Opera for a Penny Whistle

THE FUTILE LIFE OF PITO PEREZ by Jose Ruben Romero, translated by William O. Cord. 151 pages. Prentice-Hall. $4.95.

On the eve of World War II, a scandalous, enigmatic fictional scamp named Pito Perez suddenly loomed on the Mexican literary landscape. He was modeled after a real-life picaresque oddball named Jesus Perez Gaona, and was immediately hailed as a personification of the national character. Bloody, absurd, splendid, his story seemed to mirror Mexico. The Futile Life of Pito Perez --his equivalent U.S. name would be something like Penny Whistle Jones--was not so much an instant bestseller as an immediate national classic. Its author, Jose Ruben Romero, became a figure of renown* But strangely, until now, Pito remained untranslated.

Pito's Penance. Who is he, really? The Don Quixote of his country? He lacks the illusions of the gaga grandee; besides, he is his own Sancho Panza, and he doesn't own a horse. One thing is certain, he is bafflingly Mexican. He was nursed by his mother, but a foundling foster brother got most of the milk. It was the same with his first crime--robbing the church poor box. A confederate got the pesos and Pito got the penance. "My life," he says, "is a sad one, like that of all cheats. But I have seen people laugh so often at my sorrow that I have ended up laughing at it myself."

When he is not laughing, he is puzzling over the difference between what he is told and what he painfully finds out about the way things really are. As set down with disarming simplicity by Romero, Pito's story is "the dialogue between a poet and a madman." His travels with what he calls his "prodigious flute," a pipe whittled from bamboo, lead him all through the state of Michoacan and always take him back to the village of Santa Clara del Cobre, his bitterly loved and hated birthplace.

Lear's Fool. No one follows this pie-eyed piper, and he follows no one; his most faithful companion is the skeleton of a woman, the least troublesome kind of female from his point of view. In every town he knows the jails, the madhouses, the cantinas and the churches. He wears rags sewn with tiny bells, each of which tinkles a note that in his mind symbolizes the special vice of each place he has visited. He is a spiv, and his roguish capacity for survival unites him with Ulysses, Tom Jones and Huckleberry Finn. Yet Pito remains the faithful son of both Catholicism and the anticlerical tenets of the Mexican Revolution. At his most sacrilegious, he testifies to the faith; at his antisocial worst, he demonstrates that the republic offers the good life to its citizens. He reassures the Catholic, the republican and the mestizo; he is no atheist who would destroy the church or anarchist who would destroy the state. Like Lear's Fool, he demonstrates the madness of the King, but neither would nor could leave his service.

Should Mexicans ever send a philosophical Peace Corps into the urban sprawl north of their own country, the missionaries will certainly carry in their saddlebags The Futile Life of Pito Perez. Meanwhile, Pito should be pressed into the hands of any tourists, State Department types or oilmen whose duties call them from the confident certitudes of U.S. life into the philosophical complexities that lie south of the border.

*More than a novelist, Romero (1890-1952) was a poet, essayist, lecturer and revolutionary (in the 1911 uprising against Dictator Porfirio Diaz), served as Mexico's Ambassador to Brazil in 1937 and to Cuba from 1938 to 1944.

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