The Mercury Fountain
(Early 20th century Southwest/Mexico)
by Eliza Factor (Akashic Books), 2012
This is an amazing book. Eliza Factor’s writing bumps up against
magical realism time and again in the most wonderful way, and yet remains
excruciatingly real. It is a story about a man with a utopian vision—which he
tries to embody in the life of a small town (Pristina) near the Texas/Mexico
border—that is founded on the grinding, toxic work of mining mercury.
Quicksilver – “liquid silver with the quick of life”—is at the center of
Pristina’s lifeblood. Mercury, its toxicity barely grasped at the turn of the
last century, was for a while considered to hold the cure for just about every
ailment, in addition to being useful in all sorts of manufacturing processes.
Owen Scraperton, the American visionary and owner of the mine (he won the title
in a poker game), is convinced that his utopia, built on the “Principals of
Pristina: Clarity, Unity, Purpose”, will become a model of of racial tolerance,
agnosticism and scientific rationalism for the world. His wife, Dolores, a
Mexican of the old, now poor aristocracy, is less sure, and their only child, a
strange, snake-whispering daughter named Victoria, bounces between her two
polarized parents in a world undergoing the radical changes of revolution,
economic downfall, and the modernization of work, culture, morality and
communications. A definite must read.
In the story, Owen builds a large fountain in the town plaza that has mercury flowing in it instead of water. Here's a photo of a contemporary mercury fountain to get a sense of what that would look like. Eerie!
I was rambling this morning through the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, in the Testaccio neighborhood, because it was a place revered by Henry James, who tenderly placed his candidly shocking little American heroine Daisy Miller in its hallowed precincts: "Daisy's grave was in the little Protestant cemetery, in an angle of the
wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses and the thick spring
flowers." I wandered to the grave of Keats with its modest epitaph, and then searched for some minutes and found another grave, that of Constance Fenimore Woolston, an American writer, grand-daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, and intimate friend of James. She reportedly committed suicide in Venice, throwing herself out the window of the Palazzo Semitocolo (I took a photo of that, too, when I was in Venice 10 days ago), where James soon after the melancholy event visited and burned all of his correspondence to her, among other things. The scene, and his feelings about it, are tellingly, dramatically, movingly portrayed in Colm Toibin's magnificent book The Master. Percy Bysshe Shelley is buried there, too, along with the sons and daughters of many illustrious "non-Catholic foreigners": Goethe and Bach among them. A melancholy and beautiful place, well worth the long walk outside the Eternal City to visit the remains and think about time passing. 
But a final, more modern note! It came as a complete surprise to me to find the grave of Gregory Corso, the Beat poet, who died in 2001 - his epitaph is well worth remembering and pondering.
