Counterfeit Jewel

THE PEARL (122 pp.)--John Steinbeck --Viking ($2).

"It was as large as a sea-gull's egg. It was the greatest pearl in the world," and Kino had found it. How the pearl brought grief to its finder is a Mexican legend which Novelist John Steinbeck first heard on a trip to Mexico in 1940. Seldom has an old tale been made to pay off so richly. Steinbeck expanded it into a long short story for the Woman's Home Companion, has adapted it as a Hollywood movie script to be released next spring, and now has issued The Pearl between covers with powerful but hurried illustrations by famed Mexican Painter Orozco.

Like the other pearl fishermen of La Paz, Kino lived with his wife and baby in a dirt-floor brush hut on the edge of town. He was superstitious and devout, so poor that the fee-minded local doctor refused to treat the baby for centipede poisoning. But the pearl changed everything. The doctor came eagerly to the brush hut. Looking into the pearl, Kino saw his wife Juana wearing shoes and a new shawl, himself in a white suit, the baby Coyotito at school. There would be a new harpoon; he even dared dream of a rifle. The neighbors "knew that time would now date from Kino's pearl"; when he went to the pearl buyers, the whole town followed.

The collusive pearl buyers, banking on native ignorance, offered Kino a price so low that he determined to sell his pearl in the distant capital. Then the evil begins. Kino is half killed when someone tries to rob him, and Juana begs him to throw the pearl into the sea "where it belongs." In the night, Kino's fishing canoe is smashed, the brush hut set afire. During a second attempt to rob him, Kino kills a man and is forced to run away with Juana and the baby. They are followed into the mountains by trackers. When Kino kills them by their campfire, the baby Coyotito is also killed by a stray shot. Now even Kino is convinced of the source of evil. Grief-stricken, he and Juana return to the village carrying their dead baby; as the silent natives look on, Kino throws the pearl back into the sea.

Steinbeck has a field day with this simple tale. "Kino squatted by the fire pit and rolled a hot corncake and dipped it in sauce and ate it. And he drank a little pulque and that was breakfast. . . . Kino sighed with satisfaction--and that was conversation." The style is simple and effective when Steinbeck is describing things; turned on people it acquires a stickiness that is rapidly becoming the trademark of Steinbeck's prose: "And the baby was weary and petulant, and he cried softly until Juana gave him her breast, and then he gurgled and clucked against her." Steinbeck's Pearl will seem a little jewel only to those readers who find important meanings in calculated ambiguities, and mistake manipulated sentimentality for emotion.

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