Yet as mentioned above, such distasteful matters were never spoken of in the Count’s house. Everyone knew that they had happened, and that would have to suffice. If it hadn’t been for this marital prize, the Casa del Conde, which the state had yet to declare a historical site, Don Alonso would have left his little housewife in the lurch—where, incidentally, she now finds herself. Who wouldn’t do the same to snatch a dowry like this one? I would, at the drop of a hat! In which case I would make just the kind of arrangement with Beatrice as the Count appears to have fashioned with his multiple mistresses. For I have not only aristocratic inclinations, but capitalistic ones as well: Vigoleis as a palace lord! I can just see him reclining in his Hall of Ancestors. Beatrice would finally get her own pipe organ.
Like most Mallorquine villas, in architectural style this free-spirited Count’s palacio showed a pronounced influence of the Italian Renaissance. And like many others, the edifice was falling apart. In the interior court an arch had split apart, and was kept from collapsing by means of timbers and iron clamps. The open staircase was likewise out of plumb, ditto the gallery that led to the gate of the piso principal, the main floor. Everything had to be propped up, until the day when our enterprising anarchist could put together enough of his homemade bombs and infernal machines to blow up the whole island, which is to say the whole world. Over the centuries, the Spaniards have developed a genuine and fascinating mastery in the art and culture of architectural decay, a skill exceeded perhaps only by their Iberian brothers in Portugal. They are no good at restoration, because they are too impulsive, too little devoted to petty matters, and still too rich in the midst of their poverty. Historical conservation requires a sense of having nothing to put in the place of what is in decline. The Spanish are not conscious of their poverty, and therein lies their greatness.
In the courtyard there stood some crippled banana shrubs, recognizable for what they were supposed to represent only by the shape of their leaves. A coat of white dust enveloped these subtropical plants, but every so often they took on a tropical aspect when a wind arrived across the Mediterranean from the Sahara and covered their whiteness with a reddish coat. Above these bushes stood a stately palm tree, just as genuine as the banana plants but, unlike the latter, free of dust. A little monkey, Don Alonso’s darling, leaped around the fronds and kept them from getting dusty by busily shaking them. Don Alonso, who was skeptical about mankind and even in despair at times when the production rate of fireworks was at an ebb, sought and found in “Beppo” what Madame Perronet had sought and found in her tomcat Melchisédech and Bismarck in his Imperial hounds. Our Spanish landlord, on his part, had to reach back to a former evolutionary stage of humanity to obtain the consolation he was seeking.
Broad-leafed plants, with above-ground roots of a kind that I never saw elsewhere on the island, were growing here in big-bellied clay vats that had once served as containers for water. These roots were remarkable for the little red blossoms that came forth out of their woody fibers—parasites, as Herr von Martersteig claimed. The courtyard floor was set with sizeable flagstones. In the rainy season, when pools of water collected in between them, to keep our feet dry we had to jump our way across the court to reach the first step of the open staircase. In the background of the patio, where doors led to the stables and storage rooms, was a red-marble dipping well, whose rusted iron framework revealed that it was just as dried up as the house’s exchequer.
The entrada or entrance hallway was roomy. If upon entrance you looked up at a ceiling richly inlaid with polychrome wood, you were given the impression of grandiosity, of expansiveness, of a style of living that is not constrained to camouflage its four enclosing walls with slaked lime. But we seldom enter a stranger’s house with our eyes elevated to heaven; in certain instances we tend to do just the opposite. Stepping into the Count’s solarium, our glance went directly to what was no longer aristocratic at all about Doña Inés and her purchased spouse, Alonso. It was not even aristocratic in the sense of those impoverished noble types who decorate their cramped city apartments with relics of their exalted family heritage. This space was the realm of little people who have renounced a glorious past, but who continue to honor what they have inherited from the bride’s father, besides the palace itself. It contained paintings—paintings that were just as unmarketable as I would term them impossible, if we weren’t forced to admit that the impossible simply doesn’t exist. Don Alonso’s father-in-law had daubed these monstrosities onto canvas during a long lifetime as a Sunday and workday hobbyist. Still-life studies with columns, lizards stuck on them, a goat reclining in shadow; pieces of fruit; sunsets that one could interpret as sunrises with no loss of effect; blind alleys showing everything in merciful darkness; portraits of women who, at least as they appeared on canvas, could never count on winning a husband; portraits of men whom one should probably avoid after dark; pictures of children, of whom Beatrice said that if they were hers, she would drown them in a bucket. I supplemented these criminal aesthetics of hers by remarking that there were people who wouldn’t shrink from trashing the pictures, too, if they were forced to live in their company—which is exactly what we were about to do. A self-portrait of the artist stood on an easel. That seemed the only way to permit the magic of illumination to play upon his forceful, very Castilian nose. By rough estimate, a good fifty square yards of painted canvas were hanging in this hall—and that, by the very same approximate estimate, was the total vertical surface of the hall itself including the doors, which also had art works on them.
“Ghastly!” Beatrice said when it dawned on her that the paintings were worse than the children she reacted to so vehemently and who, after all, must have given some modicum of pleasure to their parents. “Ghastly! All of them should be burned!”
Beatrice inclines to arrogance. Quite often she is moved to issue unfair, over-hasty opinions. I calmed her down a bit by pointing out that in the most famous galleries of Europe, works of no less putrid quality get exhibited all the time. I was thinking primarily of the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and today I can think of several others that I hadn’t yet visited back then, when I relied for the most part on Zwingli for my justification of kitsch. If human hair could display an aesthetic reaction, it would often stand on end in art galleries, such as the ones I’m thinking of. But human hair is uneducated; you might say it is crass, or even lacking in respect, for otherwise it wouldn’t keep on growing after the demise of its maternal soil.
We must further consider (I am still quoting myself, as I stood in contemplation of the gimcrack art produced by Don Alonso’s father-in-law) that world-class collections display their moldy junk mainly for historical purposes, whereas here in the Count’s palace, it was shown as a gesture of piety toward the person of its perpetrator, who was still among the living and who resided under this very roof. This state of affairs actually doesn’t affect the meaning of the term “inherited,” which I have used above. As count and grandee of a historical nation, and as an artist within his own four walls, Don Juan, the father-in-law, had long since ceased to exist. His kingdom was no longer of his own world, and he could be regarded as already interred, if he didn’t sit day by day on a stool in the kitchen, peeling potatoes and cleaning vegetables with one blind eye. He himself considered this second, proletarian existence of domestic servitude as an anomaly of his family destiny, all the more so since he could no longer paint, and thus had forfeited his life’s golden glory. In a purely physical sense, he was a large man, a veritable colossus with thick, white, close-cut hair. His bushy eyebrows, two bundles of fur with a few bristles sticking out, would have seemed menacing if the eyes beneath them had been similarly piercing. But the left side showed total sightlessness, and all the right one saw was a troublesome blur. It was only after work hours, when the old gentleman rose from his drudgery and took the place of honor in the hall, that he perked up markedly, thus putting certain limits on my prior description of him. The seat of honor was a wicker armchair with wobbly l
egs; the fact that it was situated next to his self-portrait was a coincidence that gave rise to interesting comparisons. But because in a Spanish household, not to mention in a Spanish boarding house, a day’s work ends at around midnight, and because Don Juan had to climb out of the sheets every morning early, he never sat for very long next to this previous edition of himself. Certainly he might have had better reason to veer off toward anarchism than his active, vital, joyful, life-affirming, yet often life-cursing son-in-law, if it weren’t for the fact that he, Don Juan, had already entered his second childhood.
I would be doing this artist an injustice if I failed to mention that the remaining rooms were likewise papered with his entertaining colored canvases. The dining room, in particular, contained masterpieces of his appetite-enhancing brushwork. I had the pleasure during our entire stay at the Pensión del Conde, of sitting opposite a fish with an expertly painted, staring, glazed eye that seemed to plead with me, “Please, won’t somebody finally eat me up, now that I’ve been gasping here on dry land ever since my executioner fished me out of his cranial aquarium?” It wasn’t lack of air that was causing this fish to gasp, but an ordinary kitchen onion that it held in its maw. To keep the fish within the confines of its frame, the painter had garnished its ventral fin with a sprig of parsley.
If we can speak of a certain lack of genuine art on the part of this family’s testator, it was made up for by his heir’s practical, applied artistic talents. Don Alonso was skilled in all kinds of crafts. He punched leather, painted on porcelain, burned in wood, made ceramic pots, turned wood on a lathe, etched, carved ivory, and modeled in wax. He was good at marquetry and intaglio, and bound his own books with self-marbled end-papers. In short, there was nothing you could find in a handbook of arts and crafts that this after-hours anarchist didn’t practice with proficiency. His workshop on the third floor was equipped with all the necessary tools and machines. I was constantly amazed and, I must admit, envious whenever I watched this master puttering away in his white smock, which displayed, in a kind of batik pattern, traces of all his various enterprises.
Since I was myself an unregistered member of the guild that can make thirteen botched jobs out of a dozen tries, we soon became friends. I was allowed to enter and leave his studio at will, and also to use his tools, once Alonso noticed that I was just as clever at this sort of thing as he was, and that I wasn’t about to purloin his precious possessions. This anarchist Count would never have tolerated such a thing.
Only one area was off limits to me, and that was the tiny, windowless cubicle where he devoted himself wholeheartedly to his anarchism. It could be reached only by squirming through garrets, past a pigeon loft, up a set of stairs, and along perilous attic passageways. In the palace it was referred to as the cámara ardiente, which in Catholic churches is what they call a chapel with a catafalque for funeral masses. Not unlike the Church, though with much less pious intent, the Count placed his cámara in the service of death. This is where the partisans gathered in the evening, men who were convinced that things must not go on as they were, and that something had to be done. Some had read Bakunin, others were versed in Ballanche; all of them were devoted to what they read between the lines in Unamuno and Pío Baroja, and they all dabbled in the manufacture of fireworks and infernal machines with which to undermine bourgeois society and, above all, blow up the churches. The conspirator-in-chief, Don Alonso, demanded that one of these churches be spared: Montesión, where once every year he partook of the Holy Eucharist.
Don Darío, who up to now is familiar to us in word if not in deed, was a member of years-long standing in this league of explosives experts. With some he had a reputation as the group’s intellectual spine and unimpeachable brain, for he was a well-read fellow, much traveled, nursing a personal hatred of the Pope, and in possession of the financial wherewithal without which it is futile to foment any conspiracy. But he got thrown out of the nocturnal cooperative as too dangerous a revolutionary. In a later chapter I shall return to this gentleman. But let me explain here why a rich and smart terrorist like him could no longer be tolerated in the Count’s powder magazine.
One night the gang, having convened in the fraternal harmony and pacific concord that is essential when dealing with high explosives, was as usual fiddling around with their petards. Don Darío, our crippled hero of the barricades, having maneuvered the secret passageways, suddenly bounced into this chamber of horrors. Upon arrival, he proclaimed loudly that enough was enough; from now on all churches must be leveled, including the Montesión that Comrade Alonso wanted preserved for the salvation of his private soul. Down with all Your Eminences, one of whom, an eminently grey one, had been living it up for months in Don Darío’s hotel with wine and women, but had now vamoosed for the mainland without paying his bill! Don Alonso, it was reported, was at first benumbed by this pronouncement. But then he quickly recovered, and retorted that if Comrade Darío blasted away his church, he would personally light the fuse in the chapel at this co-conspirator’s bullfight arena, and send the Holy Mother of God sky-high, so help him God! With a gnashing of teeth Don Darío retracted his threats, only to put forth additional warnings that were worse, because he meant to carry them out right here in the powder room. There was no choice but to gang up on this zealot and transport him out to the street. When we took up residence in the Pensión del Conde, relations among the bomb builders had broken off.
Over the years I saw many bombs from Alonso’s atelier go off in Palma. These explosive pronouncements had the best intentions of doing away with the entire clerical clique. But when, for example, they got thrown at streetcars whose passengers were politely asked to disembark beforehand, it still took some powerful anarchists’ shoulders to overturn the vehicle. On the other hand, the bombs made short work of window glass. The shattering noise mingled promisingly with the explosion, the bomb-chuckers cheered in the cause of “freedom,” cursed the bourgeoisie and the clergy, and then withdrew to a café to discuss their next plot. When Franco exploded the big bomb that turned the whole country into a cámara ardiente, Don Alonso and his buddies were forced to realize that what they had been up to amounted to stuffing butifarras—about which, more in my Epilogue. For the moment, let us enjoy peace for a while longer. It is so profoundly calming now that the noise of the fireworks has died away.
Doña Inés was love itself, kindness itself, solicitude itself, and she was all these things regardless of the fact that she was also ugliness itself. Having no children, she was as busy as a bee—a cause-and-effect relation that would make no sense in northern Europe. In Spain, mothers with multiple children are condemned to indolence, a result of their tumbling from one trauma to the next as they deal with their offsprings’ plight, which is so seldom mitigated by happiness. I never saw Doña Inés with empty hands. She was fierce even with a dust cloth, although she always conducted a losing battle. Her staff knew well enough why they weren’t asked to do the dusting. It would have required the entire army of monkeys commanded by the German guest in Room 13 to assist Beppo in keeping the grime from fulfilling its bourgeois function. Doña Inés didn’t lay her hands in her lap until the day she died. A few months ago a friend told me of her passing away. She was in her early forties when we committed ourselves to her care. Her hair was already then snow-white, and her face featured a constant smile that wasn’t meant to be one. What caused this illusion of merriment was an unfortunate play of wrinkles near her mouth. Perhaps “play” is saying too much, for as an innkeeper she might well have worn a perpetual smile without harboring an iota of good will toward her guests. “Keep smiling”—that’s what the Americans call this technique of using a lie to smooth over the rough edges of life. It is certain that I never saw her laughing, but then it was no laughing matter to keep charge of the crowd of bungling domestics who served under her scepter. Come to think of it, she herself served under the cudgel of her gigantic philandering husband, the one who had chopped down his family tree so that he could crawl around
all the more conveniently in the depths of the shrubbery.
Among the female personnel, the most remarkable was the cook. She was a short, plump girl with a significant bosom, from the depths of which there rose little clouds of smoke, making her appear as though she were always carrying a steaming bowl of soup. She believed in God with the type of faith that keeps the believer from ever having to blush in the face of the One believed in. We could have thought that she was constantly offering a ritual gift of incense to the Almighty. But this was not the case. As she went about her chores Josefa puffed on a pipe, and she stashed it in her capacious cleavage when working at the stove, while explaining a Spanish recipe to her guests, or while she had to carry in the food herself because the table waiters were off wallowing somewhere else. An expert in matters pertaining to smoke, Captain von Martersteig, later told me that Josefa wore between her breasts an asbestos pouch hand-crafted by our friend the Count. As a reconnaissance pilot in Baron von Richthofen’s squadron, Martersteig had enjoyed a bird’s-eye view of many events, and thus we can believe that he made reliable observation of the cook’s bosom. Unfortunately, his current status was limited to low-level flying of this sort, which is to say… But I am not yet through with our little fireplug of a cook, Josefa.
Everybody in the house loved this little ageless, God-fearing, honest girl with her smoke-producing gentleman’s vice. I soon took her into my heart, and more than once she pressed me to her ample cushions. She was a good cook, Josefa was, but always with the same menu—which wasn’t her fault. The Count’s Boarding House was not, after all, a “Príncipe” with a chef who, if he worked in Germany, would be awarded the title of Privy Councillor or, like some painters in oils, a professorship. At the Count’s house the menu had to be inexpensive, in order to keep the price of lodging within reason. The hot water sold by my grandfather was no doubt cheaper still, but I don’t wish to make invidious comparisons. At Doña Inés’ table no one suffered hunger or thirst. And if the two of us did feel such pangs later, it was not at her board, but out in God’s open air.
The Island of Second Sight Page 20