered what the pearl would be worth. And he wondered whether he had baptized Kino’s baby, or married him for that matter. The news came to the shopkeepers, and they looked at men’s clothes that had not sold so well. The news came to the doctor where he sat with a woman whose illness was age, though neither she nor the doctor would admit it. And when it was made plain who Kino was, the doctor grew stern and judicious at the same time. “He is a client of mine,” the doctor said. “I am treating his child for a scorpion sting.” And the doctor’s eyes rolled up a little in their fat hammocks and he thought of Paris. He remembered the room he had lived in there as a great and luxurious place, and he remembered the hard-faced woman who had lived with him as a beautiful and kind girl, although she had been none of these three. The doctor looked past his aged patient and saw himself sitting in a restaurant in Paris and a waiter was just opening a bottle of wine. The news came early to the beggars in front of the church, and it made them giggle a little with pleasure, for they knew that there is no almsgiver in the world like a poor man who is suddenly lucky. Kino had found the Pearl of the World. In the town, in little o ces, sat the men who bought pearls from the shers. They waited in their chairs until the pearls came in, and then they cackled and fought and shouted and threatened until they reached the lowest price the sherman would stand. But there was a price below which they dared not go, for it had happened that a sherman in despair had given his pearls to the church. And when the buying was over, these buyers sat alone and their ngers played restlessly with the pearls, and they wished they owned the pearls. For there were not many buyers really—there was only one, and he kept these agents in separate o ces to give a semblance of competition. The news came to these men, and their eyes squinted and their ngertips burned a little, and each one thought how the patron could not live forever and someone had to take his place. And each one thought how with some capital he could get a new start.  All manner of people grew interested in Kino—people with things to sell and people with favors to ask. Kino had found the Pearl of the World. The essence of pearl mixed with essence of men and a curious dark residue was precipitated. Every man suddenly became related to Kino’s pearl, and Kino’s pearl went into the dreams, the speculations, the schemes, the plans, the futures, the wishes, the needs, the lusts, the hungers, of everyone, and only one person stood in the way and that was Kino, so that he became curiously every man’s enemy. The news stirred up something in nitely black and evil in the town; the black distillate was like the scorpion, or like hunger in the smell of food, or like loneliness when love is withheld. The poison sacs of the town began to manufacture venom, and the town swelled and pu ed with the pressure of it. But Kino and Juana did not know these things. Because they were happy and excited they thought everyone shared their joy. Juan Tomás and Apolonia did, and they were the world too. In the afternoon, when the sun had gone over the mountains of the Peninsula to sink in the outward sea, Kino squatted in his house with Juana beside him. And the brush house was crowded with neighbors. Kino held the great pearl in his hand, and it was warm and alive in his hand. And the music of the pearl had merged with the music of the family so that one beauti ed the other. The neighbors looked at the pearl in Kino’s hand and they wondered how such luck could come to any man. And Juan Tomás, who squatted on Kino’s right hand because he was his brother, asked, “What will you do now that you have become a rich man? ” Kino looked into his pearl, and Juana cast her eyelashes down and arranged her shawl to cover her face so that her excitement could not be seen. And in the incandescence of the pearl the pictures formed of the things Kino’s mind had considered in the past and had given up as impossible. In the pearl he saw Juana and Coyotito and himself standing and kneeling at the high altar, and they were being married now that they could pay. He spoke softly, “We will be married—in the church.” In the pearl he saw how they were dressed—Juana in a shawl sti with newness and a new skirt, and from under the long skirt Kino could see that she wore shoes. It was in the pearl—the picture glowing there. He himself was dressed in new white clothes, and he carried a new hat— not of straw but of ne black felt—and he too wore shoes— not sandals but shoes that laced. But Coyotito—he was the one—he wore a blue sailor suit from the United States and a little yachting cap such as Kino had seen once when a pleasure boat put into the estuary. All of these things Kino saw in the lucent pearl and he said, “We will have new clothes.” And the music of the pearl rose like a chorus of trumpets in his ears. Then to the lovely gray surface of the pearl came the little things Kino wanted: a harpoon to take the place of one lost a year ago, a new harpoon of iron with a ring in the end of the shaft; and—his mind could hardly make the leap—a ri e—but why not, since he was so rich. And Kino saw Kino in the pearl, Kino holding a Winchester carbine. It was the wildest daydreaming and very pleasant. His lips moved hesitantly over this—“A ri e,” he said. “Perhaps a ri e.” It was the ri e that broke down the barriers. This was an impossibility, and if he could think of having a ri e whole horizons were burst and he could rush on. For it is said that humans are never satis ed, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satis ed with what they have. The neighbors, close pressed and silent in the house, nodded their heads at his wild imaginings. And a man in the rear murmured, “A ri e. He will have a ri e.” But the music of the pearl was shrilling with triumph in Kino. Juana looked up, and her eyes were wide at Kino’s courage and at his imagination. And electric strength had come to him now the horizons were kicked out. In the pearl he saw Coyotito sitting at a little desk in a school, just as Kino had once seen it through an open door. And Coyotito was dressed in a jacket, and he had on a white collar and a broad silken tie. Moreover, Coyotito was writing on a big piece of paper. Kino looked at his neighbors ercely. “My son will go to school,” he said, and the neighbors were hushed. Juana caught her breath sharply. Her eyes were bright as she watched him, and she looked quickly down at Coyotito in her arms to see whether this might be possible.  But Kino’s face shone with prophecy. “My son will read and open the books, and my son will write and will know writing. And my son will make numbers, and these things will make us free because he will know—he will know and through him we will know.” And in the pearl Kino saw himself and Juana squatting by the little re in the brush hut while Coyotito read from a great book. “This is what the pearl will do,” said Kino. And he had never said so many words together in his life. And suddenly he was afraid of his talking. His hand closed down over the pearl and cut the light away from it. Kino was afraid as a man is afraid who says, “I will,” without knowing. Now the neighbors knew they had witnessed a great marvel. They knew that time would now date from Kino’s pearl, and that they would discuss this moment for many years to come. If these things came to pass, they would recount how Kino looked and what he said and how his eyes shone, and they would say, “He was a man trans gured. Some power was given to him, and there it started. You see what a great man he has become, starting from that moment. And I myself saw it.” And if Kino’s planning came to nothing, those same neighbors would say, “There it started. A foolish madness came over him so that he spoke foolish words. God keep us from such things. Yes, God punished Kino because he rebelled against the way things are. You see what has become of him. And I myself saw the moment when his reason left him.” Kino looked down at his closed hand and the knuckles were scabbed over and tight where he had struck the gate.  Now the dusk was coming. And Juana looped her shawl under the baby so that he hung against her hip, and she went to the re hole and dug a coal from the ashes and broke a few twigs over it and fanned a ame alive. The little ames danced on the faces of the neighbors. They knew they should go to their own dinners, but they were reluctant to leave. The dark was almost in, and Juana’s re threw shadows on the brush walls when the whisper came in, passed from mouth to mouth. “The Father is coming—the priest is coming.” The men uncovered their heads and stepped back from the door, and the women gathered their shawls about their faces and cast down their eyes. Kino and Juan Tomás, his brother, stood up. The priest came in—a graying, aging man with an old skin and a young sharp eye. Children, he considered these people, and he treated them like children. “Kino,” he said softly, “thou art named after a great man—and a great Father of the Church.” He made it sound like a benediction. “Thy namesake tamed the desert and sweetened the minds of thy people, didst thou know that? It is in the books.” Kino looked quickly down at Coyotito’s head, where he hung on Juana’s hip. Some day, his mind said, that boy would know what things were in the books and what things were not. The music had gone out of Kino’s head, but now, thinly, slowly, the melody of the morning, the music of evil, of the enemy sounded, but it was faint and weak. And Kino looked at his neighbors to see who might have brought this song in.  But the priest was speaking again. “It has come to me that thou hast found a great fortune, a great pearl.” Kino opened his hand and held it out, and the priest gasped a little at the size and beauty of the pearl. And then he said, “I hope thou wilt remember to give thanks, my son, to Him who has given thee this treasure, and to pray for guidance in the future.” Kino nodded dumbly, and it was Juana who spoke softly. “We will, Father. And we will be married now. Kino has said so.” She looked at the neighbors for con rmation, and they nodded their heads solemnly. The priest said, “It is pleasant to see that your rst thoughts are good thoughts. God bless you, my children.” He turned and left quietly, and the people let him through. But Kino’s hand had closed tightly on the pearl again, and he was glancing about suspiciously, for the evil song was in his ears, shrilling against the music of the pearl. The neighbors slipped away to go to their houses, and Juana squatted by the re and set her clay pot of boiled beans over the little ame. Kino stepped to the doorway and looked out. As always, he could smell the smoke from many res, and he could see the hazy stars and feel the damp of the night air so that he covered his nose from it. The thin dog came to him and threshed itself in greeting like a windblown ag, and Kino looked down at it and didn’t see it. He had broken through the horizons into a cold and lonely outside. He felt alone and unprotected, and scraping crickets and shrilling tree frogs and croaking toads seemed to be carrying the melody of evil. Kino shivered a little and drew his blanket more tightly against his nose. He carried the pearl still in his hand, tightly closed in his palm, and it was warm and smooth against his skin. Behind him he heard Juana patting the cakes before she put them down on the clay cooking sheet. Kino felt all the warmth and security of his family behind him, and the Song of the Family came from behind him like the purring of a kitten. But now, by saying what his future was going to be like, he had created it. A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes a reality along with other realities—never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked. Thus Kino’s future was real, but having set it up, other forces were set up to destroy it, and this he knew, so that he had to prepare to meet the attack. And this Kino knew also—that the gods do not love men’s plans, and the gods do not love success unless it comes by accident. He knew that the gods take their revenge on a man if he be successful through his own e orts. Consequently Kino was afraid of plans, but having made one, he could never destroy it. And to meet the attack, Kino was already making a hard skin for himself against the world. His eyes and his mind probed for danger before it appeared. Standing in the door, he saw two men approach; and one of them carried a lantern which lighted the ground and the legs of the men. They turned in through the opening of Kino’s brush fence and came to his door. And Kino saw that one was the doctor and the other the servant who had opened the gate in the morning. The split knuckles on Kino’s right hand burned when he saw who they were. The doctor said, “I was not in when you came this morning. But now, at the rst chance, I have come to see the baby.” Kino stood in the door, lling it, and hatred raged and amed in the back of his eyes, and fear too, for the hundreds of years of subjugation were cut deep in him. “The baby is nearly well now,” he said curtly. The doctor smiled, but his eyes in their little lymphlined hammocks did not smile. He said, “Sometimes, my friend, the scorpion sting has a curious e ect. There will be apparent improvement, and then without warning—pouf!” He pursed his lips and made a little explosion to show how quick it could be, and he shifted his small black doctor’s bag about so that the light of the lamp fell upon it, for he knew that Kino’s race love the tools of any craft and trust them. “Sometimes,” the doctor went on in a liquid tone, “sometimes there will be a withered leg or a blind eye or a crumpled back. Oh, I know the sting of the scorpion, my friend, and I can cure it.” Kino felt the rage and hatred melting toward fear. He did not know, and perhaps this doctor did. And he could not take the chance of pitting his certain ignorance against this man’s possible knowledge. He was trapped as his people were always trapped, and would be until, as he had said, they could be sure that the things in the books were really in the books. He could not take a chance—not with the life or with the straightness of Coyotito. He stood aside and let the doctor and his man enter the brush hut. Juana stood up from the re and backed away as he entered, and she covered the baby’s face with the fringe of her shawl. And when the doctor went to her and held out his hand, she clutched the baby tight and looked at Kino where he stood with the re shadows leaping on his face. Kino nodded, and only then did she let the doctor take the baby. “Hold the light,” the doctor said, and when the servant held the lantern high, the doctor looked for a moment at the wound on the baby’s shoulder. He was thoughtful for a moment and then he rolled back the baby’s eyelid and looked at the eyeball. He nodded his head while Coyotito struggled against him. “It is as I thought,” he said. “The poison has gone inward and it will strike soon. Come look!” He held the eyelid down. “See—it is blue.” And Kino, looking anxiously, saw that indeed it was a little blue. And he didn’t know whether or not it was always a little blue. But the trap was set. He couldn’t take the chance. The doctor’s eyes watered in their little hammocks. “I will give him something to try to turn the poison aside,” he said. And he handed the baby to Kino. Then from his bag he took a little bottle of white powder and a capsule of gelatine. He lled the capsule with the powder and closed it, and then around the rst capsule he tted a second capsule and closed it. Then he worked very deftly. He took the baby and pinched its lower lip until it opened its mouth. His fat  ngers placed the capsule far back on the baby’s tongue, back of the point where he could spit it out, and then from the oor he picked up the little pitcher of pulque and gave Coyotito a drink, and it was done. He looked again at the baby’s eyeball and he pursed his lips and seemed to think. At last he handed the baby back to Juana, and he turned to Kino. “I think the poison will attack within the hour,” he said. “The medicine may save the baby from hurt, but I will come back in an hour. Perhaps I am in time to save him.” He took a deep breath and went out of the hut, and his servant followed him with the lantern. Now Juana had the baby under her shawl, and she stared at it with anxiety and fear. Kino came to her, and he lifted the shawl and stared at the baby. He moved his hand to look under the eyelid, and only then saw that the pearl was still in his hand. Then he went to a box by the wall, and from it he brought a piece of rag. He wrapped the pearl in the rag, then went to the corner of the brush house and dug a little hole with his ngers in the dirt oor, and he put the pearl in the hole and covered it up and concealed the place. And then he went to the re where Juana was squatting, watching the baby’s face. The doctor, back in his house, settled into his chair and looked at his watch. His people brought him a little supper of chocolate and sweet cakes and fruit, and he stared at the food discontentedly. In the houses of the neighbors the subject that would lead all conversations for a long time to come was aired for the rst time to see how it would go. The neighbors showed one another with their thumbs how big the pearl was, and they made little caressing gestures to show how lovely it was. From now on they would watch Kino and Juana very closely to see whether riches turned their heads, as riches turn all people’s heads. Everyone knew why the doctor had come. He was not good at dissembling and he was very well understood. Out in the estuary a tight woven school of small shes glittered and broke water to escape a school of great shes that drove in to eat them. And in the houses the people could hear the swish of the small ones and the bouncing splash of the great ones as the slaughter went on. The dampness arose out of the Gulf and was deposited on bushes and cacti and on little trees in salty drops. And the night mice crept about on the ground and the little night hawks hunted them silently. The skinny black puppy with ame spots over his eyes came to Kino’s door and looked in. He nearly shook his hind quarters loose when Kino glanced up at him, and he subsided when Kino looked away. The puppy did not enter the house, but he watched with frantic interest while Kino ate his beans from the little pottery dish and wiped it clean with a corncake and ate the cake and washed the whole down with a drink of pulque. Kino was nished and was rolling a cigarette when Juana spoke sharply. “Kino.” He glanced at her and then got up and went quickly to her for he saw fright in her eyes. He stood over her, looking down, but the light was very dim. He kicked a pile of twigs into the re hole to make a blaze, and then he could see the face of Coyotito. The baby’s face was ushed and his throat was working and a little thick drool of saliva issued from his lips. The spasm of the stomach muscles began, and the baby was very sick. Kino knelt beside his wife. “So the doctor knew,” he said, but he said it for himself as well as for his wife, for his mind was hard and suspicious and he was remembering the white powder. Juana rocked from side to side and moaned out the little Song of the Family as though it could ward o the danger, and the baby vomited and writhed in her arms. Now uncertainty was in Kino, and the music of evil throbbed in his head and nearly drove out Juana’s song. The doctor nished his chocolate and nibbled the little fallen pieces of sweet cake. He brushed his ngers on a napkin, looked at his watch, arose, and took up his little bag. The news of the baby’s illness traveled quickly among the brush houses, for sickness is second only to hunger as the enemy of poor people. And some said softly, “Luck, you see, brings bitter friends.” And they nodded and got up to go to Kino’s house. The neighbors scuttled with covered noses through the dark until they crowded into Kino’s house again. They stood and gazed, and they made little comments on the sadness that this should happen at a time of joy, and they said, “All things are in God’s hands.” The old women squatted down beside Juana to try to give her aid if they could and comfort if they could not. Then the doctor hurried in, followed by his man. He scattered the old women like chickens. He took the baby and examined it and felt its head. “The poison it has worked,” he said. “I think I can defeat it. I will try my best.” He asked for water, and in the cup of it he put three drops of ammonia, and he pried open the baby’s mouth and poured it down. The baby spluttered and screeched under the treatment, and Juana watched him with haunted eyes. The doctor spoke a little as he worked. “It is lucky that I know about the poison of the scorpion, otherwise—” and he shrugged to show what could have happened. But Kino was suspicious, and he could not take his eyes from the doctor’s open bag, and from the bottle of white powder there. Gradually the spasms subsided and the baby relaxed under the doctor’s hands. And then Coyotito sighed deeply and went to sleep, for he was very tired with vomiting. The doctor put the baby in Juana’s arms. “He will get well now,” he said. “I have won the ght.” And Juana looked at him with adoration. The doctor was closing his bag now. He said, “When do you think you can pay this bill?” He said it even kindly. “When I have sold my pearl I will pay you,” Kino said. “You have a pearl? A good pearl?” the doctor asked with interest. And then the chorus of the neighbors broke in. “He has found the Pearl of the World,” they cried, and they joined fore nger with thumb to show how great the pearl was. “Kino will be a rich man,” they clamored. “It is a pearl such as one has never seen.”  The doctor looked surprised. “I had not heard of it. Do you keep this pearl in a safe place? Perhaps you would like me to put it in my safe?” Kino’s eyes were hooded now, his cheeks were drawn taut. “I have it secure,” he said. “Tomorrow I will sell it and then I will pay you.” The doctor shrugged, and his wet eyes never left Kino’s eyes. He knew the pearl would be buried in the house, and he thought Kino might look toward the place where it was buried. “It would be a shame to have it stolen before you could sell it,” the doctor said, and he saw Kino’s eyes ick involuntarily to the oor near the side post of the brush house. When the doctor had gone and all the neighbors had reluctantly returned to their houses, Kino squatted beside the little glowing coals in the re hole and listened to the night sound, the soft sweep of the little waves on the shore and the distant barking of dogs, the creeping of the breeze through the brush house roof and the soft speech of his neighbors in their houses in the village. For these people do not sleep soundly all night; they awaken at intervals and talk a little and then go to sleep again. And after a while Kino got up and went to the door of his house. He smelled the breeze and he listened for any foreign sound of secrecy or creeping, and his eyes searched the darkness, for the music of evil was sounding in his head and he was erce and afraid. After he had probed the night with his senses he went to the place by the side post where the pearl was buried, and he dug it up and brought it to his sleeping mat, and under his sleeping mat he dug another little hole in the dirt oor and buried the pearl and covered it up again. And Juana, sitting by the re hole, watched him with questioning eyes, and when he had buried his pearl she asked, “Who do you fear?” Kino searched for a true answer, and at last he said, “Everyone.” And he could feel a shell of hardness drawing over him. After a while they lay down together on the sleeping mat, and Juana did not put the baby in his box tonight, but cradled him in her arms and covered his face with her head shawl. And the last light went out of the embers in the re hole. But Kino’s brain burned, even during his sleep, and he dreamed that Coyotito could read, that one of his own people could tell him the truth of things. And in his dream, Coyotito was reading from a book as large as a house, with letters as big as dogs, and the words galloped and played on the book. And then darkness spread over the page, and with the darkness came the music of evil again, and Kino stirred in his sleep; and when he stirred, Juana’s eyes opened in the darkness. And then Kino awakened, with the evil music pulsing in him, and he lay in the darkness with his ears alert. Then from the corner of the house came a sound so soft that it might have been simply a thought, a little furtive movement, a touch of a foot on earth, the almost inaudible purr of controlled breathing. Kino held his breath to listen, and he knew that whatever dark thing was in his house was holding its breath too, to listen. For a time no sound at all came from the corner of the brush house. Then Kino might have thought he had imagined the sound. But Juana’s hand came creeping over to him in warning, and then the sound came again! the whisper of a foot on dry earth and the scratch of ngers in the soil. And now a wild fear surged in Kino’s breast, and on the fear came rage, as it always did. Kino’s hand crept into his breast where his knife hung on a string, and then he sprang like an angry cat, leaped striking and spitting for the dark thing he knew was in the corner of the house. He felt cloth, struck at it with his knife and missed, and struck again and felt his knife go through cloth, and then his head crashed with lightning and exploded with pain. There was a soft scurry in the doorway, and running steps for a moment, and then silence. Kino could feel warm blood running from his forehead, and he could hear Juana calling to him. “Kino! Kino!” And there was terror in her voice. Then coldness came over him as quickly as the rage had, and he said, “I am all right. The thing has gone.” He groped his way back to the sleeping mat. Already Juana was working at the re. She uncovered an ember from the ashes and shredded little pieces of cornhusk over it and blew a little ame into the cornhusks so that a tiny light danced through the hut. And then from a secret place Juana brought a little piece of consecrated candle and lighted it at the ame and set it upright on a replace stone. She worked quickly, crooning as she moved about. She dipped the end of her head shawl in water and swabbed the blood from Kino’s bruised forehead. “It is nothing,” Kino said, but his eyes and his voice were hard and cold and a brooding hate was growing in him. Now the tension which had been growing in Juana boiled up to the surface and her lips were thin. “This thing is evil,” she cried harshly. “This pearl is like a sin! It will destroy us,” and her voice rose shrilly. “Throw it away, Kino. Let us break it between stones. Let us bury it and forget the place. Let us throw it back into the sea. It has brought evil. Kino, my husband, it will destroy us.” And in the relight her lips and her eyes were alive with her fear. But Kino’s face was set, and his mind and his will were set. “This is our one chance,” he said. “Our son must go to school. He must break out of the pot that holds us in.” “It will destroy us all,” Juana cried. “Even our son.” “Hush,” said Kino. “Do not speak any more. In the morning we will sell the pearl, and then the evil will be gone, and only the good remain. Now hush, my wife.” His d