‘Who was that?’ I asked.
Both the schoolmaster and Catalina’s husband wanted to tell me about the Cat-stewer, but the sacristan held the floor. It appears that this well-known figure had been cook to the old Bishop of Palma, who died, and the new Bishop made the mistake of criticizing one of his sauces. Though he kept silent his pride was wounded, and at a banquet to which the new Bishop invited the Captain-General and his staff, he served up a delicious rabbit ragout. When called into the dining room to receive extravagant compliments, he said, ‘Yes, beyond all doubt I am the best cook in Majorca! I can make stewed alley cat taste like the tenderest rabbit. And now, My Lord Bishop, I have finished, and wish you and your guests a very good night!’ He threw his tall chef’s hat on the floor, and marched out in glory. After that, he drifted around Palma picking up cigarette butts dropped by tourists, and accepting coffees from Palma folk who admired his spirit. He never cooked another meal. In the severe shortage of cooks caused by the building of too many hotels, the Cat-stewer was wooed with enormous offers – up to a hundred thousand pesetas a year – for his culinary services. He only spat for an answer.
‘What did the Count do about his persecution by the ex-Countess’s postcards?’ I asked.
It was an embarrassing question. Three of my fellow-mourners stirred uncomfortably in their chairs, but kept silent, warned by the lawyer’s frown.
María, the midwife, took pity on me. ‘The Count had peasant blood, Don Roberto. It is known that, in his chagrin, he consulted a wise woman at Andraitx. Nothing can be said for certain as to the advice she gave him. At all events, the persecution ended when Doña Acebo died, early last year.’
‘How did she die, Doña María?’
‘By drowning, also. The new liner in which she and her young band leader were travelling from Brazil to the Argentine struck a rock and foundered.’
Don Tomás hastily changed the subject. ‘The Count had the kindest heart,’ he babbled. ‘One day, plagued by his neurotic compulsion, he tried to pass from one end of San Miguel Street to the other while dodging alternately to the right and left of persons who approached. This made him perform a hazardous dance, because it was a busy Saturday morning, with the farmers, as usual, crowding the streets and the tables outside the Café Suiza. Along roared a Vespa motor scooter; the Count dashed across its path, trying to pass it on his right. The scooter struck his foot, the rider fell off, and the machine fell, though its engine continued to throb where it lay overturned by the sidewalk. A baker’s boy astride a bicycle, balancing a huge tray of pastries on his head, ran into the Vespa, and all the pastries were spilled. “Young man,” cried the Count to the Vespa rider, who was nursing a bruised elbow, “how dare you take your dangerous machine down San Miguel Street on a Saturday morning?” A blind woman lottery vendor, seated on the curb, felt her skirts lifted by the wind of the Vespa’s exhaust, and let out a scream. The Count immediately paid the baker’s boy, and then consoled the old creature, kissed her hand, bought five lottery tickets and tore them up – having a soul above money – and guided her into the Suiza, where she rapidly downed several brandies. The baker’s boy collected the pastries, dusted them on his trousers, restacked them on the tray, and rode on, the richer by a hundred pesetas. The deceased had his faults, as who had not, but will we ever look upon his like again?’
We sat talking and drinking until five o’clock, and then prepared to depart. We went upstairs for a last farewell, before leaving the Count to the companionship of his best friend, who was already gilding the mountain-tops. ‘The Spanish taste for black velvet,’ observed the schoolmaster sententiously, eyeing the Count’s court dress, ‘is often thought to reflect the gloomy side of our national character. That is an error. Our ancestors gloried in the indigo plant, which alone afforded them a fast sable dye to contrast with the brilliant white of their linen cuffs and ruffs. Spanish black velvet never turned rusty or green. Guillermo did well in choosing those lilies and roses to set it off. Our friend’s darkest moods were always enlivened by vivid flashes of the purest white.’
The funeral Masses for the Count took place at ten o’clock, and every noble house in Palma sent representatives. Our village square was crowded with their sleek American and Italian cars. The visitors kept together in a tight, silent bunch, and made me feel a peasant of peasants. Throughout the service, which the Bishop himself conducted, with the aid of several subsidiary priests, including Don Julián, I was puzzling to myself: ‘She landed yesterday, you see. Not far from here. That is why I must leave you.’ Who had landed that Thursday? Where? ‘She’ could not have been Doña Acebo, and it was generally agreed that no other woman had figured in the Count’s adult life. María, the midwife, had hinted at a recourse to witchcraft, but since witchcraft is a subject that Majorcans never discuss with foreigners, I concluded that it would be wiser to let the problem lie.
The next day, as it happened, Jack and Gloria Stonegate – Jack is a shrewd North of England retired businessman, and Gloria is a genius at repairing antique china – had asked my wife and me to lunch with them at Paguera, which is a few miles from Andraitx. Paguera has the sunniest climate in Majorca, which means, of course, insufficient rain, and therefore a perpetual water shortage. But against that you may set a fine, sandy beach, pine forests, and swimming as early as March.
‘Anything new happened here since last time?’ I asked Jack, over drinks.
‘Nothing much, old boy, except two motor-bike accidents, one death by drowning, a kerosene shortage, a fight between some Dutchmen in the grocery store, and a coffin washed up on the islet three days ago.’
‘The coffin sounds the most interesting.’
‘It certainly was! It contained a carved wooden doll, about three feet long – obviously a portrait of someone real – wearing a bridal robe and veil. What do you make of that? Round her shoulders she wore a miniature postbag, striped with the Spanish colours, and in the bag we found an assortment of rather stupid amatory picture postcards from all over the place – Tangier, Honolulu, Blackpool, Atlantic City, Copenhagen. The name and address of the person who had received them all had been carefully scraped away with a razor, and there was no message on any of them – only the signature “A”.’
‘How big was the coffin?’
‘Life-size. It must have been a long time in the water. I got a good look at the cards. The latest one came from Rio de Janeiro, postmarked eighteen months ago. A yard or two of frayed rope hung from a handle of the coffin. Evidently it had been weighted down by stones – the lead lining wasn’t quite heavy enough to keep it on the bottom – but it must have broken loose in the big storm last week. The Guardias and the priest were examining it as I wandered up. The priest seemed shocked to the core, and even the Guardias were upset. What do you make of that story, old boy?’
‘Oh, just a practical joke,’ I reassured Jack. ‘Some Majorcans will go to any length for a laugh – you’d be surprised!’
‘I call it a damned macabre form of humour,’ Jack grumbled. ‘But then, I’m English.’
Please do not ask whether, in my opinion, Doña Acebo’s death by drowning was just a coincidence. Be content with facts. The coffined doll must be accepted as valid evidence that the Count, with a witch’s assistance, tried to procure Doña Acebo’s death by magical means. Unofficially, my fellow-villagers do not doubt that he succeeded. They condemn his action as un-Catholic, of course, but the provocation was enormous, and how else could a Count of Deià, with a peasant mother, have been expected to act? Officially, they agree with the priest: it was a sad coincidence. Officially, so do I.
The Lost Chinese
JAUME GELABERT WAS a heavily-built, ill-kempt, morose Majorcan lad of seventeen. His father had died in 1936 at the siege of Madrid, but on the losing side, and therefore without glory or a dependant’s pension; his mother a few years later. He lived by himself in a dilapidated cottage near our village of Muleta, where he cultivated a few olive terraces and a lemon grove. On my way
down for a swim from the rocks, three hundred feet below, I would cut through Jaume’s land and, if we happened to meet, always offered him an American cigarette. He would then ask if I were taking a bathe, to which I answered either: ‘You have divined my motive correctly,’ or: ‘Yes, doctors say it benefits the health.’ Once I casually remarked that my blue jeans had grown too tight and, rather than throw them away, I wondered if they might come in handy for rough work. ‘I could perhaps use them,’ he answered, fingering the solid denim. To say ‘thank you’ would have been to accept charity and endanger our relationship; but next day he gave me a basket of cherries, with the excuse that his tree was loaded and that June cherries were not worth marketing. So we became good neighbours.
This was June 1952 – just before Willie Fedora appeared in Muleta and rented a cottage. The United States Government was paying Willie a modest disability grant, in recognition of ‘an anxiety neurosis aggravated by war service in Korea’, which supported him nicely until the tide of tourism sent prices rocketing. Brandy then cost a mere twelve pesetas a litre, not thirty-six as now; and brandy was his main expense.
Our small foreign colony, mostly painters, at first accepted Willie. But the tradition here is that instead of drinking, playing bridge, sun-bathing, and discussing one another’s marital hazards, as at expensive resorts with more easily accessible beaches, foreigners work. We meet only in the evening around a café table, when our mail has arrived. Occasional parties are thrown, and sometimes we hire the village bus for a Sunday bullfight; otherwise we keep ourselves to ourselves. Willie disliked this unsociable way of life. He would come calling on trivial pretexts, after breakfast, just when we were about to start work, and always showed his independence by bringing along a four-litre straw-covered flask of cheap brandy – which he called ‘my samovar’ – slung from his shoulder. To shut the door in Willie’s face would have been churlish; to encourage him, self-destructive. Usually, we slipped out by the back door and waited until he had gone off again.
Willie wrote plays; or, rather, he laboured at the same verse play for months and months, talking about it endlessly but making no progress. The hero of Vercingetorix (Willie himself disguised in a toga) was one of Julius Caesar’s staff-captains in the Gallic War. Whenever Willie began his day’s work on Vercingetorix he needed to down half a pint of brandy, because of the fearful load of guilt which he carried with him and which formed the theme of his Roman drama. Apparently towards the end of the Korean War, a senior officer had put Willie in charge of five hundred captured Chinese Communists but, when he later marched them to the pen, a bare three hundred were left. The remainder could neither have been murdered, nor committed suicide, nor escaped; yet they had disappeared. ‘Disappeared into thin air!’ he would repeat tragically, tilting the samovar. Any suggestion that these Chinamen had existed only on paper – a 3 scrawled in the heat of battle, we pointed out, might easily be read as a 5 – enraged Willie. ‘Goddam it!’ he would shout, pounding the table. ‘I drew rations and blankets for five hundred. Laugh that off!’
Before long, we shut our doors against Willie. Let him finish his play, we said, rather than talk about it; and none of us felt responsible for his lost Chinese. Yet every night they haunted his dreams, and often he would catch glimpses of them skulking behind trees or barns even by day.
Now, it is an old custom at Muleta to support the Catholic China Missions, and on ‘China Day’ the school children paint their faces yellow, slant their eyebrows and dress themselves up in the Oriental clothes, of uncertain origin, which the Mother Superior of our Franciscan convent distributes from a long, deep, camphor-scented chest. They drive around in a tilt-cart and collect quite a lot of money; though who ultimately benefits from it remains a mystery, because (as I told the incredulous Mother Superior) no foreign missions have been tolerated in China for some years. Unfortunately, the young Chinese came tapping at Willie’s cottage window one afternoon and scared him out of his wits. Accidentally smashing his samovar against a wine barrel as he stumbled into the café, Willie collapsed on the terrace. When he felt better, we recommended a Palma doctor. He groaned at us: ‘You jump off a cliff! I’m through with you all. I’m going native.’
Willie did go native. To the surprise of Muleta, he and Jaume Gelabert struck up a friendship. Jaume, already branded as the son of a Red, had earned a reputation for violence at that year’s fiesta of San Pedro, Muleta’s patron saint. The Mayor’s sharp-tongued son who owned a motorcycle and led the atlots, or village bucks, made Jaume his victim. ‘Behold the Lord of La Coma!’ Paco sneered. Jaume went pale. ‘“Lord of La Coma” comes badly from you, Paco, you loud-mouthed wencher! Your own uncle robbed my widowed mother of her share in the estate, and the whole village knew it, though they were too cowardly to protest.’ Paco then extemporized a copeo, a satiric verse of the sort current on San Pedro’s Day:
The Lord of La Coma he lives in disgrace:
He never eats crayfish nor washes his face!
A group of atlots took up the chorus, dancing in a ring around Jaume:
Ho, ho, that’s how we go –
He never eats crayfish nor washes his face!
Jaume pulled a stake from the baker’s fence and ran amok, felling Paco and a couple of other atlots before he was disarmed by Civil Guards and shoved without ceremony into the village lockup. The Justice of the Peace, Paco’s father, bound Jaume over after a stern caution. At Muleta, no decent man ever uses force: all fighting is done either with the tongue or with money.
The two social outcasts became such close friends that it spared us further responsibility for Willie’s health. He had decided to learn Majorcan from Jaume. This old language, not unlike Provençal, is in domestic use throughout the island, though discountenanced by the Government. Willie had a natural linguistic gift, and within three months could chatter fluent Majorcan – the sole foreigner in Muleta (except my children, who went to school there) who ever achieved the feat. Willie gratefully insisted on teaching Jaume how to write plays, having once majored in dramatic composition at a Midwestern university, and meanwhile laid Vercingetorix aside. By the spring, Jaume had finished The Indulgent Mother, a Majorcan comedy based on the life of his great-aunt Catalina. In return he had made Willie eat solid food, such as bean porridge and pa amb oli, and drink more red wine than brandy. Jaume did not question Willie’s account of those lost Chinese, but argued that the command of five hundred prisoners must have been too great a burden for so young a soldier as Willie; and that omniscient God had doubtless performed a miracle and cut down their numbers. ‘Suppose someone were to give me five hundred sheep!’ he said. ‘How would I manage them all single-handed? One hundred, yes; two hundred, yes; three hundred, perhaps; five hundred would be excessive.’
‘But, if so, why do these yellow devils continue to haunt me?’
‘Because they are heathen and blaspheme God! Pay no attention! And if they ever plague you, eat rather than drink!’
In 1953, Muleta suffered a financial crisis. Foul weather ruined the olive prospects, blighted the fruit blossom, and sent numerous terraces rumbling down. Moreover, Dom Enrique, our parish priest, had ordered a new altar and rebuilt the chancel at extravagant cost; while neglecting the church roof, part of which fell in after a stormy night. One consequence was that the village could not afford to hire the Palma Repertory Troupe for their usual San Pedro’s Day performance. But Dom Enrique heard about Jaume’s play, read it, and promised to raise a cast from the Acción Católica girls and their novios: if Willie would stage-manage the show, and Jaume devote its takings to the Roof Fund.
This plan naturally met with a good deal of opposition among the village elders: Willie, now nicknamed ‘Don Coñac’, and Jaume the violent Red, seemed most unsuitable playwrights. Dom Enrique, however, had felt a certain sympathy for Jaume’s use of the stake, and also noted the happy improvement in Willie’s health under Jaume’s care. He preached a strong sermon against the self-righteous and the uncharitable and, havin
g got his way, cleverly cast Paco as the juvenile lead. Nevertheless, to avoid any possible scandal, he laid it down that rehearsals must follow strict rules of propriety: the girls’ mothers should either attend or send proxies. He himself would always be present.
The Indulgent Mother, which combined the ridiculous with the pathetic, in a style exploited by Menander, Terence, Plautus and other ancient masters, was an unqualified success. Although no effort of Willie’s or Dom Enrique’s, as joint stage-managers, could keep the cast from turning their backs on the audience, gagging, mumbling, hamming, missing their cues, and giggling helplessly at dramatic moments, the Roof Fund benefited by fifteen hundred pesetas; and a raffle for a German wrist-watch (left on the beach two years previously) brought in another eight hundred. The Baleares printed a paragraph on the remarkable young playwright, Don Jaime Gelabert, below the heading: ‘Solemn Parochial Mass at Muleta; Grandiose Popular Events.’ Paco and his novia, the heroine, also secured a niche in the news.
Meanwhile Willie, whom the Baleares unfortunately named ‘Don Guillermo Coñac, the transatlantic theatrician,’ had celebrated Jaume’s debut a little too well, singing Negro spirituals in the village streets until long after midnight. When at last he fell insensible, Paco and the other atlots pulled off his clothes and laid him naked on a vault in the churchyard, with the samovar under his head. He was there discovered by a troop of black-veiled old beatas, or religious women, on the way to early Mass – an appalling scandal! Jaume had gone straight home, after the final curtain, to escape congratulations. In the morning, however, he pieced the story together from village gossip, caught Paco outside the café and threw him into the Torrent, where he broke an ankle. This time, Jaume would have been tried in the capital for attempted homicide, had Willie not intervened. ‘Punish Jaume,’ he warned the Mayor, ‘and you will force me to sue your son. I have witnesses who can testify to his shameless behaviour, and the United States Government is behind me.’