Read Online Oh What a Paradise It Seems by John Cheever - Free Book Online

prepared questions. He tried to imagine some traditional monster with a head covered with adders and a mouth filled with fire, but he was either too tired or too drunk or too solaced by the beauty of the farmland to feel anxious about his interview with Gallia. His interpreter was telling him about her beginnings. The story was nearly as familiar as the radio music. Her family had lost the houses and villas that most families have lost at one time or another.
    They arrived at the foot of the volcano a little before dark. “Aren’t you frightened?” the interpreter asked. “Oh yes, yes,” said Sears politely. He did not feel that he wasgiving the interview its importance. There was a little garden at the entrance to the prophetess’s cave and Sears noticed that the soil was so acid it supported almost nothing but parsley. “Please let me take your arm,” said the interpreter. “I’m so frightened I can hardly speak.”
    There was a sort of room in the cave lighted by a single electric bulb. Sears wondered where the power came from. The prophetess sat at a plain table covered with clean oilcloth. She was a middle-aged woman whose hair had begun to gray and who held her head high with her blinded eyes closed. She wore a clean cotton dress. Sears’s feeling for her was one of absolute friendliness. This wonder, who had prophesied the fall of uranium prices, excited in him the broadest smile.
    She asked to feel something of his and he gave her his wallet. She fingered the wallet and began to smile. Then she began to laugh. So did Sears. She returned the wallet to him and said something to his interpreter. “I have no idea what she means,” said the interpreter, “but what she said was ‘La grande poésie de la vie.’” The prophetess stood and so did Sears. They were both laughing. Then she held out her arms and he embraced her. They parted, laughing. Night had fallen and as soon as he started the car the chauffeur turned on the radio to very loud music and they returned to the capital.
    This cheerful brush with a prophet was no help at all in Sears’s understanding of Estelle. She thought her prophetic attributes of the first importance. She seemed to think of them more as an achievement than a gift. She felt that the world we see—the world Sears adored—was superficialand, in her case, transparent and that she could see a more real world where love and death were visibly ordained. It seemed to Sears that her foresight was largely pessimistic. She most often prophesied quarrels, poverty, divorce, madness and suicide. Sears could not remember her having prophesied any triumphs of the spirit. She dyed her hair red and wore lime-green dresses, and when you were introduced to her you would feel that you had met her at cocktail parties. I don’t mean five or ten cocktail parties—I mean hundreds and hundreds of cocktail parties before that social ceremony vanished from the calendar and when the cocktail party seemed as much a part of nightfall as the lengthening shadows. She seemed so allied to the cocktail party that one wondered what would become of her when that ritual had become obsolete.
    It would have been very unlike Sears to check on the accuracy of her prophecies. When they returned home in the evening after a party she would sit at her dressing table and say that it had been revealed to her that the A’s would divorce, B would lose all of his money, C would be arrested for fraud and Mrs. E would go mad. She considered prophecy to be her outstanding social gift, and the complex irony of claiming to know the future was revealed one night to Sears when they were entertaining. Estelle was a dreadful cook—indeed she was a dangerous cook and she had that night prepared a risotto that was particularly lethal. While she prophesied lengthily the misfortunes of a family in the neighborhood, Sears worried a little about what he knew of the immediate future. He knew that at three or four in the morning that was