The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories

by Christopher Dolley (ed)

  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. Accidently 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 atlotes, 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 atlotes 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 atlotes before he was disarmed by Civil Guards and shoved without ceremony into the village lock-up. 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’mb’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 1’ he said. ‘How would I manage them all singlehanded? 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, having 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 Guil
lermo 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 atlotes 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.’

  Jaume and I remained on good terms. I told him: ‘Jaume, in my view you acted correctly. No true friend could have done less under such provocation.’

  Winter and spring went swiftly by, and another San Pedro’s Day was on us. Willie visited Dom Enrique at the Rectory and offered to stage-manage a new play of Jaume’s: The Difficult Husband. He did not arrive drunk but (as they say in Ireland) ‘having drink taken’, and when he announced that this comedy had merits which would one day make it world famous, Dom Enrique could hardly be blamed for excusing himself. A deceased widow, the Lady of La Coma, had just left the Church a small fortune, on the strength of which his parishioners trusted him to re-engage the Palma Repertory Troupe as in previous years.

  Bad news further aggravated this setback. Jaume, due for the draft, had counted on being sent to an anti-aircraft battery, three miles away, from where he could get frequent leave; in fact, the Battery commander had promised to arrange the matter. But something went wrong – Paco’s father may have spoken a word in the Captain’s ear – and Jaume was ordered to Spanish Morocco.

  Willie, with streaming eyes, promised to irrigate the lemon grove, plough around the olive trees, plant the beans when the weather broke, and wait patiently for Jaume’s return. But two hundred phantom Chinese took advantage of his loneliness to prowl among the trees and tap at the kitchen window. Willie’s samovar filled and emptied, filled and emptied four or five times a week; he neglected the lemon grove, seldom bothered with meals, and locked the cottage door against all callers: at all costs he must finish an English translation of The Difficult Husband. I met him one morning in the postman’s house, where he was mailing a package to the States. He looked so thin and lost that, on meeting the Mayor, I suggested he should take some action. ‘But what would you have me do?’ cried the Mayor. ‘He is committing no crime. If he is ill, let him consult the Doctor!’ That afternoon, Willie saw Toni Coll digging a refuse pit below the cottage: convinced that this was to be his own grave, he sought sanctuary in the church organ-loft, drank himself silly, and was not discovered for twenty-four hours. Dom Enrique and his mother carried him to the Rectory, where they nursed him until the American Embassy could arrange his transfer to the States. At New York, a veterans’ reception committee met Willie, and he was sent to a Pittsburgh army hospital. On New Year’s Day, 1955, he broke his neck falling out of a window, apparently pursued by Chinese oppressors. I felt bad about him.

  If Muleta expected to hear no more about Jaume’s comedy, Muleta erred. Just before the rockets soared up in honour of San Pedro two years later, Mercurio the postman (who also, acts as our telegraphist) tugged at my sleeve. ‘Don Roberto,’ he said, ‘I have a telegram here from New York for a certain William Schenectady. Do you know the individual? It came here three days ago, and none of your friends recognize the name. Could he be some transitory tourist?’

  ‘No: this is for our unfortunate Don Coñac,’ I told him. In Spain only the middle name counts, being the patronymic, and Willie’s passport had read ‘William Schenectady Fedora’.

  ‘A sad story,’ sighed Mercurio. ‘How can telegrams benefit the dead, who are unable even to sign a receipt? And there is no means of forwarding the message …’

  ‘I’ll sign, since that’s what worries you,’ I said. ‘Probably it contains birthday greetings from some old aunt, who has remained ignorant of his fate. If so, I’ll tear it up.’

  After the fun was over, I remembered the cable. It ran:

  WILLIAM SCHENECTADY FEDORA: MULETA: MAJORCA: SPAIN: MAGNIFICENT BRAVO BRAVO BRAVO STOP DIFICTUL HUSBAN SENSATIONAL FUST THE PLOY NEEDED ON BIRDWAY WIT NEUMANN DIRECTION HARPVICKE IN THE LED STOP AIRMALLING CONTRACT STOP PROPOSE FOLOV UP WIT PRESONAL VISIT SO ONEST KINDLY REPLAY STOP REGARDS

  EVERETT SAMSTAG EMPIRE STAT ENTERPRIXES NEW YORK

  I frowned. My neighbour Len Simkin was always talking about Sammy Samstag, the Broadway impresario, and had even promised Willie to interest him in Vercingetorix; but somehow this cable did not seem like a joke. Who would waste ten dollars on kidding a dead man? Yet, if it wasn’t a joke, why did Samstag send no prepaid reply coupon?

  I tackled Mercurio, who admitted that such a form had, as it happened, come with the cable for Don Coñac; adding: ‘But since Don Coñac is no more, perhaps some other foreigner may care to dispatch a telegram with its help.’

  So I cabled Samstag:

  INTERESTED IN YOUR INTEREST STOP WILL ADVISE AUTHOR OF DIFFICULT HUSBAND CURRENTLY ON SAFARI TO GRANT OPTION IF FINANCIALLY COMMENSURATE WITH YOUR TRIPLE BRAVO STOP REGARDS

  To explain that Willie was no longer available, and that the job of protecting Jaume fell to me, would have exceeded the prepaid allowance, so I signed ‘Fedora’. ‘Currently on safari’ was cablese for ‘at present trailing his rifle through North Africa, but will be back next week’, and sounded far more opulent.

  At the café, I met Len, a young-old fabricator of abstract mobiles. He had once briefly taken a very small part in an off-Broadway play, but was Muleta’s sole contact with the Great White Way. ‘A pity poor Willie’s dead,’ I said, when Len had finished his scathing comments on last night’s performance by the Palma Repertory Troupe. ‘He might have got you a speaking part in this new Broadway play. Willie always admired your delivery.’

  ‘I don’t get the joke,’ Len grumbled. ‘That wack gave me the creeps! One of those “creative artists” who create chaos. A few drinks from the old samovar, and I could see those goddamned Chinese! I bet they infiltrated into his coffin, and pulled the lid down after them.’

  ‘If you take my front-page news like that, Len,’ I told him, ‘you’ll not be offered even a walk-on!’

  ‘Still, I don’t get it …’

  ‘Well, you will – as soon as Sammy Samstag turns up here toting an enormous box of Havanas, and you’re left in a corner smoking your foul Peninsulares.’

  ‘Neumann directing? Harwicke in the lead as Vercingetorix?’

  ‘No, the title isn’t Vercingetorix. It’s The Difficult Husband. Otherwise you’ve guessed right.’

  ‘You’re very fonny, don’t you, Mister?’ Len stalked away, then wheeled angrily, and came out with a splendid curtain line: ‘In my opinion, jokes about dead Americans stink!’

  When Jaume stepped from the Palma-Muleta bus, looking bigger and more morose than ever, no one rolled out the red carpet. That evening I found him alone in his cottage, cooking a bean and blood-pudding stew over the wood fire; and accepted an invitation to share it. Jaume asked for details on Willie’s death, and wept to hear about the open window.

  ‘He was a brother to me,’ he choked. ‘So magnanimous, so thoughtful! And since he could not manage this little property by himself, I had asked Toni Coll to tend the trees, and go half-shares in the lemons and oil. Toni has just paid me two thousand pesetas. We are not friends, but he would have lost face with the village by neglecting my land while I was doing my service. He even repaired the terrace that fell before my departure.’

  I had brought along a b
ottle of red Binisalem wine, to celebrate Samstag’s cable.

  ‘Poor Willie, how wildly enthusiastic he would have been,’ Jaume sighed, when I read it to him. ‘And how he would have drunk and sung! This comes too late. Willie always wanted me to enjoy the success that his frailties prevented him from attaining.’

  ‘May he rest in peace!’

  ‘I had no great theatrical ambition,’ Jaume continued, after a pause. ‘Willie forced me to write first The Indulgent Mother, and then The Difficult Husband.’

  ‘Did they take you long?’

  ‘The Indulgent Mother, yes. Over the second I did not need to rack my brains. It was a gift.’

  ‘Yet Señor Samstag, a most important person, finds the result magnificent. That is certainly a triumph. You have a copy of the play?’

  ‘Only in Majorcan.’

  ‘Do you realize, Jaume, what will happen if The Difficult Husband pleases Broadway?’

  ‘Might they pay me?’

  ‘Pay you, man? Of course! With perhaps five per cent of the gross takings, which might mean fifty thousand dollars a week. Say it ran for a couple of years, you’d amass … let me work it out – well, some two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.’

  ‘That means nothing to me. What part of a peseta is a dollar?’

  ‘Listen: if things go well, you may earn twelve million pesetas … And even if the play proved a dead failure, you’d get two hundred thousand, merely by selling Señor Samstag the right to stage it!’

  ‘Your talk of millions confuses me. I would have accepted five hundred pesetas for the job.’