Mexico & Metaphysics

THE SIGN OF TAURUS (320 pp.)--William Fifield--Holf, Rinehart, Winston ($4.95).

Countess Potolska sits in the sun-dazed plazas of Mexico, but her eyes blindly stare at aristocratic Polish drawing rooms, the image of Pilsudski, and her 20-year-old son standing in the streets of Warsaw in grim defiance of Nazi soldiery. Hawk-eyed and hawk-beaked, the countess is a Polish Jewess and a refugee, one of the world's involuntary tourists whose heaviest luggage is memory.

One day, after watching a blowsy clairvoyant telling fortunes in a Mexican cave, the countess receives a suggestion that both repels and attracts her. With her own fortunes sadly reversed, why not ply the fortunetelling trade herself?

In a gypsy getup, with a fake topaz ring and a black velvet hood for her crystal ball, she looks the part, and a wily young Italian named Guido helps her play it. A kind of surrogate son, Guido cases clubs and fairs beforehand, and supplies her with the knowledgeable tidbits that later pass for revelations.

All of this has the makings of the good gay farce that Novelist Fifield has chosen not to write. As the crystal ball clouds, the plot turns metaphysical. The countess half-believes in contact with a psychic realm that goes far beyond trickery or even telepathy. At a table-rapping seance, the countess herself is taken aback when her dead son's voice materializes. Finally, her crystal ball reveals tragedy in a bull ring, and a picador is killed.

While only a confirmed horoscope addict will find all this fully convincing, any reader will be impressed by Author Fifield's rendering of the trancelike intensity with which the countess' conscious mind pearl-dives into her unconscious. Author Fifield speculates intriguingly on religious and metaphysical questions. Does the ability to foretell a future event presuppose predestination? Are times past, present and future coeval? These questions are more fully developed than the novel's characters, who seem to exist like cards in a deck, merely to take plot tricks.

But whenever The Sign of Taurus stargazes too abstractedly. Author Fifield gives it a powerful tug back to the earthy sights and sounds of the country--and the sheer physical exuberance of the setting gradually converts The Sign of Taurus into a triumph of Mexico over metaphysics.

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