Complete Short Stories

by Robert Graves

  ‘Someone told me a local proverb about its position… something about twitching hairs from a beard – I forget.’

  He laughed nervously: ‘Yes, that is right. St Peter, we say in our village, sits on St Paul’s neck and twitches the hairs from his beard. The proverb refers to the two saints’ sharing the same feast day. St Peter takes precedence and robs St Paul of the glory. And in the geographical sense Samper – the name is a contraction of the Majorcan words San Per, or St Peter – sits on the neck of Sampol, or San Pol, namely St Paul, because of my farm’s situation just above the small western bulge of the Ca’n Sampol terraces. Yes, señor, though not showing any animosity, I decided to put a tight collar round Don Pablo’s neck, a regular martingale, and pluck out a few bristles from his chin. Meanwhile, my wife and I could live comfortably enough at Ca’n Samper and enjoy the respect and affection of the village, who soon knew all about the negro’s trick that Don Pablo had played us. Now we come to the story of the irrigation rights.’

  He paused for a minute while he rolled and lighted another cigarette.

  ‘“Water is gold,”’ I quoted in the sententious local style which keeps conversation on the move.

  ‘“And land without water is stones and dust,”’ he agreed. ‘Well, while I had been farming Ca’n Sampol, secure in my life-tenancy, I had not made much distinction in my mind between it and my own farm; in fact, I had rather robbed Peter to keep Paul fat. At Ca’n Sampol I had planted a very fine grove of orange trees – Florida seedless navels, brought from Valencia, the first seen in the island. They need a lot of water about midsummer, but if well tended they yield fruit the size of canteloupes and of a marvellous juiciness. Well, St John’s Day came around and Don Pablo’s bailiff greeted me in the Church porch after mass, and asked me to let down the water from Ca’n Samper every Monday and Friday, if that suited me. And I said, playing the innocent: “Ka, man, why do you want water? You have plenty in Ca’n Sampol. Enough for goldfish ponds and fountains and a turbine for the electric light.”

  ‘“Yes,” said he, “God be thanked that the greater part of the farm is well watered. But the part separated by the Rock of the Ass from the rest of the terraces, lying directly below Ca’n Samper, does not enjoy the benefit of the spring which rises on the other side of the rock. And that is precisely where you sited the new orange plantation.”

  ‘“Of course,” I said. “I had almost forgotten that I planted about a hundred Florida navel oranges while I was the tenant of Ca’n Sampol. They no longer interest me.” Many people were present and smiled at my words.

  ‘“But those terraces have a right to the water from Ca’n Samper.”

  ‘“Certainly, they have. But only to the residue. Naturally in the winter and spring, when there is plenty of rain, you can have as much as you please because I cannot possibly use it all, not being a great water-drinker. But in June, July, August and September I intend to use it all. There will be no residue.”

  ‘“Master Pedro, that is a bad thing to say. You should never have planted those orange trees if you intended to starve them.”

  ‘“Be reasonable, man! Who is to starve first, myself or the orange trees? Now that I have to make a living for my children from a small place like Ca’n Samper, I must intensively cultivate every square metre of it. I can no longer afford to rob Peter to make Paul fat. If Don Pablo had considered things well he would have built a small reservoir to catch the winter residue.”

  ‘“It is a hold-up. This is midsummer, and unless you let down the water the trees will die. There is no great depth of soil in the plantation. The roots are touching rock already.”

  ‘“No, they will not die, but they will lose their leaves and shed their fruit, and be greatly discouraged until that reservoir is built. A pity, because they are beautiful trees.”

  ‘“What are you going to cultivate so intensively this midsummer? This is not the season for planting vegetables or trees, and your terraces are not by any means fully sown.”

  ‘“What is it to you whether I grow twitch-grass or coconuts?” That raised a loud laugh.

  ‘“You are ill-advised to quarrel with Don Pablo.”

  ‘“I am not quarrelling with him. He is in his own house; I am in mine. If he wishes to buy water let him come and talk to me, and we will call up a squadron of lawyers from Palma to write the affair down in a manner so clear that neither he nor I can escape our commitments.” The occasion, Don Roberto, when you came with him to my house a fortnight later for the apricot cuttings – that was when he finally prevailed on himself to talk to me. As you yourself have recalled, it was St Peter’s Day and my fiesta; but it was also St Paul’s Day and his fiesta. He brought you with him as a protection, trusting that my courtesy to foreigners would restrain me from making a scandal or slamming the door in his face. You may remember that, while you were chatting with my wife, and showing my little boy your watch that opened with a secret spring and also chimed the hour, I went out with Don Pablo to fetch you the cuttings. He did his utmost to soothe and caress me, pleading that I should let bygones by bygones, and give him at any rate a loan of the water until it was time to build a reservoir. “Have you no shame, man?” he asked. “Do you wish to lose the esteem of your neighbours? What will the village say if you let my trees die out of spite.” I laughed loudly.

  ‘“I laugh in your face,” I said, “your neighbours are laughing behind your back.”

  ‘“It is not Christian behaviour,” he said. “One would take you for a chueta.”1

  ‘“Distinguished Don Pablo, even Christians disagree at times, and your Saint with my Saint. For the Hermit of the Moorish Tower, who knows the Scriptures like any priest – he was once on the point of being ordained when he boxed the Superior’s ears and was thrown out of the Seminary – the Hermit, I tell you Don Pablo, was explaining something of importance to me last Sunday. He said that according to the Epistle to the Galatians, St Paul entered upon a public argument at Antioch with St Peter, declaring that he was much to be blamed and a regular chueta, trying to make everyone else into a chueta. But what did St Peter answer? He refused to be drawn into a scandalous scene (says the Hermit), and instead, like St Michael when insulted by the Devil, left the matter to be decided by God. And what was the result? He was preferred to St Paul in all things, and entrusted with the gold and silver keys of Paradise which St Paul was not allowed to touch, not even with one finger. I am Peter, you are Paul, and the silver key at my belt is water. Call me chueta, by all means, but if you want water, pay for it you must.”

  ‘So he asked me to name a price. And I said: “It is not much that I ask. Merely a written statement from your wife that I was never behind-hand with my rent. That will be worth ten thousand pesetas to me. In return, I will cease to water my young coconut palms and you can have what water you require, summer and winter, and be saved the expense of building a reservoir.” But he refused to do anything of the kind and called me a bad name. It was at this point that I made a great mistake, as Doctor Guasp has since pointed out to me. If I had been content to refer historically to the quarrel between the two Saints, long ago patched up in Heaven, no great harm would have been done. But before I parted with Don Pablo on this occasion I forgot the Hermit’s moral about not answering in kind when insulted. I championed my own Saint, as was right, but in expressing my disgust of Don Pablo I foolishly sneered at the “Great Apostle to the Gentiles,” as Doctor Guasp calls St Paul, in provocative words that I now deeply regret. Well, as I expected, Don Pablo was thoroughly incensed and fetched me before the tribunal.’

  ‘And you won your case?’

  ‘That was easy. Not only did I have justice and documents and important witnesses on my side, but I happened to be a friend of the prosecuting attorney’s secretary, so that I knew in advance exactly what questions would be asked and had all my witnesses well primed, and a series of very cutting replies ready for my own use. Moreover, I had subpoenaed Doña Binilde and she had to take the oath. Despite
her love for Don Pablo she was not going to risk her salvation by committing perjury; I knew that well. So my counsel forced her to admit that, so far as she knew, I had never been in arrears and that her husband had expressed great satisfaction with my labour. The prosecuting attorney protested that these questions were irrelevant, but the Judge, who knew of the case beforehand from Doña Binilde’s brother, who was very much ashamed of his sister, overruled him. Then my counsel asked me in cross-examination, whether I intended to bring a counter-charge for non-payment of my compensation.

  ‘I replied: “No. Since there has clearly been a misunderstanding between Don Pablo and his distinguished wife, it will not be necessary. He will obviously pay me, as a matter of personal honour, and shake hands with me in Court.” Don Pablo grew very red, seeing that the dog was dead, as they say, and came out with the money. We shook hands, and I said in front of everybody: “Many thanks. Now I will see whether I can spare a few bucketsful of water for your orange plantation. My coconut palms are doing nicely now, and I can perhaps water them a little less intensively.” Everyone laughed, including the Judge, because the coconuts of Ca’n Samper were already a byword. But Don Pablo had to pay costs… Well, then came the matter of his Large Black pigs, you may have heard of that?’

  ‘They trespassed, did they not?’

  ‘They trespassed gravely, stealing the mast from under my oak-trees. I went to the Mayor, and served Don Pablo a formal injunction to keep his pigs under restraint, but he told the Mayor that he had a legal right to the mast. It was lying on the New Road, which was built to connect the Upper and Lower roads while the two farms were still under the same ownership, and the proprietor of Ca’n Sampol had, he said, a right of free passage through it and could graze his animals on their way through Ca’n Samper. So the Mayor brought this message back to me and I said: “If the answer is ‘no,’ then he must come to the Tribunal! And I lay you a hundred pesetas to one that I will win my case.” And I won it.’

  ‘Did he not have any grazing rights?’

  ‘Certainly he had. One cannot stop a mule or an ass snatching a mouthful of grass as he goes along a road to which he has a right. And, to forestall all possible arguments on this head, the deed referring to the New Road – a deed drawn at the time that my grandparents sold Ca’n Sampol – contained a clause making the grazing rights reciprocal: my beasts equally had a right to graze in their passage along the New Road through Ca’n Sampol. But the Ca’n Samper oaks, planted since the deed was drawn, bore acorns of the sweet variety that are sold roasted on the barrows in the market. The ordinary bitter acorns rank legally as “pasture”; these ranked as fruit. So, having disregarded my injunction, he was ordered to pay damages and costs, and undertake that his pigs kept to their sty in future… That was another hair twitched from St Paul’s beard. What date was it that you left the island?’

  ‘It was August 2, 1936.’

  ‘A few days only before the catastrophe of the Invasion of Majorca. I daresay you read all about it in the newspapers. One Captain Bayo had advertised in Barcelona for volunteers to reconquer Majorca for the Republican Government, and he arrived, with a few ships and a few thousand Catalans and Valencians and Frenchmen, one Sunday morning at Puerto Cristo on the other side of the island from here. He met with little opposition, and had he chosen to march directly on Palma, the city would have been his. But he did not, or he could not, for his scallywags – and upon my word, though there may have been high-minded and idealistic revolutionaries among them, these were certainly a small minority – his scallywags preferred to loot the shops and cafés and villas of that little seaside place and outraged the feelings of all those who might otherwise have welcomed them and marched in their ranks. Soon they were all drunk, and the acting Captain-General of the islands collected the coastguards and civil guards in lorries, and sent them to block the roads. By the time that Bayo had reorganized a part of his force and got them on the move, it was too late. The Italian war-planes had flown to the Palma airport, refuelled and came humming into action. The battle was lost, and much blood was shed, some of it by the peasant women who came out with butchers’ knives to defend their property against Bayo’s deserters, scattering them in twos and threes across the Plain.’

  ‘A great disappointment to the Liberals and Socialists of the island! Before I left they were saying: “Now that General Goded has failed to secure Barcelona, the rebellion will be over in three weeks.”’

  ‘They were disappointed to tears. The precipitate and disorderly Bayo invasion was the worst possible advertisement for their cause, and they had no resistance left when it came to the Terror. The hotheads of the Falange soon got busy on the Reds and hunted them like thrushes. Not merely the few Communists and militant Socialists, not merely the Socialist mayors and councillors and their supporters, but all sympathizers with what was, after all, the legal government. Of this I do not wish to say much except that the military commanders, who were in control, behaved correctly for the most part and discouraged lynch law. But for many months terrible things happened, in revenge for the terrible things said to have been done to the Anti-Republicans in Minorca, Catalonia and elsewhere; and as propaganda became fiercer on both sides, so the acts of revenge became more horrible. In all, about four thousand men died in Majorca, for the Nationalists were numerically weak and could take no risks of a counter-revolt. Majorca with its natural riches, its air-fields and sea-plane base must be held at all costs. “To be relentless now,” they said, “is to be merciful in the long run.” Trials became tragically brief. A civil war is like the shaking of a bottle of clear wine. It froths and grows dark with unsuspected dregs. I tell you, there are men who die here every month in remorse for their deeds of that day, though the doctors diagnose tuberculosis or heart trouble.’

  ‘Private feuds become complicated with public causes,’ I suggested.

  ‘That is well said. In peace time, jealousy and rancour pass unnoticed or find vent in petty ways, but in a civil war it is different. If a bad man – and every village has one or two bad men, and many sour old women of the devout sort we call “Saints” – had been worsted in a bargain by his neighbour, or been passed over in a legacy in favour of a cousin, that was enough. The unfortunate rival would be denounced as a Red who had expressed sorrow at the news of Bayo’s defeat, and off he would have to go to the overcrowded and insanitary Castle prison until his case came up months later. Sometimes he never even reached prison. He would “resist arrest” or “attempt to escape” and be found dead by the roadside with a bullet in him, or with a broken neck at the foot of a cliff.’

  ‘Where were your own political sympathies?’

  ‘I have no politics. I voted for the Socialists at the election which was the cause of the war, because the candidates for our Council had undertaken to build a new school for the girls and to bring the telephone to the village. My politics are the same, I suppose, as any peace-loving man’s: I hate disorder, graft and inefficiency in government, and I dislike change. But when a thing stinks it must be thrown away.’

  ‘And Don Pablo?’

  ‘He came out as an ultra-patriotic Right-winger, talking as valiantly and immoderately as the famous “General Manzanilla,” the self-appointed Nationalist spokesman, himself. He was so far to the Right that he nearly dipped over the horizon and came to China. Our village is isolated, as you know. No telephone, no telegraph, and at that time we did not even have a Civil Guard stationed there. And nobody had heard of the Falange except from the newspapers. But the priest preached the necessity of rallying to the Church against the miscreants who had murdered children and violated nuns and crucified priests in their own churches and wished to destroy every vestige of decent civilization. So Don Pablo stepped into the breach, as the largest landowner, and formed a League for Defence against the Reds. He said that since we had no armed forces in the village, we must get help from the Falange Headquarters at Palma. The next thing that we knew, he had two gunmen installed in the barn next
to the Church, and was soliciting subscriptions to maintain them there at ten pesetas apiece a day until the danger had passed. He collected a large sum with the priest’s help, so now we were thoroughly secure. The men were not of the island; the younger was an Aragonese, the elder a Valencian. Well, of course, in times like those, it was not enough for them to sit still and draw their pay. Defence was understood as offence, and since it happened that the Socialist candidates for the local council were all men of property and well-connected – the one who had hoped to be mayor was married to the priest’s sister and had freely given a plot of his ground to make an extension of the crowded churchyard – well then, less prominent victims had to be found. There was a harmless one-eyed ancient, a bit silly, but the village bee-expert; he boasted that he had been a Socialist since the year of the Second International – whatever that may have been – and that all his bees were Socialists too. He was hauled off to prison with the face of a martyr and died there a few weeks later of peaceful senility. It’s now ten years since there has been honey in the village. And the schoolmaster, who was not from these mountains, but a nobody from the Plain, he too suffered. He was altogether too independent and progressive in his views for Don Pablo’s taste. He even favoured careers for women and, instead of attending mass in the parish church, used to go for confession to a friend of his, a retired priest with an interest in antiques and literature, who lived five kilometres away. Don Pablo had him lodged in the “Grand Hotel”, as we called the prison, for six months before his trial came off. He was acquitted, but asked the Ministry of Education for an exchange of posts, and is now teaching in Palma, where he has a school of some importance.’

  Don Pedro was now coming to the part of the story that made painful telling. Tears started to his eyes and he had difficulty in controlling his voice. But he continued: ‘After these routine arrests, others followed of a different sort altogether. Bernat Martí, a schoolfellow of mine, who kept a café and butcher’s shop near the Church and was a great wag, was arrested late one night by the two gunmen, despite the frantic cries of his daughter, a deaf-mute, and carried off in Don Pablo’s car. He was shot in the back while trying to escape. “A dangerous Red,” Don Pablo subsequently reported to the military officer at the Port. But if Bernat was a Red, then I am a negro. The truth was that on St Anthony’s Day, when we have a bonfire and the beasts and cars are blessed by the priest, it is the custom in our village to make copeos – that is to say scurrilous rhymes to the accompaniment of an ancient jig. And on St Anthony’s Day, two years before this, Bernat had rhymed about the indecent haste with which Doña Binilde had rushed to the Church with Don Pablo. When I heard the news of his death, I went at once to my cousin Amador, a good fellow but impulsive. I said to him: “The shameless wretches have murdered Bernat. Take my advice, go off at once to stay with your brother-in-law, the coastguard Lieutenant, at the other end of the island.”