Now it was only the Christian Scientist ladies who could deliver me up to my enemies. I was terribly afraid of them.
By the way, none of the frequenters of Mulet’s tertulia had ever been aware that the organizer of that institution was for years a secret member of the Franco movement. His reputation was that of a radical leftist.
I still had debts with Bauzá, the premier Mallorcan tailor. I couldn’t pay them, but I didn’t want to escape from the island without giving the store my Swiss address. “Debts?” the proprietor asked. “Have you gone crazy? And what am I supposed to do with your address in Switzerland?” Now you are really going to get shot, I told myself. They were shooting people who, although they believed in God, were causing economic difficulties for other believers. This war, the Bauzá man went on, would be over soon. Franco would be the winner, and then we would return to the island. Paquita had told him how much we loved Mallorca. So now, in order that we wouldn’t crash in on our Swiss relatives in shabby clothes, which would cast wrong signals about Franco and the Holy War, he was prepared to have two more suits made for me. He clapped his hands, and his staff rushed to his side. They showed me some select English yarns. I know a thing or two about fine fabrics, and this display caused me to take fright once again. This was highest-quality stuff. I lied, telling them that my departure was set for the next day. “Not a problem,” was the answer. The custom work would be ready in 24 hours. I could pay when we returned; they had no use for more money; making uniforms was now more profitable than in peacetime. I was sweating tacks. The world around me had gone insane. First I was scheduled for the firing squad, then I was listed to receive a bribe from the Führer’s own cash box, and now, for reasons of international prestige, General Franco was about to have two suits custom-made to fit my body. I shook a few hands and left the store in haste.
But the English rescue ship didn’t arrive.
Suddenly Beatrice remembered that we had left two books from the lending library in our apartment. We mustn’t leave without returning them—they were, after all, books! Once again she ventured into the most dangerous area of the city, retrieved our books, and took them to Mulet. When Mulet saw her entering his shop he was at first speechless. Then he said, “Are the two of you bound and determined to be executed?” No, said Beatrice, but books were books, and borrowed books were meant to be returned, even in wartime. We even returned Mamú’s precious binoculars, a piece of her late Prince’s military gear that she had lent us. Mamú had already fled from the island, so we gave this item to her cook. Stupidity never ceases, even in wartime. What am I saying? There is nothing like war to bring forth the most sublime forms of human brainlessness.
Once when I was strolling along the Borne, I spied the sign for the Fomento del turismo, and I thought to myself, “Go on in, the boss was always nice to you. He’s an old German ex-pat, totally Iberianized by now, 30 years of experience with foreigners.” His name was Müller, or maybe Schulze, and that was all he had left of his German origins, but this was a common affliction among former Germans. We had a chat, but the fellow avoided any mention of murder and manslaughter—an understandable omission with a state employee, and anyway, conversations can soon come to an end in times of widespread carnage. He told me that sometimes he was consulted as an interpreter, and one time—sure enough, they were looking for some notorious German, some writer or other, some dangerous character who lived on the Calle del General Barceló. They couldn’t locate the guy, but for three weeks they took Müller/Schulze out on a truck as an interpreter. Both of the suspects were supposed to be killed—the guy’s wife was supposedly from Switzerland.
But those two weren’t killed, I said, adding that the lackadaisical Spanish methods had allowed them to escape. Did he know the couple, I asked? Nope—never saw them. The guy was some kind of struggling writer, his wife gave lessons. Failures, both of them. Did he consider myself as a failure? Of course not; I was the best tourist guide on the island. He laughed. Then I told him who I was. Once again, laughter from Herr Meier or Herr Schulze. We both placed our elbows on his office counter. I showed him my passport. When it finally dawned on him that I was identical with my doomed Doppelgänger, he quickly stepped out in front of the counter, grabbed my arm, and shoved me out the door. “Get out of here, for God’s sake! You’re going to be shot, and I don’t want to be any part of it!” I was on the point of telling him that my execution had been delayed, but I was already standing outside on the Borne. Herr Müller bolted the door of his tourist office behind me.
Wherever I went, I was redundant. In similar circumstances, Hamlet would have said, “Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!” Vigoleis wended his way, somewhat less classically, once again to the British Consulate. “Good news, just arrived! Be at the port tomorrow at 4 a.m. H.M.S. Grenville, a destroyer.” A dyed-in-the-wool Englishman would have said, “God bless you!” I shouted, “Porra!” and sped away.
“Grenville? Grenville?” Beatrice didn’t seem to like the name. She searched her memory and said that it was not at all a good omen if the destroyer in question was named after the famous ocean-going hero during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Spaniards had capsized him in a battle off the Azores.
“The evil eye, across the centuries?”
That evening we went to the Suredas to say goodbye.
The Suredas are, on a national level, a decidedly fertile dynasty, one that has bequeathed divine right from father to son. Seldom do their parcels of land lie fallow or wither back to wilderness, as sometimes happens when one scion or another devotes himself to art or the sciences, becomes a purely intellectual being, gets beyond all the political nonsense in his country, and thus becomes irrelevant to the cause of patriotism. Pedro Sureda is one such example. Families like this one are the joy and the natural habitat of all monarchies. If the monarch should fall from his throne because he is unwilling to relinquish the Imperial Apple in favor of the Adam’s apple beneath a stiff bourgeois collar, or to give up the crown in favor of a soft fedora, then dynasties whose regal legitimacy exists solely on insignias, or in ancestral portraits hanging on their walls, will go on dreaming of royal power and majesty, ermine robes and dalmatic capes. At times when they get impatient in sight of the empty throne, they will band together to heave the King back up where he historically belongs.
All of the Suredas remained loyal to the Spanish King, with the exception of Pedro, who was too much of an artist to wish to serve any other master. Besides, he was unwilling to crawl in the dust. That is why all of the Suredas looked upon the two-armed General as the man to reinstate the Old King or to bestow a New King on the country. That is exactly what Franco promised the Mallorcan monarchists during a visit to the island several years previous. History knows of no instance of a general going back on his word. It knows only of instances when he didn’t keep his word—but that is just a matter of time.
The reception took place at the home of Pedro’s sister Celerina, in a large salon with stable chairs. Not a single chair leg was missing or rotting with age. The door to the secret chamber was not a secret. There were plates and cups for each guest, and whoever wished to stay overnight, or was forced to by the curfew, could choose a bed without sinning against some famous personage. In a word, Celerina had a rich husband.
The large cemeteries under the island moon were getting larger. The Holy War continued planting its crosses. So the mood was morose as we, who clung illegally to what was left of our little lives, joined the circle of visitors invited and arranged in accordance with Mallorquin custom. There were several relatives in the group, but also friends of the family who had come to wish us well on our departure. All these people liked us; many of them had taken us to their hearts. Moreover, the ones who knew about our adventures, the members of the nobility in particular, were impressed that we hadn’t done any stealing in the process of scrambling out of our misery.
Each and every face reflected the mixture of terror,
pity, eschatological expectation, and the peculiar glow that we later discerned in Portugal in similarly decadent noble families. It expressed a certain anticipation: just a few more shots, just a few more heads, and all will be accomplished. Behold, the King has arrived!
“Why flee at this late phase of the war?” they asked. “Ridiculous! What for?” The grand deluxe train was already under steam, they said. “But what’s with you? Why are you leaving?”
Thus I had to relate the same story all over again, now for the twelfth time, as in a mortuary when you spell it all out in detail for the benefit of the aunts, the neighbors, and the milkman.
The ballad of our fishy heroism evoked a great deal of interest among the aunts with lorgnette and reticule, and among their fawning young heirs; among elderly gentlemen with sideburns and medals; among officers with pomade in their hair, pomade on their fingernails, and swagger sticks in their tunic pockets; and with the unassuming Princess, who was seated on a stool as if she were working at her easel. It is no wonder, then, that I soon started stretching the boundaries of my historical account, striding through our 24-hour life-and-death grace period not with wobbly knees, but with a firm gait. Don Juan’s ear trumpet was constantly at my mouth, even when I had to change places and explain to a hard-of-hearing lady some detail of our uniquely perpetual execution. The grandee followed me around all bent over, a vassal of his own deafness, which over the years worsened at the same rate as the tufts of hair grew out of his ears. As a courtesy to him, I shouted a few words into his trumpet, then quickly resumed speaking to normal ears. Deaf people are grateful for any little particle of language that gets tossed to them. They chew on it until it turns to poison inside. That’s why deaf people are malicious; they’re always thinking that people are putting the wrong morsels of speech into their trumpets.
Everybody felt that Papá’s constant trumpet-waggling was disturbing the leave-taking festivities. But didn’t he, too, have a right to hear our story? Alas, later on we found out that he wasn’t at all interested. Nor was Don Juan Sureda eager to learn what his friend, the Catholic German, or the other crusaders, thought about the Holy War. Pedro told me that Papá had breathed a sigh of relief when he heard that Vigoleis hadn’t been shot, that he was still alive, but that no one knew where he was—presumably at some hideaway in the mountains. Search for him, Don Juan immediately said. He mustn’t leave the island or be sentenced before he could speak with him. If Vigoleis was put in the slammer prior to getting drilled, he, Juan Sureda Bimet, would arrange for his release on the basis of his personal connections, which included the King and his Generalissimus. He needed Vigoleis, he said. But what for? For some Catholic mission or other? No one in the family knew. Papá had kept silent.
As soon as I entered the salon, Don Juan came right up to me, stuck his horn under my nose, and started nudging me with it, much as lambs nudge the udder to make the milk start flowing. He sputtered a few words; I thought I heard the word diferencia, and then the name “Goethe.” But by then I was already in conversation with some of the others present, with Don Juan in my wake. I related the German Consul’s winged words to us, which earned me generous applause. Don Juan nudged me with his horn. “Well, old fellow,” I said to a friend of the family who had always boasted of his anarchistic ideas, “not yet in your coffin? You have only Don Juan to thank for that, the man who has permeated your whole clan with his monarchistic notions”—again a nudge of the ear trumpet under my nose, and again the words “difference” and “Goethe.” I bent down to kiss the feeble hand belonging to an elderly lady, and the elderly lady blessed my scalp, telling me that I was not meant to be a martyr of the revolution. Someone interjected, “Well now, he really ought to have been shot! No tourist guide has ever told as many lies as he has. He gave the foreigners a completely false image of our island. The officials have received dozens of complaints. Not one date was correct, not one name, not one anecdote. So—shoot him!”
Finally Don Juan grabbed a chair next to mine, tore me away from a chat with the Princess, and held his trumpet in front of my mouth so threateningly that, for the first time since the outbreak of the insurrection, I thought my final hour had arrived.
Don Juan urgently wanted his Catholic German to tell him the semantic difference between the word übersetzen with the accent on setzen, and the word übersetzen with the accent on über. And what about the word überwinden, or the word…? There were loud protests. Don Juan heard them, or rather he overheard them. Speaking half in Spanish and half in German, he expressed the opinion that the classic German writers—among them, unfortunately, Goethe—constantly misused these compound verbs. Would I be willing, he asked, to clear this matter up, here and now and once and for all? If so, then whoever felt he had a right to end my life was welcome to shoot me forthwith. Revolutions, he explained, have a way of taking their own course, but literary study takes hard work, even while the bombs are going off.
I was about to give vent to my philological prowess when Pedro dragged me away from the ear trumpet. This was our last evening together, the Princess explained as if in apology; perhaps they would never see us again. “Never again,” the entire Sureda clan trumpeted into the deaf man’s ear as he tapped the air with his bugle, waiting for his oracle to make a pronouncement. I, the Übersetzer who was planning my Übersetzung to France, began a discourse on the linguistic “über” muddle, taking examples from my own life experience, but I was soon shouted down, so Don Juan didn’t hear what I had to say. An object came flying across the salon and landed right in the bell of the trumpet. The discussion came to a muffled end. The object smelled of sweaty feet. A young male Sureda from the house of Verdugo, a decadent scion in a decadent era, had thrown one of his socks at his father. Five centuries previous, a similar Sureda would have had his father’s head cut off. Outside on the island, other sons were throwing their fathers into wells, hanging them, or crucifying them. The Lord’s Ten Commandments have no meaning during the Lord’s own wars.
That wasn’t a very pleasant farewell gathering, Beatrice said. It was all just because of the old hidalgo. I myself thought it was the nicest farewell I had ever survived. Beatrice would have preferred to go home right away.
At the very moment when the sock got tossed into the trumpet, agents came searching for us at the Pensión del Conde. If we had been there, they could have just lifted us out of our rocking chairs. Vigoleis, the Übersetzer, would soon have experienced his Übersetzung into the Great Beyond, his wife Beatrice along with him.
It began with somebody’s letter to his fiancée on the mainland. Would we be willing to post it in Marseille? Just a brief cordial message, nothing more. This was prohibited under pain of death, as everyone knew, and at the English Consulate they reminded us of this in no uncertain terms. Even the consular mail was being censored, now that the police had established that consulates were spreading “false tales of atrocities” to foreign countries. The German Consul actually pretended to be shocked by such horror stories. He claimed to know nothing about murder and manslaughter on the island.
And it ended with Beatrice once again emptying her little cosmetics kit and placing more and more letters inside. Everyone had relatives on the mainland, but—heaven forbid, nothing of a political nature! One of the anarchist priests handed me a thick letter with the query, “Are you willing to risk this for the Lord’s sake? It contains the truth about what’s happening on our island.” It was addressed to the Archbishop of Paris. I thanked the clergyman for his confidence and stuck the letter in my breast pocket, where I also carried with me my uncle’s letter of recommendation. But first I placed some important-looking seals on the letter to the Archbishop.
It was madness to agree to this courier service: 200 letters, more or less! Could there possibly be so many loved ones back home?
Angelita, too, the beautiful Angelita, asked us to take something along. She was the only one who had no loved ones across the ocean, but she packed a basket of provisions for us, delicaci
es from a secret hoard in her shop. Did such things still exist? Sobrasadas? Turrón? Her aunts wept, and the volatile Paquita was also rather moved. But she tapped her temple with her finger. As the cashier at Bauzá, the premier clothing store on the island, she knew that I was leaving Mallorca without my custom-cut Bauzá suit.
To make a decent escape is also to be like Don Quixote.
This time, our exit from the Pensión del Conde took place without fanfare, without the other tenants lining up to say farewell, and without porra! and puta! There was no Beppo there to toss a handful of dirt at us.
Don Alonso had scrounged up a taxi to fetch us at the most god-awful early hour I have ever crept out of bed. The driver was reliable, he told us, and had exact instructions. Josefa, the cook, gave me her blessing. If here and now I let the Vesuvius of her mighty bosom send forth smoke one last time, it is only because my memory retains the touching image of that sacrificial altar of hers. For like Don Joaquín’s pipe, hers too had long since gone cold.
The Island of Second Sight Page 117