THE TYRANNY OF THE DEAD
When Jaime got into bed three hours after midnight, he fancied he saw in
the obscurity of his dormitory the faces of Captain Valls and Toni
Clapes.
They seemed to be speaking to him as they had been doing the afternoon
before.
"I oppose it," repeated the seaman with an ironic laugh.
"Don't do it," counseled the smuggler with a grave gesture.
He had spent the evening at the Casino, silent and ill humored under the
obsession of these protests. What was there so strange and absurd about
his plan that it should be rejected by that Chueta, notwithstanding that
it would be an honor to his family, and by that peasant, rude and
unscrupulous, who lived almost beyond the pale of the law?
It was true that this marriage would arouse scandal and protest on the
island; but, what of that? Had he not a right to seek his salvation by
any means? Was it perhaps a new idea for people of his class to try to
reestablish their fortune by means of matrimony? How about the dukes and
high born princes who sought gold in America, giving their hand to
daughters of millionaires of origin more censurable than that of Don
Benito?
Ah, that crazy Pablo Valls was right in a way! These alliances might be
made in the rest of the world, but Majorca, the beloved Roqueta, still
possessed a living soul, the soul of former centuries, filled with odium
and prejudice. The people were such as they were born, such as their
fathers had been, and thus they must continue to be here in this calm
atmosphere of the island which was unstirred by new thoughts slowly
wafted from the outside world.
Jaime tossed restlessly in his couch. He was not sleepy. He thought of
the Febrers, and of their glorious past! How it weighed upon him, like a
chain of slavery which made his misery keener!
He had spent many afternoons in the archives of his house, in the
apartment next to the dining-room opening the bronze doors of the
cabinets and poring over the bundles of papers by the soft light
filtering through the Persian blinds, dusty old papers which had to be
shaken to keep them from being devoured by moths! Barbarous letters of
marque with erroneous and capricious profiles which had served the
Febrers in their early commercial campaigns. The whole array of them
would barely bring in enough to eat for two days; and yet, the family
had fought for centuries to make itself worthy this trust. How much dead
glory!
The true fame of his family, spreading beyond the borders of the island,
began in 1541 with the arrival of the great Emperor. An armada of three
hundred ships manned by eighteen thousand marines assembled in the bay
on their way to the conquest of Algiers. Here were the Spanish infantry
commanded by Gonzaga, the Germans under the Duke of Alva, the Italians
led by Colonna, two hundred knights of Malta at whose head marched the
knight commander Don Priamo Febrer, the hero of the family, while the
whole fleet sailed under the orders of the famous admiral Andrea Doria.
With festivities in representation of mythologic scenes, Majorca
welcomed the Lord of Spain and the Indies, of Germany and of Italy, who
now happened to be suffering from gout and other infirmities. The flower
of Castilian nobility followed the Emperor on this holy enterprise and
was duly lodged in the dwellings of the Majorcan caballeros. The house
of Febrer received as guest a parvenu noble, but recently risen from
obscurity, whose achievements in a far off country, and whose visible
riches, aroused both enthusiasm and criticism. It was the Marquis del
Valle de Huaxaca, Hernando Cortes, who, having just conquered Mexico,
had come with the expedition in a galley equipped at his own expense,
accompanied by his sons Don Martin and Don Luis, eager to figure now
among the ancient nobles of the reconquest as an equal.
A royal magnificence distinguished this conqueror from distant lands,
this possessor of fabulous wealth. Three enormous emeralds valued at
over a hundred thousand ducats decorated the bridge of his galley; one
was cut in the form of a flower, another in the figure of a bird, and
another was shaped like a bell, with an enormous pearl serving as a
clapper. He was attended by persons who had been his companions
overseas, and who had adopted exotic customs; slender hidalgos of sickly
color who silently whiled away the time lighting bundles of herbs
resembling pieces of rope, and puffing smoke out of their mouths like
demons who were on fire within.
The long line of Febrer's grandmothers had handed down from generation
to generation a great uncut diamond, a souvenir from the heroic captain
given in return for their gracious hospitality. The precious stone was
described in the family documents, but Don Horacio's grandfather had not
had the pleasure of seeing it, since it had disappeared during the
course of centuries, as had so many riches swept away by the financial
troubles of an ostentatious house.
The Febrers prepared refreshments for the armada, in the name of
Majorca, defraying most of the expenses themselves. In order to arouse
the Emperor's appreciation of the abundance and productiveness of the
island, this "refreshment" included a hundred beeves, two hundred sheep,
hundreds of pairs of chicken and peacocks, hundreds of cuarteras of oil
and flour, hundreds of cuarterones of wine, more hundreds of cuarterolas
of cheese, capers, olives, twenty bottles of arrayan, and four quintales
of white wax. Moreover, the Febrers resident on the island and not
members of the Order of Malta, embarked in the squadron with two hundred
Majorcan gentlemen, eager to conquer Algiers, that nest of pirates. The
three hundred galleys sailed out of the bay, their pennants streaming,
accompanied by salutes discharged from cannons and bombards, cheered by
the multitude crowded upon the walls. Never had the Emperor gathered
together so imposing a fleet.
It was October. The able Doria was in bad humor. According to him there
existed no other safe ports in the Mediterranean than "June, July,
August and--Mahon." The Emperor had delayed too long in Tyrol and Italy.
The Pope, Paul III, when he came out to meet him at Lucca, had
prophesied misfortunes due to the lateness of the season. The expedition
disembarked on the shore of Hama. The knight commander Febrer, with his
caballeros of Malta marched in the vanguard, sustaining incessant
onslaughts from the Turks. The army took possession of the heights
surrounding Algiers and began the siege. Then Doria's predictions were
fulfilled. A frightful storm arose with all the violence of the African
winter. The troops, without shelter, drenched to the bone during the
night of the torrential rain, were stiff with cold. A furious wind
compelled the men to lie flat upon the ground. At sunrise, the Turks,
taking advantage of this situation, fell suddenly upon the army, which
became demoralized and scattered, but the knight commander Priamo, a
demon of war, insensible alike to either cold or fire, vigorous,
aggressive and untiring, restrained the advance with a handful of his
caballeros. Spaniards and Germans rallied. Pursued by the besiegers the
Turks had to fall back to the very walls of Algiers, and Don Priamo
Febrer, wounded in the face and in the leg, dragged himself to the city
gates and thrust his dagger deep into one of its panels in testimony of
his attack.
In another sally against the Moors, the onset was so furious that the
Italians were driven back, the Germans following their example, and the
Emperor, flaming with fury at seeing his favorite soldiers in retreat,
unsheathed his sword, called for his colors, set spurs to his war-horse,
and shouted to the brilliant retinue of caballeros that followed him:
"Forward, gentlemen! If you see me fall with the flag, save it before
you do me!" The Turks fled before the charge of this squadron of iron. A
Febrer from the island, entitled "the rich," a remote ancestor of
Jaime's, had twice rushed in between the Emperor and the enemy, saving
his life. At the exit of a narrow defile the fire from the Turkish
culverins decimated the cavalry. The Duke of Alva grasped the bridle of
his monarch's horse. "Sire, your life is more important than a victory!"
and the Emperor, growing calmer, turned back, and with a stately gesture
of gratitude re moved the gold chain from about his neck and hung it
upon the shoulders of Febrer.
Meanwhile, the storm wrecked one hundred and sixty vessels, and the
remainder of the fleet was forced to take refuge behind Cape Matifou.
The majority of the nobles agreed upon an immediate retreat. Hernando
Cortes, the Count of Alcaudete, governor of Oran, and the Majorcan
gentlemen, with the Febrers at their head, begged the Emperor to save
himself and to let the army carry forward the expedition alone. At last
a retreat was decided upon, and over mountain summits and through
rain-swollen streams, they achieved their sorrowful purpose, continually
accosted by the enemy, leaving killed and prisoners in their wake. In
the teeth of the storm those who were able boarded the ship; the raging
sea swallowed up nine more vessels, and the Majorcan galleys sailed
mournfully into the bay of Palma convoying the Emperor who left for the
Peninsula without landing in Majorca. The Febrers returned to their
house covered with renown even in defeat; one bearing the golden
testimonial of the Caesar's friendship; the other, the knight commander,
lying on a litter, cursing like a pagan because the blockading of
Algiers had been discontinued.
Priamo Febrer! Jaime could not think of him without sympathy and
curiosity aroused by the tales he had heard in his youth. His was the
heroic, and also the unconventional soul of the family. The ancient
dames of the house never mentioned his name. On hearing it they lowered
their eyes and blushed. Although a soldier of the church, a holy knight
who had taken the vow of chastity on entering the Order, he always
carried women in his galley--Christian women ransomed from the
Mussulman, who were in no haste to return to their homes, or else
infidels captured on his audacious buccaneering expeditions.
When it came to a division of the booty, he looked with indifference
upon the pile of riches, leaving them for the Grand Master of the Order;
he was only interested in appropriating the women. If threatened with
excommunication, he laughed impishly in the faces of the ecclesiastics
of the Order. If the Grand Master sent for him to administer a reproof
for his carnality, Febrer would straighten himself arrogantly, reminding
him of the glorious victories on the sea which the Cross of Malta owed
to him.
Some of his letters, bundles of yellow paper with reddish characters,
faded and indistinct, were written in a style which revealed the knight
commander's lack of learning. He expressed himself with soldierly
fluency, mixing religious phrases with the most shameless expressions.
His name was known along the whole Mediterranean coast where dwelt the
infidels. The Mohammedans feared him as they feared the devil; Moorish
mothers hushed their babes with threat of the knight commander Febrer.
Dragut, the great Turkish corsair, considered him the only rival worthy
of his valor. Each feared and respected the other, and, after several
engagements in which both were wounded, they endeavored to avoid
meeting, either on land or sea.
One day Dragut, on visiting a galley of his fleet anchored off Algiers,
found Priamo Febrer, half naked, chained to a seat with an oar in his
hands.
"Casualties of war!" exclaimed Dragut.
"Casualties of fortune!" replied the knight commander.
They clasped hands and said no more. One did not offer favor, nor did
the other ask for mercy. The people of Algiers flocked to see the
"Maltese Demon," now become a slave and fastened to a bench, but when
they beheld him as fierce and glowering as a captive eaglet they dared
not insult him. The Order paid as ransom for its heroic warrior hundreds
of slaves, ships, and cargoes, as if he were a prince. Years afterward,
Don Priamo, upon entering a Maltese galley found the intrepid Dragut in
turn chained to a rower's seat. The scene was repeated in reverse, with
no sign of surprise from either, as if the event were perfectly normal.
They clasped hands.
"Casualties of war!" said Febrer.
"Casualties of fortune!" replied the other.
Jaime liked the knight commander because he had represented in the bosom
of the noble family lawlessness, license, scorn of convention. What
cared he for difference of race and religion when he fancied a woman?
When this noble ancestor had come to middle life he retired to Tunis
among his good friends the rich corsairs, who, once hating and fighting
him, now at last became his comrades. Of this period of his existence
little was known. Some thought that he had become a renegade, and that
as a diversion he even gave chase on the sea to the galleys from Malta.
Enemies of his, gentlemen of the Order, swore to having seen him during
a battle, dressed as a Turk, in the forecastle of a hostile ship. The
only positive fact was that he lived in Tunis in a palace on the
seashore with a Moorish woman of splendid beauty, a relative of his
friend the Bey. Two letters in the archives testified to this
incomprehensible liaison. When the Moslem woman died Don Priamo returned
to Malta, deeming his career ended. The highest dignitaries of the Order
desired to favor him if he would amend his conduct, and they talked of
appointing him Commander of the Order of Malta at Negroponte, or else
Great Castellan at Amposta, but the incorrigible Don Priamo would not
better his ways, and continued a libertine, crusty, fickle in
disposition toward his companions, but a beloved hero to his brothers in
arms, men of the ranks belonging to the Order, mere soldiers who could
display over their cuirasses no other decoration than that of the half
cross.
Scorn for their intrigues, and the hatred of his enemies, caused him to
abandon the archipelago of the Order, the Islands of Malta and Gozo,
ceded by the Emperor to the warrior friars for no other price than the
annual tribute of a goshawk such as are native to the island. Old and
worn he retired to Majorca, living off the products of the estates
belonging to his commandery situated in Catalonia. The impiety and the
vices of the hero horrified the family and scandalized the island. Three
young Moorish girls and a Jewess of great beauty were his companions in
the guise of servants where they occupied a whole wing of the Febrer
mansion, which was much larger at that time than today. Moreover, he
kept several male slaves; some were Turks; others Tartars; these shook
with fear whenever they saw him. He had dealings with old women who were
held to be witches; he consulted Hebraic healers; he shut himself up in
his dormitory with these suspicious characters, and the neighbors
trembled at seeing his windows glow with an infernal fire in the small
hours of the night. Some of his male slaves grew pale and languid as if
their lives were being sucked away. The people whispered that the knight
commander was using their blood for magic drinks. Don Priamo wished to
renew his youth; he was eager to reanimate his body with vital fires.
The Grand Inquisitor of Majorca hinted at the possibility of paying a
visit, with familiars and alguazils, to the apartments of the knight
commander, but the latter who was a cousin of the Inquisitor,
communicated by letter his intention of knocking open his head with a
boarding pike if he ventured to so much as set foot on the first step of
his stairway.
Don Priamo died, or rather he burst under pressure of his diabolical
beverages, leaving as a testimonial of his freedom from bias a will, the
copy of which Jaime had read. The warrior of the church willed the main
portion of his property, as well as his weapons and trophies, to his
elder brother's children, as had likewise done all the second sons of
the house; but in continuation there figured a long list of legacies,
all for children of his whom he declared begotten of Moorish slave women
or of Jewess friends, Armenians and Greeks, vegetating, wrinkled, and
decrepit, in some port of the Levant; an offspring like that of a
patriarch of the Bible, but all irregular, hybrid, the product of the
crossing of hostile blood of antagonistic races. Famous knight
commander! It seemed as if on breaking his vows he tried to minimize the
offense by always choosing infidel women. To his sins of carnality was
added the shame of traffic with females hostile to the true God.
Jaime looked upon him as a precursor who cleared away his doubts. What
was strange about his marrying a Chueta, a woman like others in her
customs, beliefs, and education, since the most famous of the Febrers in
an epoch of intolerance had lived beyond the pale of the law with
infidel women? Suddenly, however, family prejudices provoked in Jaime a
twinge of remorse, causing him to recall a clause in the knight
commander's will. He left legacies to the children of his slave women,
hybrids of other races, because they were of his blood and he wished to
shield them from the sufferings of poverty, but he prohibited them from
using their father's name, the name of the Febrers which had always been
kept legally free from degrading admixtures in their Majorcan house.
Recalling this, Jaime smiled in the darkness. Who could answer for the
past? What mysteries might not be hidden at the roots of the trunk of
his origin, back in the medieval times, when the Febrers and the rich of
the Balearic synagogue trafficked together and loaded their ships in
Puerto Pi? Many of his family, and even he himself, with other members
of the ancient Majorcan nobility, had something Jewish in their faces.
Purity of race was an illusion. The life of nations depends upon
constant change, the great producer of mixtures and assimilations. But,
ah, the proud family scruples! The dividing lines created by custom!
He himself, though pretending to jest at the prejudices of the past,
experienced an irresistible feeling of haughtiness in the presence of
Don Benito who was to become his father-in-law. He considered himself
superior; he tolerated him with condescending courtesy; he had mentally
revolted when the rich Chueta spoke of his pretended friendship for Don
Horacio. No, the Febrers had never mingled with these people. When his
ancestors were in Algiers with the Emperor, Catalina's forefathers were
probably shut up in the ward of Calatrava, making objects of silver,
trembling at the thought that peasant-farmers might descend upon Palma
under pretext of war, groveling, white with terror, before the Great
Inquisitor, undoubtedly some Febrer, to gain his protection.
Outside, in the reception hall, hung the portrait of one of his less
remote ancestors, a senor with shaven face, fine colorless lips, white
wig, and red silk coat, who, according to a memorandum on the canvas,
had been perpetual governor of the city of Palma. King Carlos III sent a
royal ordinance to the island prohibiting the insulting of the old-time
Jews, "an industrious and honorable people," threatening with penalty of
imprisonment whosoever should call them "Chuetas." The island council
sniffed at this absurd order of the too kind monarch, and Governor
Febrer settled the matter with the authority of his name. "File the
ordinance; it will be noted, but it will not be complied with. Why
should the Chuetas be given respect like any one of us? They are content
so long as their pockets and their women are not touched." Then they all
laughed, saying that Febrer spoke from experience, for he was extremely
fond of visiting "the street," giving work to the silversmiths so as to
be able to talk to their women.
In the reception room there was also another ancestral portrait--that of
the Inquisitor Don Jaime Febrer, whose name he bore. In the garrets of
the house he had found several visiting cards yellowed by time, bearing
the name of the rich priest; cards engraved with emblems such as came
into use in the Eighteenth Century. In the center of the card appeared a
wooden cross, with a sword and an olive branch; on both sides two
pasteboard coronets worn as a mark of infamy by those on whom punishment
was to be inflicted, one with the cross of the Sacred Office, another
with dragons and Medusa heads. Manacles, whips, rosaries, and candles
completed the decoration. Below burned a bonfire around a post with a
large iron ring, and there figured a conical hat decorated with
serpents, toads, and horned heads. A sort of sarcophagus rose between
these decorations, and on it was inscribed in ancient Spanish
lettering: "The Senior Inquisitor, Don Jaime Febrer." The peaceful
Majorcan who, on returning to his house, found this visiting card, must
have felt his hair rise in terror.
Another of his ancestors came into his mind, the one mentioned by the
choleric Pablo Valls when he recalled the burning of the Chuetas and
Father Garau's little book. He was an elegant and gallant Febrer, who
had kindled enthusiasm among the ladies of Palma at the famous auto de
fe, with his new suit of Florentine cloth, embroidered in gold, mounted
upon a charger as sightly as his master, carrying the standard of the
Sacred Tribunal. In flights of lyric rapture the Jesuit described his
genteel bearing. At sundown the knight had seen, there near the foot of
the castle of Bellver, how the corpulent bulk of Rafael Valls had
burned, and how his entrails had burst out and fallen into the coals, a
spectacle from which the presence of ladies distracted his attention,
making his horse caracole near the doors of their carriages. Captain
Valls was right; it was barbarous; but the Febrers were his kindred; his
name and the fortune he had squandered he had owed to them. Now he, the
last descendant of a family proud of its history, was about to marry
Catalina Valls, the offspring of the executed Jew!
The old wives' tales he had heard in childhood, the simple stories with
which Mammy Antonia used to entertain him, now surged through his mind
like dreams of the past, which had made a deep impression. He thought of
the Chuetas, who, according to popular opinion, were not the same as
other people; reputed to be creatures of sordid poverty and slimy to the
touch, who, no doubt, concealed terrible deformities. Who could say that
Catalina was like other women?
Then his thoughts turned to Pablo Valls, so merry and generous, the
superior of nearly every other friend Jaime possessed on the island, but
Pablo had lived little in Majorca; he had traveled widely; he was not
like those of his race, working stationary like automatons in the same
posture for centuries, reproducing themselves in their cowardice,
lacking courage and unity to compel respect.
Jaime knew rich Jewish families in Paris and in Berlin. He had even
solicited loans from the lofty barons of Israel, but as he came into
contact with these true Hebrews who clung to their religion and their
independence, he did not feel that instinctive repugnance aroused by the
devout Don Benito and other Chuetas of Majorca. Was it atmosphere which
influenced him? Was it that centuries of submission, and fear, and the
habit of cringing, had made of the Jews of Majorca a different race?
Febrer at last sank into the darkness of sleep, with these thoughts
whirling through his troubled mind.
While dressing next morning, he decided, by a great effort of the will,
to make a certain call. This marriage was something extraordinary and
risky, which demanded long reflection, as his friend the smuggler had
pointed out.
"Before taking the step I must play my last card," thought Jaime. "I'll
go and see the Popess Juana. I haven't seen her for many years, but she
is my aunt, my nearest relative. In justice, I ought to be her heir. Ah,
if only that idea would occur to her! If she would only bestir herself
all my troubles would be over."
Jaime decided upon the most advantageous hour to visit the great lady.
In the afternoon she held her famous salon of canons and austere
gentlemen whom she received with the airs of a sovereign. These were to
be the inheritors of her money, as agents and representatives of various
corporations of a religious character. He must visit her immediately;
surprise her in her solitude after mass and morning prayers.
Dona Juana lived in a palace near the Cathedral. She had remained
unmarried, abominating the world after certain deceptions in her youth
for which Jaime's father had been responsible. All the combativeness of
her irrascible disposition, and the zeal of her cold and haughty faith,
she had dedicated to politics and religion. "For God and for the King,"
Febrer had heard her say, on visiting her once when he was a boy. In her
youth she had dreamed of the heroines of Vendee, she had been aroused by
the heroic deeds and sufferings of the Duchess of Berry, and was eager,
like those forceful women, devoted to their legitimate rulers and to
religion, to mount a war horse, wearing an image of Christ on her
breast, with a sabre hanging by her side. This desire, however, did not
pass beyond vague dreams. In reality she had been on no other expedition
than a trip to Catalonia, during the last Carlist war, to see at closer
range the sacred enterprise which was absorbing a great part of her
wealth.
The enemies of the Popess Juana declared that the young woman had kept
concealed in her palace the Count of Montemolin, a pretender to the
crown, and that she had drawn him into conspiracy with General Ortega,
Captain General of the islands. To these rumors were added tales of the
romantic love of Dona Juana for the pretender. Jaime smiled on hearing
this gossip. It was all a lie; Don Horacio's grandfather, who had known
the whole story, often mentioned these matters to his grandson. The
Popess Juana had loved no other than Jaime's father. General Ortega was
a deluded person whom Dona Juana received with extraordinary show of
mystery, gowned in white, in a darkened salon, talking in a sweet voice
which seemed to come from beyond the tomb, as if she were an angel of
the past, concerning the necessity of turning Spain back to its ancient
customs, sweeping away the liberals, and reestablishing the government
of caballeros. "For God and for the King!" Ortega was shot on the coast
of Catalonia when his Carlist expedition failed, and the Popess remained
in Majorca, ready to bestow her money upon new pious enterprises.
Many thought that she was ruined after her prodigality during the last
civil war, but Jaime knew what a fortune the devout lady possessed. She
lived as simply as a peasant; she still owned extensive estates, and the
money she had saved by her economies went in the form of gifts to
churches and convents and in donations to Saint Peter's treasury. Her
old time motto, "For God and for the King!" had suffered mutilation. She
no longer thought of the king. Nothing was left of her former enthusiasm
for the exiled pretender except a great daguerreotype with a dedication
adorning the darker part of her salon.
"A fine young man," she used to say, "but like all liberals! Ah, life in
a foreign land! How it changes men! What sins----!"
Now her enthusiasm was only for God, and her money made its way to Rome.
One supreme hope dominated her life. Would not the Holy Father send her
the "Golden Rose" before she died? It was a gift originally intended for
none but queens, but some pious rich women of South America had received
this distinction, and Juana gave a detailed account of her liberalities,
living in holy poverty so that she might send still more money. The
"Golden Rose," and then she would be ready to die!
Febrer arrived at the dwelling of the Popess: a zaguan resembling his
own, but better kept, cleaner, with no grass between the paving stones,
no cracks nor broken places in the wall, but all in monastic
pulchritude! The door was opened to him by a servant, young and pale,
dressed in a blue habit with a white cord, who made a gesture of
surprise on recognizing Jaime.
She left him in the reception hall among a concourse of portraits, such
as that in the house of the Febrers, and she ran with a light, rat-like
trot to the interior rooms to announce this extraordinary visit which
disturbed the monastic peace of the palace.
Long moments of silence followed. Jaime heard furtive footsteps in the
adjoining apartments; he saw curtains which swayed lightly, as if moved
by a gentle zephyr; he felt lurking forms behind them, unseen eyes
spying upon him. The servant reappeared, bowing low to Jaime with grave
courtesy, for was he not the senora's nephew? She left the great salon
and disappeared.
Febrer amused himself while waiting by looking over the vast room, with
its archaic luxury. His own house had been like this in his
grandfather's time. The walls were covered with rich crimson damask
forming a background for the ancient religious paintings in soft,
Italian style. The furniture was of white and gilded wood, with
voluptuous curves, upholstered in heavy embroidered silk. Polychrome
figures of saints and Eighteenth Century hangings with mythological
scenes were reflected in the deep azure mirrors above the consoles. The
vaulted ceiling was painted in fresco, with an assemblage of gods and
goddesses seated on clouds, whose rosy nudity and bold gestures
contrasted sharply with the dolorous visage of a great Christ which
seemed to preside over the salon, occupying a wide space on the wall
between two doors. The Popess recognized the sinfulness of these
mythological decorations, but as they were reminiscent of a happy epoch,
of a time when the caballeros ruled, she respected them, and tried not
to see them.
A damask curtain parted, and a woman who looked like an old servant
entered the salon, dressed in black, wearing a plain skirt and a poor
jacket, after the manner of a peasant woman. Her gray hair was partly
concealed by a dark shawl to which time and grease had imparted a
reddish tint. Beneath her skirt peeped forth feet shod in hempen
sandals, with coarse white stockings. Jaime hastily arose. That old
servant was the Popess!
The chairs were arranged in a certain disorder, which suggested the
coterie which gathered there every afternoon. Each seat belonged by
right of habit to a certain grave person, and stood motionless in its
own particular place. Dona Juana occupied a great throne-like chair,
from which seat she presided every afternoon over her faithful reunion
of canons, old woman friends, and senoras of wholesome ideas, like a
queen receiving her court.
"Sit down," she said to her nephew curtly.
She extended her hands, in the automatism of custom, across a monumental
empty silver brazier, and stared at Jaime fixedly with her piercing gray
eyes so accustomed to commanding respect. This authoritative stare
gradually began to soften until it weakened in tears of emotion. She had
not seen her nephew for nearly ten years.
"You are a true Febrer. You look like your grandfather--like all of the
men of your family."
She concealed her real thoughts; she kept silent about the only
resemblance which moved her, his likeness to his father. Jaime was the
young naval officer, just as he used to come to see her in the old days!
He lacked nothing but the uniform and the eyeglasses. Ah, that monster
of liberalism and of ingratitude!
Soon her eyes recovered their accustomed hardness; her features became
more dry, more pale and angular.
"What do you wish?" she said rudely; "because you certainly have not
come merely for the pleasure of seeing me!"
The moment had arrived! Jaime lowered his eyes with childish hypocrisy,
and, afraid of broaching his actual desires, he began his attack in a
roundabout manner. He explained that he was good, that he believed in
all the old ideals, that he desired to maintain the prestige of his
family and to add to it. He had not been a saint; he confessed it; a
wild life had consumed his wealth--but the honor of the house remained
intact! This life of sin and wickedness had given him two things,
experience, and the firm intention to mend his ways.
"Aunt, I want to change my way of living; I want to become a different
man."
The aunt assented with an enigmatic gesture. Very well; thus Saint
Augustine and other holy men who had spent their early lives in
licentiousness, changed their ways and had become luminaries of the
church.
Jaime felt encouraged by these words. He certainly would never figure as
a luminary of anything, but he desired to be a good Christian gentleman;
he would marry, he would educate his children to carry on the traditions
of the house--a beautiful future! But, alas! lives as irregular as his
were difficult to patch up when the moment came to direct them toward
virtuous ends. He needed help. He was ruined; his lands were almost in
the hands of his creditors; his house was a desert; he had protected
himself by selling the mementoes of the past. He, a Febrer, was about to
be thrust into the street, unless some merciful hand should assist him;
and he had thought of his aunt, who, when all was said and done, was his
nearest relative, almost like a mother, in whom he trusted to save him.
The imaginary motherhood caused Dona Juana to flush slightly, and
augmented the hard glitter in her eyes. Ah, memory, with its haunting
visions!
"And is it from me you hope for salvation?" slowly replied the Popess in
a voice that hissed between the yellow rows of her parted teeth. "You
are wasting your time, Jaime. I am poor. I have almost nothing--barely
enough to live on and to make a few gifts to charity."
She said it with such an accent of firmness that Febrer lost hope and
realized that it would be useless to insist. The Popess would not help
him.
"Very well," said Jaime with visible discouragement. "But, lacking your
assistance, I must seek another solution for my troubles, and I have one
in view. You are now the head of my family, and it is right for me to
seek your advice. I am considering a marriage which can save me; an
alliance with a rich woman, but one who does not belong to our class;
one of low origin. What ought I to do?"
He expected in his aunt a movement of surprise, of curiosity. Perhaps
the announcement of his marriage would soften her. It was almost certain
that, terrified at this great danger to the honor of her house and of
her blood, she would smooth the way for him by conceding assistance,
but the one to be surprised, to be dismayed, was Jaime as he saw the
pale lips of the old woman part in a cold smile.
"I have heard," she said. "I was told all about it this morning in Santa
Eulalia as I was coming away from mass. You were at Valldemosa
yesterday. You are going to marry--you are going to marry--a Chueta!"
It cost her an effort to pronounce the word; she shuddered as she spoke
it. After this a long silence reigned, one of those tragic and absolute
silences which follow great catastrophes, as if the house had just
tumbled down, and the echo of the last toppled wall had died away.
"And what do you think of it?" Jaime ventured to ask timidly.
"Do as you wish," said the Popess with frigidity. "You remember that we
have lived many years without seeing each other, and we can go on in the
same way for the rest of our lives. Do as you please. Henceforward you
and I will be like people of different blood; we think along different
lines; we cannot understand each other."
"So I ought not to marry?" he insisted.
"Ask yourself that question. For many years the Febrers have wandered on
such crooked paths that nothing they do surprises me."
Jaime detected in his aunt's eyes and noted in her voice a repressed
joy, a reveling in vengeance, the satisfaction of seeing her enemies
fall into what she considered a dishonor, and this irritated him.
"But if I marry," he said, imitating Dona Juana's frigid manner, "will
you come to my wedding?"
This put an end to the tranquillity of the Popess, who drew herself up
haughtily. The romantic books of her youth rushed through her mind; she
spoke like an injured queen at the end of a chapter of a historic novel.
"Caballero! I am a Genovart on my father's side. My mother was a Febrer,
but one family is as good as the other. I renounce the blood that is to
be mixed with a vile people, Christ killers, and I remain true to my
own, to that of my father which will end with me pure and honorable!"
She pointed toward the door with arrogant mien, bringing the interview
to a close, but soon she seemed to realize how abrupt and theatrical her
protest had been, and she lowered her eyes; she grew more human,
assuming an air of Christian meekness.
"Good-bye, Jaime; may the Lord enlighten you!"
"Good-bye, Aunt."
Impelled by custom he extended his hand, but she drew hers back,
concealing it behind her. Febrer smiled as he recalled certain tales
told by the gossips. It was not scorn nor hatred. The Popess had made a
vow that as long as she lived she would touch the hand of no man except
those of the priests.
When he found himself again on the street, he began to curse mentally,
looking at the swelling balconies of the rococo mansion. Rattlesnake!
How she rejoiced at his marriage! When it had become a fact she would
pretend indignation and scandal before her coterie; perhaps she would
get sick so that all the islanders would sympathize with her, and yet,
her joy would be great, the joy of a vengeance nourished for many years,
on seeing a Febrer, the son of the man she hated, submerged in what she
considered the most ignominious of dishonors. Urged on by the certainty
of ruin, he must give her this joy by carrying into effect his union
with the daughter of Valls! Ah, poverty!
He wandered along the solitary streets near the Almudaina and the
Cathedral until past midday. At last hunger instinctively turned his
steps homeward. He ate in silence, without knowing what was put before
him, not even seeing Mammy, who, worried and restless since the previous
day, was eager to start a conversation in order to learn more news.
After luncheon he stepped out upon a small gallery with a crumbling
balustrade crowned by three Roman busts which looked into the garden. At
his feet spread the foliage of the figs, the varnished leaves of the
magnolias, the green balls on the orange trees. Before him the trunks of
the palms shut off the blue of space, and, farther away, the
sharp-pointed merlons of the wall extended to the sea, the luminous,
immense sea, trembling with life as if the barkentines with their
wind-filled sails were tickling its greenish surface. At his right lay
the port crowded with masts and surrounded with yellow chimneys; beyond,
striding into the waters of the bay, the dark mass of the pines of
Bellver, and on the summit the circular castle like a bull-ring, with
its Torre de Homenaje apart, isolated, with no other link than a
graceful bridge. Below lay the modern red houses of Terreno, and beyond,
at the end of the cape, the ancient Puerto Pi with its signal towers and
the batteries of Don Carlos.
Across the bay, losing itself in the sea, amid the fog floating upon the
horizon, was a dark green cape with reddish rocks, gloomy and desolate.
Against the blue sky the Cathedral lifted its buttresses and arcades
like a ship of stone bereft of masts, flung by angry waves between the
city and the shore. Behind the temple the ancient alcazar, the
Almudaina, flaunted its red, Moorish, almost windowless towers. In the
bishop's palace the glass panes in the miradors shone like flames of
reddened steel, as if reflected from a conflagration. Between this
palace and the sea wall, in a deep, grass-grown fosse along whose walls
crept windswept garlands of rosebushes, lay some cannons, a few of them
very ancient and mounted upon wheels; others more modern, which had
awaited for years the call to action, were scattered over the ground.
The great iron guns were oxidized, as were the gun-carriages; the
long-range cannons, painted red, and sunken in the herbage, resembled
exhaust pipes of a steam engine. Neglect and the rust of disuse were
aging these modern pieces. The traditional, monotonous atmosphere which,
according to Febrer, enveloped the island, seemed to weigh upon these
instruments of war, old and out-of-date almost before they were
fashioned, and before ever having spoken.
Insensible to the joyousness of the sun, heedless of the luminous
palpitation of the blue expanse, deaf to the chirping of the birds
fluttering at his feet, Jaime was overcome by intense sadness, by
overwhelming depression.
Why struggle with the past? How rid himself of the chain? At birth
everyone found the place and the gesture for everything in the course of
his existence already defined; it was useless even to wish to change
one's situation.
Often in his early youth, on looking down from a height upon the city
with its smiling environs, he had felt obsessed by gloomy thoughts. In
the sunshine-flooded streets, under shelter of the roofs, swarmed an
ant-like humanity, dominated by necessities and ideas of the moment
which they considered all important, believing with consuming egotism in
a superior and omnipotent being watching and directing their goings and
comings, as insignificant as the infusoria in a drop of water. Beyond
the town Jaime's imagination pictured cypress tops thrust above sombre
walls, the white structures of a compactly built city, multitudes of
tiny windows like the mouths of ovens, and marble slabs which seemed to
cover the entrances to caves. How many were the inhabitants of the city
of the living, in their plazas and on their broad streets? Sixty
thousand--eighty thousand. Ah! In that other city but a short distance
away, crowded, silent, packed into their little white houses beneath the
gloomy cypresses, the invisible inhabitants numbered four hundred
thousand--six hundred thousand, perhaps a million!
In Madrid, the same thought had flashed through his brain one afternoon
while he was strolling with two women through the outskirts of the town.
The crests of the hills near the river were occupied by silent villages,
among whose white edifices rose pointed groups of cypress; and on the
opposite side of the great city also existed other bivouacs of silence
and oblivion. The city was surrounded by a closely drawn cordon of
fortresses of the departed. Half a million living beings swarmed through
the streets, imagining themselves alone in the mastery and direction of
their existences, never heeding the four--six--eight millions of their
kind, close beside them, but invisible.
The same thought had come to him in Paris, where four millions of
stirring citizens dwelt, surrounded by twenty or thirty millions of
whilom inhabitants now asleep. The same melancholy reflections had
haunted him in all the great cities.
The living were nowhere alone; the dead ever surrounded them, and as the
dead were more, infinitely more, they weighed upon the living with the
heaviness of time and of numbers.
No; the dead did not depart, as the people thought. The dead remained
motionless on the brink of life, spying upon the new generations,
forcing upon them the authority of the past with a rude tug at the soul
whenever they tried to step out of the beaten path.
What tyranny was theirs! What unlimited power! It was futile to turn
away the eyes and to stifle memory; the dead are everywhere; they occupy
the highways of the living, and they stride out to meet us and remind us
of their benefactions, compelling us to a debasing gratitude. What
servitude! The house in which we live was constructed by the dead;
religions were created by them; the laws which we obey the dead
dictated. Our favorite dishes, our tastes, our passions, came from them;
the foods which nourish us, all are produced by earth broken up by hands
which now are dust. Morality, customs, prejudices, honor--these are
their work. Had they thought in some different way, the present
organizations of men would not be as they are today. The things which
are agreeable to our senses are so because thus the dead willed them;
the disagreeable and useless are detested by the will of those who no
longer exist; what is moral and what is immoral are sentences pronounced
centuries ago by them.
Those men who make an effort to say new things do nothing but repeat in
different words the same thoughts that the dead had been expressing for
centuries. That which we consider most spontaneous and personal in
ourselves has been dictated to us by unseen masters lying in their
earthen couches, who, in their turn, had learned the lesson from other
ancestors. The gleam of our eyes is but the glow of the souls of our
forefathers, as the lines in our faces reproduce and reflect the traces
of generations long disappeared.
Febrer smiled sadly. We imagine that we think our own thoughts, while in
the convolutions of our brain stirs a force which has lived in other
organisms, like the sap of the grafted shoot which carries energy from
old and dying trees to new offshoots. Much of the thought which we
express spontaneously, as the latest novelty of our mind, is an idea of
those others, encysted in our brain at birth, and which suddenly bursts
its bondage. Our tastes, our caprices, our virtues and our defects, our
affinities and our repulsions--all inherited, all a work of those who
have disappeared but who survive in us.
With what terror Jaime thought of the power of the dead! They concealed
themselves to make their tyranny less cruel, but they had not really
perished; their souls were lying within the confines of our existence,
just as their bodies formed an entrenched field roundabout the man-made
towns. They scrutinized us with arbitrary eyes; they followed us,
guiding us with invisible clutch at the slightest indication of
deviating from the path; they banded together with diabolic
determination to lead the flocks of men who rush after some new and
extraordinary ideal, reestablishing with violent reaction, the order of
life, which they love, silent and placid, amid rustle of dried grasses
and the flutter of butterfly wings and the sweet peace of the cemetery,
asleep in the sun.
The souls of the dead fill the world. The dead do not go away, they
remain as masters. The dead command, and it is useless to resist.
The man of the great cities living a giddy life, knowing not who built
his house, nor who makes his bread, seeing no other works of nature than
the stunted trees adorning his streets, ignores these things. He does
not even realize that his life is spent among millions and millions of
his forefathers crowded together but a few steps away, spying upon him
and directing him. He blindly obeys their tugging, without knowing where
leads the cord fastened upon his soul. Poor automaton, he believes all
his acts to be the product of his will, when they are nothing less than
impositions of the omnipotent invisible horde.
Jaime, submerged in the monotonous existence of a tranquil island,
thinking back upon his forefathers one by one, knowing the origin and
history of all that surrounded him, objects of art, clothing, furniture,
and the house itself which seemed possessed of a soul, could give
account of this tyranny better than could others.
Yes; the dead command! The authority of the living, their startling
novelties--illusion, deception, serving only to carry forward existence.
Gazing on the sea, on whose horizon the smoke from a steamer traced a
slender column, Febrer thought of the great trans-Atlantic liners,
floating cities, speeding monsters, the pride of human industry, which
can make the round of the world in a few short weeks. His remote
ancestors in the Middle Ages who went to England in a ship no better
than a fishing smack, represented something more extraordinary, and the
great captains of the present time with their swarming crews, had not
achieved greater deeds than the knight commander Priamo with his handful
of sailors. What deceptions, what illusions, we form concerning life, to
conceal from ourselves the monotony of its shams. The brevity of its
experiences was maddening. It mattered not whether one lived thirty
years or three hundred. Men perfected the playthings which served their
egoism and their well being, machines, means of locomotion; but aside
from this, they lived the same. The passions, the joys, and the sorrows
were the same; the human animal did not change.
Jaime had believed himself a free man, with a soul which he called
modern, his, all his; and now he discovered in it a confused medley of
the souls of his ancestors. He could recognize them, because he had
studied them, because they were in the next room, in the archives, like
dried flowers preserved between the leaves of an old book. The majority
of humans retained at the most a memory of their great grandfathers;
families which had been unable to scrupulously preserve the history of
their past through the centuries gave no heed to the ancestral life
perpetuated in their souls, taking as inspirations of their own the
cries which their ancestors uttered through them. Our flesh was flesh of
those who no longer exist; our souls combined fragments of the souls of
many dead men.
Jaime felt within him his austere grandfather, Don Horacio, and along
with him the animosities of the Inquisitor-general, he of the appalling
visiting card, and the souls of the famous knight commander and other
ancestors. In the mind of the man of today still lingered something of
that "perpetual governor" who considered the Jewish converts on the
island as a separate and degraded race.
The dead command! Now he understood the inevitable repugnance, the
arrogance he had felt as he came into contact with the obsequious and
humble Don Benito. Those sentiments were unconquerable, and his aversion
irremediable. It was imposed upon him by others stronger than himself.
The dead command, and they must be obeyed!
His pessimism caused him to reflect upon his present condition. All was
lost! He was unfitted for the conduct of a small business, for the
petty transactions and details which might suffice for one of meager
wants. He would renounce the idea of that marriage which was his only
salvation, and his creditors, as soon as they heard the news that this
hope had vanished would fall upon him. He would find himself expelled
from the house of his forefathers, pitied by everybody, with a pity that
would sting more keenly than insult. He felt himself unequal to witness
the final wreck of his house and of his name. What could he do? Where
should he go?
He sat staring at the sea for a great part of the afternoon, watching
the white sails until they hid themselves behind the cape, or vanished
into the broad horizon of the bay.
Leaving the terrace without knowing how, Febrer found himself opening
the door of the chapel, an old and forgotten door, which, as it creaked
upon its rusty hinges, scattered dust and cobwebs. How long it had been
since he had entered there! In the dense atmosphere of the closed room
he thought he perceived a vague odor of essences, as from a bottle of
perfume opened and long abandoned; an odor which brought back to his
memory the solemn dames of the family whose portraits hung in the
reception hall.
In the ray of light filtering through the tiny windows of the cupola
millions of dust motes illuminated by the sun danced in an ascending
spiral. The altar, with its antique carving, glowed faintly in the
mellowed light with reflections of old gold. Upon it lay a duster and a
pail, carelessly left since the last cleaning of the room, many years
ago.
Two prayer stools of old blue velvet seemed to still retain the
impression of lordly and delicate forms which no longer existed. Two
prayer books with worn edges lay upon the rack before them, as if
forgotten. Jaime recognized one of the books. It had belonged to his
mother, poor lady, pale and sick, who divided her life between praying
and the adoration of her son, for whom she dreamed an illustrious
future. The other, perhaps, had belonged to his grandmother, that
Mexican lady of the days of romanticism, who still seemed to thrill the
great house with the rustling of her white garments and the melody of
her harp.
The apparition from the past, vague and dim, arising in the deserted
chapel, the memory of those two ladies, the one all piety, the other all
idealism, aristocratic and dreamy, drove Febrer to distraction. To think
that soon the rude hands of the usurer would profane so much that was
old and venerable! He could not stay to witness it! Good-bye! Good-bye!
At dusk he sought out Toni Clapes in the Borne. With the confidence
which the contrabandist inspired in him he asked him for money.
"I don't know when I can return it. I am leaving Majorca. Everything is
going to ruin, but I must not stay to see it."
Clapes gave Jaime more money than he asked for. Toni was to stay awhile
on the island, and with the help of Captain Valls he would try to
straighten out Jaime's business affairs, if it were still possible. The
captain was a good business man, and he knew how to disentangle the most
hopeless complications. He and Jaime had quarreled the day before, but
that was no matter; Valls was a true friend.
"Don't tell anyone that I am going away," added Jaime. "No one must know
it but you--and Pablo. You are right; he is a friend."
"And when are you leaving?"
"On the first steamer for Iviza."
Jaime still had something left there; a pile of rocks covered with
thickets and full of rabbits; a crumbling tower belonging to the time of
the pirates. He had learned of it by chance the day before; some
peasants from Iviza whom he had met in the Borne had reminded him of it.
"I shall be as well off there as anywhere else--better, much better! I
will hunt and fish. I am going to live where I cannot see people."
Clapes, remembering the advice he had given the evening before, grasped
Jaime's hand with satisfaction. That affair of the Chueta girl was a
thing of the past. His peasant soul rejoiced at this solution.
"You are right in going. The other thing, the other thing would have
been an act of madness."
END OF PART ONE
PART SECOND
CHAPTER I
IVIZA
Febrer was contemplating his image, a transparent shadow of quivering
contours on the changing waters, through which the bottom of the sea
could be seen with milky spots of clean sand and dark blocks of stone
broken from the mountain overgrown with a strange vegetation.
The seaweed floated backward and forward like waving green hair; fruits
round as Indian figs hung in whitish clusters on the rocks; pearly
flowers shone in the depths of the green waters, and among the
mysterious growth star-fishes spread their colored points; sea-urchins
formed balls like dark blots covered with spines; the hippocampi, those
little "devil's horses," swam restlessly; and flashes of silver and
purple, of tails and fins, passed swiftly among whirlpools and bubbles,
dashing out of one cave to disappear into the mouth of another
unfathomable mystery.
Jaime was leaning over a small boat, with its sail dropped. In one hand
he held the volanti, a long line with several hooks, which almost
reached the bottom of the sea.
It was nearly midday. The craft lay in the shade. In the rear extended
the wide coast of Iviza with its broad sinuosities of projecting points
and steep shores. Before him was the Vedra, an isolated rock, a superb
landmark a thousand feet in height, which, standing solitary, seemed
even higher. At his feet the shadow of the colossus imparted to the
waters a dense and yet transparent color. Beyond its azure shadow
seethed the Mediterranean, flashing with gold in the sunlight, while the
coasts of Iviza, ruddy and lonely, seemed to irradiate fire.
Every pleasant day Jaime came to the narrow channel between the island
and the Vedra to fish. In calm weather this was a river of blue water
with submarine rocks which peeped their black heads above the surface.
The giant allowed itself to be approached without losing its imposing
appearance, harsh and inhospitable. When the wind blew fresh and strong,
the half submerged heads were crowned with foam and roared ominously;
mountains of water rushed roaring and foaming through this maritime
throat, and the fishermen must hoist their sails and hurry away from the
narrow pass, from this growling chaos of whirlpools and currents.
In the prow of the boat was old Uncle Ventolera, a seaman who had sailed
on ships of many nations, who had been Jaime's companion since he
arrived in Iviza. "I am almost eighty, senor," but he never let a day
pass without going out to fish. Neither illness nor fear of bad weather
prevented him. His face was tanned by the sun and the salt air, but it
had few wrinkles. His rolled up trousers displayed spare legs with fresh
and healthy skin. His blouse, open on the chest, showed a gray coating
of hair of the same color as that on his head, which was covered by a
black cap, a souvenir of his last trip to Liverpool, boasting a red
tassel on the top, and a broad white and red plaid ribbon. His whiskers
were white, and from his ears hung copper earrings.
When Jaime first made his acquaintance he expressed curiosity in regard
to these decorations.
"When I was a lad I was a ship's boy on an English schooner," said
Ventolera in his Ivizian dialect, singing the words in a sweet little
voice. "The master was a very arrogant Maltese, with whiskers and
earrings; and I said to myself, 'When I get to be a man I'm going to be
like the padrone.' Although you see me like this, I used to be a great
swell, and I used to like to imitate persons of importance."
When Jaime first went but fishing to the Vedra he forgot to watch the
water and the line in his hand, while he stared at the colossus which
stands high above the sea, broken off from the coast.
The rocks piled to a great height, wedged in one by another and mounting
into space, compelled the spectator to throw back his head to see the
pointed summit. The rocks at the water's edge were accessible. The sea
swept over them, sinking in to the low arcades of submarine caves, a
refuge of corsairs in former days, and now sometimes the depository of
smugglers. One could leap at places from rock to rock among the sabinas
and other wild plants along its base, but farther up the rock rose
straight, smooth, inaccessible, with polished gray walls. At enormous
heights were green-covered benches, and above these the cliff again rose
vertically to its crest, sharp as a finger. A party of hunters had
scaled a portion of this citadel, climbing along salient angles until
they gained the lower benches. Beyond there no one had gone, according
to Uncle Ventolera, except a certain friar exiled by the government as a
Carlist agitator, who had built on the coast of Iviza the hermitage of
the Cubells.
"He was a strong and daring man," continued the old sailor. "They say
that he erected a cross on the summit, but the wind blew it down some
time ago."
In the hollows of the great gray rock, shaded by the green sabinas and
sea pines, Febrer saw points of color jumping about, something like red
and white fleas, incessantly moving. They were the goats of the Vedra;
goats abandoned for some years which had become wild, and which
reproduced beyond the reach of man, having lost all domestic habit,
springing up the mountain side with prodigious leaps as soon as a boat
approached the cliff. On calm mornings their bleating, increased by the
impressive silence, could be heard far out upon the sea.
One morning, Jaime, having brought his gun, took a couple of shots at a
cluster of goats a long distance away, not expecting to hit them, but
merely for the fun of seeing them leap away. The reports, magnified by
the echo within the narrow defile, filled the air with the screaming and
flapping of wings of hundreds of enormous old gulls that flew out of
their haunts, frightened by the noise. The startled island had given
forth its winged inhabitants. Other huge birds emerged and flew from the
summit and disappeared like black specks toward the larger island. These
were falcons which roosted in the Vedra and lived upon the doves of
Iviza and Formentera.
The old sailor pointed out to Febrer certain window-like caves in the
most sheer and inaccessible cliffs of the smaller island. Neither goat
nor man could reach them. Uncle Ventolera knew what was hidden within
those dark passages. They were beehives; beehives centuries and
centuries old; natural retreats of bees that, crossing the straits
between Iviza and the Vedra, took refuge in these inaccessible caves
after having gleaned the flowery fields of the island. At certain times
of the year he had seen glistening streams trickling down the cliff
from these openings. It was honey melted by the sun at the entrance of
the cavern.
Uncle Ventolera tugged at his line with a grunt of satisfaction.
"That makes eight!"
Hanging from a hook, flapping its tail and kicking, was a species of
lobster of dark gray color. Others of its kind lay inert in a basket at
the old man's side.
"Uncle Ventolera, aren't you going to sing the mass?"
"If you will allow me."
Jaime knew the old man's habits, his fondness for singing the canticles
of high mass whenever he was in a joyous mood. Having given up long
voyages, his pleasure consisted in singing on Sundays in the church in
the town of San Jose, or in that of San Antonio, and indulging in the
same diversion during all the happy moments of his life.
"In a minute," he said with a tone of superiority, as if he were going
to treat his companion to the greatest of delights.
Placing one hand to his mouth he quickly extracted his teeth and put
them in his girdle. His face collapsed into wrinkles around his sunken
mouth, and he began to sing the phrases of the priest and the responses
of the assistant. The childish and tremulous voice acquired a grave
sonorousness as it resounded over the watery expanse and was reproduced
by the echoes from the rocks. The goats on the Vedra responded from time
to time with mild bleatings of surprise. Jaime smiled at the earnestness
of the old man who, with eyes gazing aloft, pressed one hand against his
heart, holding his fishline with the other. Thus they remained for some
time, Febrer watching his line, on which he did not perceive the
slightest movement. All the fish were taken by the old man. This put him
in a bad humor, and he suddenly became annoyed at the singing.
"Enough; Tio Ventolera, that's enough!"
"You liked it, didn't you?" said the old man with candor. "I know other
things, too; I could tell you about Captain Riquer--a true story. My
father saw it all."
Jaime made a gesture of protest. No, he did not wish to hear about
Captain Riquer. He already knew the tale by heart. They had been going
out fishing together for three months, and rarely did they get through
the day without a relation of the event; but Tio Ventolera, with his
senile inconsequence, convinced of the importance of everything
concerning himself, had already begun his story, and Jaime, his back
turned to his companion, was leaning over the boat, gazing into the
depths of the sea, to avoid hearing once again what he already knew so
well.
Captain Antonio Riquer! A hero of Iviza, as great a mariner as Barcelo,
who fought at Gibraltar and led the expedition against Algiers, but as
Barcelo was a Majorcan and the other an Ivizan all the honors and
decorations were bestowed upon the former. If there were such a thing as
justice the sea ought to swallow the haughty island, the stepmother of
Iviza. Suddenly the old man recollected that Febrer was a Majorcan and
he was silent and confused.
"That is to say," he added, making excuses for himself, "there are good
people everywhere. Your lordship is one of them; but, to come back to
Captain Riquer----"
He was the master of a small three-masted vessel called a xebec, armed
for privateering, the _San Antonio_, manned by Ivizans, engaged in
constant strife with the galliots of the Algerian Moors and with the
ships of England, the enemy of Spain. Riquer's name was known all over
the Mediterranean. The event occurred in 1806. On Trinity Sunday, in the
morning, a frigate carrying the British flag appeared off Iviza, tacking
beyond the reach of the cannons of the castle. It was the _Felicidad_,
the vessel of the Italian Miguel Novelli, dubbed "the Pope," a citizen
of Gibraltar and a corsair in the service of England. He came in search
of Riquer, to mock him in his very beard, sailing arrogantly in view of
his city. The bells were rung furiously, drums were beat, and the
citizens crowded upon the walls of Iviza and in the ward of "La Marina."
The _San Antonio_ was being careened on the beach, but Riquer with his
men shoved her into the water. The small cannon of the xebec had been
dismounted, but they hastily tied them with ropes. Every man from the
ward of the Marina was eager to embark, but the captain chose only fifty
men and heard mass with them in the church of San Telmo. While they were
hoisting the sails, Riquer's father appeared. He was an old sailor, and,
in spite of his son's opposition, he climbed into the boat.
The _San Antonio_ took many hours and expert maneuvering to draw close
to "the Pope's" ship. The poor xebec looked like an insect beside the
great vessel manned by the wildest and most reckless crew ever gathered
on the wharves of Gibraltar--Maltese, Englishmen, Romans, Venetians,
Livornese, Sardinians, and Dalmatians. The first broadside from the
ship's cannons kills five men on the deck of the xebec, among them the
father of Riquer. He lifts up the old man's body, being bathed in his
blood, and he runs to place it in the hold. "They have killed our
father!" groan the brothers. "Let's get busy!" replies Riquer sternly.
"Bring out the frascos! We must board her!"
The frascos, a terrible weapon of the Ivizan corsairs, fire-bottles,
which, as they burst upon the enemy's decks, set it ablaze, begin to
fall upon "the Pope's" vessel. The rigging begins to burn, the upper
works shiver, and like demons Riquer and his men spring aboard among the
flames, pistol in one hand, boarding axe in the other. The deck flows
with blood, the corpses roll into the sea with broken heads. They find
"the Pope" hiding, half dead with fear, in a locker in his cabin.
Tio Ventolera laughed like a boy as he recalled this grotesque detail of
Riquer's great victory. Then, when "the Pope" was brought a prisoner to
the island, the people of the city and the peasants gathered in crowds,
staring at him as if he were a rare wild beast. This was the pirate, the
terror of the Mediterranean! And they had found him stuck between decks,
shaking with fear of the Ivizans! He was sentenced to be strung up on
the island of the hanged men, a small islet where now stands the
lighthouse in the Strait of the Freus; but Godoy ordered him to be
exchanged for some other Spaniards.
Ventolera's father had seen great events; he was a cabin-boy on Riquer's
ship. Later he had been captured by the Algerians, being one of the last
captives enslaved before the occupation of Algiers by the French. There
he ran a terrible risk of death once upon a time when one out of every
ten of the captives was killed in revenge for the assassination of a
wicked Moor whose body was found crammed into a latrine. Tio Ventolera
remembered the stories his father used to tell of the days when Iviza
produced corsairs, and when captured vessels were brought into port with
captive Moors, both men and and women. The prisoners would be haled
before the _escribano de presas_, the scrivener of the captives, as
evidences of the victory, and he compelled them to swear "by Alaquivir,
by the Prophet and his Koran, with hand and index-finger raised, his
face turned toward the rising sun," while the fierce Ivizan corsairs, on
dividing the booty, set aside a sum for the purchase of linen for
binding up their wounds, and left another portion of the loot under
pledge for celebration of daily mass by a priest every day while they
were absent from the island.
Tio Ventolera passed from Riquer to earlier valorous corsair commanders,
but Jaime, annoyed by his chatter, ever displaying a desire to overwhelm
the island of Majorca, its hostile neighbor, at last grew impatient.
"It's twelve o'clock, grandfather. Let's go in; the fish have quit
biting."
The old man glanced at the sun, which had passed beyond the crest of the
Vedra. It was not yet noon, but it lacked little. Then he looked at the
sea; the senor was right; the fish would bite no longer, and he was
satisfied with his day's work.
He tugged at the rope with his lean arms, hoisting the small triangular
sail. The boat heeled over, pitched without making headway, and then
began to cleave the water with a gentle ripple against her sides. They
sailed out of the channel, leaving the Vedra behind, coasting along the
island. Jaime held the tiller, while the old man, clasping the
fish-basket between his knees, began counting and fingering the catch
with avaricious delight.
They rounded a cape and a new stretch of coast appeared. On the summit
of a mountain of red rocks, dotted here and there by dark masses of
shrubbery, stood a broad yellow squat tower, with no opening on the
side toward the sea except a window, a mere black hole of irregular
contour. The outlines of a porthole in the battlement of the tower, that
had formerly served for a small cannon, was outlined against the blue
sky. On one side the promontory rose sheer above the sea, and on the
other sloped landward, covered with green, with low and leafy groves,
among which peeped the white dots of a diminutive village.
The boat headed straight for the tower, and when near it they turned her
toward a nearby beach, the bow grating upon the gravel. The old man
struck the sail and warped the boat near a rock along shore from which
hung a chain. He fastened the boat to it, and then he and Jaime sprang
out. He did not wish to beach the boat; he was thinking of going out
again after dinner, a matter of putting out a trawl which he would take
up again the next morning. Would the senor accompany him? Febrer made a
negative gesture, and the old man left him until the following day when
he would awaken him from the beach singing the introit, while the stars
still shimmered in the sky. Daybreak must find them at the Vedra.
"Let us see how early you will come down from the tower!"
The fisherman turned toward the mainland, his fish-basket hanging on his
arm.
"Give my regards to Margalida, Tio Ventolera, and tell her to have my
dinner brought over right away."
The sailor replied with a shrug of his shoulders without turning his
face, and Jaime walked along the beach in the direction of the tower.
His feet, shod in hempen sandals, crunched on the gravel at the edge of
the wash from the surf. Among the azure pebbles were fragments of
pottery; portions of earthen handles; concave pieces of bowls bearing
vestiges of decoration, which had, perhaps, belonged to swelling urns;
small, irregular spheres of gray clay in which one seemed to make out,
despite the corrosion of the salt water, human features worn by the
passing centuries. They were curious relics of days of storm;
suggestions of the great secret of the sea, which had come to light
after being hidden thousands of years; confused and legendary history
returned by the restless waves to the shores of these islands, which had
been the refuge in ancient times of Phoenicians and Carthaginians, of
Arabs and Normans. Tio Ventolera told of silver coins, thin as wafers,
found by boys at play on the beach. His grandfather remembered the
tradition of mysterious caves containing treasure, caves of the Saracens
and Normans, which had been walled in with heavy blocks of stone, and
long forgotten.
Jaime began to ascend the rocky slope leading to the tower. The
tamarisk-shrubs stood erect like dwarf pines clothed in sharp and
rustling foliage, which seemed to be nourished on the salt carried in
the atmosphere, their roots embedded in the rock. The wind on stormy
days, as it swept away the sand, left bare their multiple, entangled
roots, black and slender serpents in which Febrer's feet were often
caught. A sound of hurried flight and a crackling of leaves in the
bushes answered to the echo of his footsteps, while a bunch of gray hair
with a tail like a button scampered from bush to bush in blind haste.
The startled rabbits roused dark emerald-colored lizards basking lazily
in the sun.
Together with these sounds there floated to Jaime's ears a faint
drumming, and the voice of a man intoning an Ivizan romance. He
hesitated from time to time as if undecided, repeating the same verses
over and over until he managed to pass on to new ones, uttering at the
end of each strophe, according to the custom of the country, a strange
screech like a peacock, a harsh and strident trill like that which
accompanies the songs of the Arabs.
When Febrer gained the crest, he saw the musician sitting on a stone
behind the tower, gazing at the sea.
It was a youth he had met several times at Can Mallorqui, the house of
his old renter, Pep. Resting on his thigh was the Ivizan tambourine, a
small drum painted blue, decorated with flowers and gilded branches. His
left arm was resting on the instrument, his chin in his hand, almost
concealing his face. He beat the drum slowly with a little stick held in
his right hand, and he sat motionless, in a reflective attitude, with
his thoughts concentrated on his improvisation, peeping between his
fingers at the immense horizon on the sea.
He was called the Minstrel, as were all those in the island who sang
original verses at dances and serenades. He was a tall young man,
slender, and narrow shouldered, a youth not yet eighteen. As he sang he
coughed, his slender neck swelled, and his face, of a transparent
whiteness, flushed. His eyes were large, the eyes of a woman, prominent
and rose-colored. He always wore gala costume; blue velvet trousers; the
girdle, and the ribbon which served him as a cravat, were of a flaming
red, and above this he wore a little feminine kerchief around his neck,
with the embroidered point in front. Two roses were tucked behind his
ears; his hair, lustrous with pomade, hung like a wavy fringe beneath a
hat with a flowered band, which he wore thrust on the back of his head.
Seeing these almost feminine adornments, the large eyes and the pale
face, Febrer compared him to one of those anemic virgins who are
idealized in modern art. But this virgin displayed a certain suggestive
bulk protruding beneath his red belt. Undoubtedly it was one of the
knives or pistols made by the ironworkers of the island; the inseparable
companion of every Ivizan youth.
Seeing Jaime, the Minstrel arose, leaving the tambourine hanging from
his left arm by a strap, while he touched the brim of his hat with his
right hand, still holding his drumstick.
"Good-day to you!"
Febrer, who, like a good Majorcan, had believed in the ferocity of the
Ivizans, admired their courteous manners when he met them on the
roadways. They committed murder among themselves, always on account of
love affairs, but the stranger was respected with the same traditional
scruples that the Arab possesses for the man who seeks hospitality
beneath his tent.
The Minstrel seemed ashamed that the Majorcan senor had surprised him
near his house, on his own land. He had come because he liked to look at
the sea from this height. He felt better in the shadow of the tower; no
friend was near to disturb him, and he could freely compose the verses
of a romance for the next dance in the town of _San Antonio_.
Jaime smiled at the Minstrel's timid excuses, suggesting that perhaps
the verses were dedicated to some maiden. The boy inclined his head.
"Si, senor."
"And who is she?"
"Flower of the Almond," said the poet.
"Flower of the Almond? A pretty name."
Encouraged by the senor's approbation, the youth continued talking. The
"Flower of the Almond" was Margalida, the daughter of senor Pep of Can
Mallorqui. The Minstrel himself had given her this name, seeing her as
white and beautiful as the flowers which the almond tree puts forth when
the frosts are done and the first warm breezes blowing in from the sea
announce the spring. All the youths roundabout repeated it, and
Margalida was known by no other name. He had a certain gift for thinking
of pretty sobriquets. Those which he gave lasted forever.
Febrer listened to the boy's words with a smile. In what a strange
creature had the muse taken refuge! He asked the youth if he worked, and
the boy replied negatively. His parents did not wish him to do so; a
doctor from the city had seen him in the market place one day and
advised his family that he must avoid all fatigue; and he, pleased at
such counsel, spent the working days in the country in the shade of a
tree, listening to the songs of the birds, spying on the girls walking
along the paths, and when some new verse rung in his head he sat down on
the seashore to quietly work it out and fix it in his memory.
Jaime took leave of him, saying that he might continue his poetic
occupation, but a few steps away he stopped, turning his head at not
hearing the tambourine again. The troubador was going down the hill,
fearful of annoying the senor with his music, and seeking another
solitary retreat.
Febrer reached the tower. All that which from a distance seemed to
belong to a lower story was massive foundation. The door was on a level
with the elevated windows; thus the guards in early days could avoid
being surprised by the pirates. For ingress and egress they made use of
a ladder which they drew up after them at night. Jaime had ordered made
a rude wooden ladder by which to reach his room, but he never drew it
in. The tower, constructed of sandstone, was somewhat eroded on its
exterior by the winds from the sea. Many stones had fallen from their
places, and these hollows simulated steps for scaling the tower.
The hermit ascended to his habitation. It was a round room with no other
opening than the door and the window, which almost seemed to be tunnels,
so great was the thickness of the walls. These, on the inside, were
carefully whitewashed with the gleaming lime of Iviza, giving a
transparency and milky softness to all the buildings, and to the modest
little country houses the appearance of elegant mansions. Only on the
ceiling, broken by a skylight, which told of the ancient ladder-way
leading to the flat-roof above, did there remain any trace of the soot
of the fires which used to be lighted in former days.
Rough boards, crudely fastened to wooden cross-pieces, which served to
reinforce them, were used for door, window-shutter, and ceiling
trap-door. There was not a pane of glass in the tower. It was still
summer, and Febrer, undecided, and, in truth, indifferent as to his
future, put off the details of actually settling down until some other
time.
This retreat seemed to him romantic and pleasing, in spite of its
crudity. He detected in it the skilful hand of Pep and the grace of
Margalida. He noticed the whiteness of the walls, the neatness of three
chairs and of the deal table, all scrubbed by the daughter of his former
tenant. Fish nets were draped upon the walls like tapestry; beyond hung
the gun and a bag of cartridges. Long, slender sea-shells with the brown
translucency of the tortoise were arranged in the form of fans. They
were the gift of Tio Ventolera, as were two enormous periwinkles on the
table, white, with erect points, and the interior of a moist rose-color,
like feminine flesh. Near the window his mattress lay rolled up with his
pillow and sheets--a rustic bed which Margalida or her mother made every
afternoon.
Jaime slept there more peacefully than in his palace in Palma. When Tio
Ventolera failed to awaken him at dawn by singing mass down on the beach
or by climbing up the hill to fling stones at the door of the tower, the
hermit rested on his mattress until late in the morning, listening to
the music of the sea, the great crooning mother; watching the mysterious
light, a mixture of golden sun and blue waters filtering through the
cracks and trembling on the white walls; hearing the gulls scream
outside, as they passed before the windows in joyous flight, flinging
swift shadows within the room.
At night he retired early and lay open-eyed in the diffused starry
light, wakeful in the glint of the moon as it shimmered through the
half-opened door. It was that half hour in which all the past appears
supernatural; that forerunner of sleep, in which the remotest memories
are revived. The sea roared, strident calls of the night birds broke the
stillness, the gulls complained with a lament like tortured children.
What were his friends doing now? What were they saying in the cafes of
the Borne? Who might be in the Casino?
In the morning these recollections brought a sad smile to his lips. The
returning day seemed to gladden his life. Had he ever been like others
who rejoiced in existence in the city? Here was where one could really
live.
He glanced over the interior of his round tower. It was a veritable
salon, more agreeable to him than the house of his forefathers; this was
all his own, free from the dread of co-ownership with money lenders and
usurers. He even had handsome antiquities which no one could claim. Near
the door was a pair of amphorae, drawn up by fishermen's nets--whitish
earthern jars with pointed bases, indurated by the sea and capriciously
decorated by Nature with garlands of adhering shells. In the center of
the table, between the periwinkles, was another gift from Tio Ventolera,
a terra cotta female head with a strange round tiara crowning her
braided hair. The grayish clay was dotted with little, hard spherical
concretions formed while lying for centuries in the salt water. As Jaime
gazed at this companion of his solitude his imagination pierced the
harsh outer crust and he recognized the serenity of feature, the
strangeness and mystery of the almond-shaped, Oriental eyes. It appeared
to him as to no one else. His long hours of silent contemplation had
brushed away the mask, the work of centuries.
"Look at her! She is my sweetheart," he had said one morning to
Margalida while she was cleaning his room. "Isn't she beautiful? She
must have been a princess of Tyre or of Ascalon, I am not sure which;
but the thing of which I am sure is that she was destined for me, that
she loved me four thousand years before I was born, and that she has
come down through the ages to seek me. She owned ships, robes of purple
and palaces with terraced gardens, but she abandoned all to hide in the
sea, waiting dozens of centuries for a wave to bear her to this coast so
that Tio Ventolera might find her and bring her home to me. Why do you
stare at me like that? You, poor child, cannot comprehend these things."
Margalida did, indeed, look at him in surprise. Imbued with her father's
respect for this high-caste gentleman, she could only imagine him
talking seriously. What things he must have seen in this world!
Now his words about this millenial sweetheart shook her credulity,
causing her to smile nervously, while at the same time she looked with
superstitious fear at the great lady of forgotten centuries who was
nothing but a terra cotta head. How could Don Jaime talk like that?
Everything about him was strange!
Whenever Febrer climbed up to the tower he sat down near the doorway and
looked across the landscape. At the base of the hill spread recently
ploughed fields, wooded areas belonging to Febrer which Pep was clearing
for cultivation. Then began the plantations of almonds, of a fresh green
color, and the ancient and twisted olive trees, which lifted up their
dark trunks with tufted branches bearing silver gray leaves. The house,
Can Mallorqui, was a sort of Moorish dwelling, a cluster of buildings,
all as square as dice, dazzling white, and flat-roofed. New white
buildings had been added as the family increased, and as its necessities
were augmented. Each of the dice constituted one room, and, taken
together, they formed a house, which resembled an Arabian village. From
without no one could guess which were the living rooms and which the
stables.
Beyond Can Mallorqui lay the grove, and the high-banked terraces,
separated by thick stone walls. The strong winds did not suffer the
trees to grow tall, so they put out many luxuriant branches round about
them, gaining in width what they lost in height. The branches of all the
trees were upheld by numerous forked sticks. Some of the fig trees had
hundreds of supports and spread out like an immense green tent ready to
shelter sleeping giants. They were natural summer-houses in which nearly
a whole tribe might be sheltered. The horizon in the background was shut
out by pine-clad mountains, having here and there red, barren spots.
Columns of smoke rose out of the dark foliage from the pits of the
charcoal burners.
Febrer had now been on the island three months. His arrival had
astonished Pep Arabi, who was still busy telling his friends and
relatives of his stupendous adventure, his unheard of daring, his recent
voyage to Majorca with his children, his few hours in Palma, and his
visit to the Palace of the Febrers, a place of enchantment, which held
within its confines all the luxurious and regal splendor that existed in
the world. Jaime's brusque declarations had astonished the peasant less.
"Pep, I am ruined; you are rich compared to me. I have come to live in
the tower; I don't know how long; perhaps forever."
He entered into the details of getting settled in his new quarters while
Pep smiled with an incredulous air. Ruined! All great gentlemen said the
same thing, but what was left them in their misfortune was enough to
enrich many poor men. They were like the vessels shipwrecked off
Formentera, before the government established lighthouses. The people of
Formentera, a lawless and God-forsaken crowd--they were natives of a
smaller island--used to light bonfires to decoy the sailors, and when
the ship was lost to them it was not lost to the islanders, for its
spoils made many of them rich.
A Febrer poor? Pep would not accept the money Febrer offered him. He was
going to cultivate some of the senor's lands; they would settle accounts
some other time. Since he was determined to live in the tower Pep worked
hard to make it habitable, besides ordering his children to carry the
senor's dinner to him whenever he did not feel like coming down to the
table.
These three months had been rustic isolation to Jaime. He did not write
a letter, nor open a newspaper, nor read any book, except the half dozen
volumes he had brought from Palma. The city of Iviza, as tranquil and
dreamy as a town in the interior of the Peninsula, seemed to him a
remote capital. Probably Majorca and the other great cities he had
visited no longer existed. During the first month of his new life an
extraordinary event disturbed his placid tranquillity. A letter came; an
envelope bearing the mark of one of the cafes in the Borne and a few
lines in large, crude script. It was Toni Clapes who had written. He
wished him much joy in his new existence. In Palma everything was as
usual. Pablo Vails did not write because he was angry with Febrer for
going away without bidding him good-bye. Still he was a good friend, and
he was busy disentangling Jaime's business affairs. He had a diabolical
cleverness for that sort of thing--a Chueta, in fact! He would write
more later.
Two months had gone by without the arrival of another letter. What did
he care about news from a world to which he should never return? He did
not know what destiny had in store for him; he did not even wish to
think of it; hither he had come and here he would stay, with no other
pleasures than hunting and fishing, enjoying an animal-like ease, having
no other ideas or desires than those of primitive man.
He dwelt apart from Ivizan life, not mingling in their doings. He was a
gentleman among peasants; a stranger! They treated him respectfully, but
it was a frigid respect.
The traditional existence of these rude and somewhat ferocious people
held for him that attraction which the extraordinary and the vigorous
always exerts. The island, thrown upon its own resources, had been
compelled century after century to face Norman pirates, Moorish sailors,
galleys from Castile, ships from the Italian republics, Turkish,
Tunisian, and Algerian vessels, and in more recent times, the English
buccaneers. Formentera, uninhabited for centuries after having been a
granary of the Romans, served as a treacherous anchorage for the hostile
fleets. The churches were still veritable fortresses, with strong towers
where the peasants took refuge on being warned by bonfires that enemies
had landed. This hazardous life of perpetual danger and ceaseless
struggle had produced a people habituated to the shedding of blood, to
the defense of their rights, weapons in hand; the farmers and fishermen
of the present day possessed the mentality of their ancestors, and kept
up the same customs. There were no villages; there were houses scattered
over many kilometers, with no other nucleus than the church and the
dwellings of the curate and the alcalde. The only town was the capital,
the one called in ancient documents the Royal Fortress of Iviza, with
its adjacent suburb of La Marina.
When a youth arrived at puberty his father summoned him into the kitchen
of the farmhouse in the presence of all the family.
"Now you are a man," he said solemnly, handing him a knife with a stout
blade. The youthful paladin lost his filial shrinking. In future he
would defend himself instead of seeking the protection of his family.
Later, when he had saved some money he would complete his knightly
trappings by purchasing a pocket-pistol with silver decorations, made by
the ironworkers of the country, who had their forges set up in the
forest.
Fortified by possession of these evidences of citizenship, which he
never laid aside as long as he lived, he associated with other youths
similarly armed and the life of a swain with its courtings opened before
him; serenades with the accompaniment of signal calls; dances,
excursions to parishes that were celebrating the feast of their patron
saint, where they amused themselves slinging stones at a rooster with
unerring aim, and above all the festeigs, the traditional courtships
when seeking a bride, the most respectable of customs, which gave
occasion for fights and murders.
There were no thieves on the island. Houses isolated in the heart of the
country were often left with the key in the door during the absence of
their owners. The men did not commit murder over questions of gain.
Enjoyment of the soil was equitably divided, and the mildness of the
climate and the frugality of the people made them generous and but
mildly attached to material possessions. Love, only love, impelled men
to kill each other. The rustic caballeros were impassioned in their
predilections, and as fatal in their jealousy as heroes in novels. For
the sake of a maiden with black eyes and brown hands they hunted and
challenged each other in the darkness of night, with outcries of
defiance; they sighted each other from afar with a howl before coming to
blows. The modern pistol which fired but one shot seemed to them
insufficient, and in addition to the cartridge they rammed in a handful
of powder and balls. If the weapon did not burst in the hands of the
aggressor, it was sure to make dust of the enemy.
The courtings lasted for months and even for years. A peasant-farmer who
had a daughter of suitable age for betrothal would see the youths of the
district and others from all over the island offer themselves, for every
Ivizan deemed it his privilege to court her. The father of the girl
would count the suitors--ten, fifteen, twenty, sometimes even thirty.
Then he would calculate the amount of time that could be devoted to the
affair before he would be overcome by sleep, and, taking into account
the number of aspirants, he divided it into so many minutes for each.
At twilight they would gather from every direction for the courting,
some in groups, humming to the accompaniment of clucking and a sort of
whinnying, others alone, blowing on the bimbau, an instrument made of
small sheets of iron, which buzzed like a hornet, serving to lull them
into forgetfulness of the fatigue of the journey. They came from far
away. Some walked three hours, and must travel as many back again,
crossing from one end of the island to the other on the courting days
which were Thursdays and Saturdays, for the sake of talking three
minutes with a girl.
In the summer they sat in the porchu, a kind of rural zaguan, or if it
were winter they would go into the kitchen. The girl sat motionless on a
stone bench. She had removed her straw hat with its long streamers that
during the daytime gave her the air of an operetta shepherdess; she was
dressed in gala attire, wearing the blue or green accordian-plaited
skirt, which she kept during the remainder of the week compressed by
cords, and hanging from the ceiling, in order to keep the plaiting
intact. Under this she wore other and still other skirts; eight, ten or
twelve petticoats, all the feminine clothing the house possessed, a
solid funnel of wool and cotton that obliterated every sign of sex and
made it impossible to image the existence of a fleshy reality beneath
the bulk of cloth. Rows of filigree buttons glittered on the cuffs of
her jacket; on her breast, crushed flat by a monastic corset which
seemed made of iron, shone a triple chain of gold with its enormous
links; from beneath the kerchief worn on the head hung her heavy braids
tied with ribbons. On the bench, serving as a cushion for her voluminous
body, made bulky by skirts, lay the abrigais, the feminine winter
garment.
The suitors deliberated over the question of precedence in the courting,
and one after another they took their places at the girl's side,
talking to her the allotted number of minutes. If one of them, becoming
too enthusiastic in conversation, forgot his companions and trespassed
on their time, they reminded him by coughs, furious glances, and
threatening words. If he persisted, the strongest of the band would
grasp him by the arm and drag him away so that another might take his
place. Sometimes when there were many suitors and time was at a premium,
the girl would talk with two at once, trying to display no preference.
Thus the courting continued until she manifested predilection for a
youth, often without regard for her parents' choice. In this short
springtime of her life the woman was queen. After marriage she
cultivated the soil alongside her husband and was little better than a
beast.
The rejected youths, if they felt no particular interest in the girls,
would then retire, transferring their affections a few leagues farther
on; but if they were really enamored, they would lurk about the house
and the chosen one was forced to fight with his former rivals, achieving
marriage only by a miracle after passing through a pathway strewn with
knives and pistols.
The pistol was like a second tongue to the Ivizan; at the Sunday dances
he would fire off shots to demonstrate his amorous enthusiasm. On
leaving his sweetheart's house, to give her and her family a sign of his
appreciation, he was accustomed to fire a shot as he crossed the
threshold, then calling out, "Good-night!" If, on the contrary, he went
away offended and wished to insult the family, he would invert this
order, first calling out, "Good-night," and shooting his pistol
afterwards; but he was obliged in that case to rush out at full speed,
for the members of the household promptly replied to the declaration of
war with answering shots, with clubs, and with rocks.
Jaime was living on the brink of this existence, burdened with its crude
traditions, looking on from the outside at the Arabian customs which
still prevailed in this lonely island. Spain, whose flag floated every
Sunday over the few houses embraced within each parish, scarcely gave a
thought to this bit of soil lost in the sea. Many countries of far-away
Oceanica were in more frequent communication with the great centers of
civilization than this island, in former times scourged by war and
rapine, and now lying forsaken off the beaten track of ocean steamers,
surrounded by a girdle of small, barren islets, reefs, and shallows.
In his new round of life Febrer felt the joy of one who occupies a
comfortable seat from which he may witness an interesting spectacle.
These farmers and fishermen, the warlike descendants of corsairs, were
pleasant companions for him. He pretended to look upon them from afar,
but gradually their customs were captivating him, drawing him into
similar habits. He had no enemies, and yet, in strolling about the
island when he did not have his gun upon his shoulder, he carried a
revolver hidden in his belt, ready for an emergency.
In the early days of his life in the tower, as the exigencies of getting
settled compelled him to go into the town, he dressed as in Majorca, but
little by little he left off his cravat, his collar, his boots. For
hunting he preferred the blouse and the velveteen trousers of the
peasants. Fishing accustomed him to wearing hempen sandals for climbing
rocks and for walking along the beach. A hat like that worn by the
youths of the parish of San Jose covered his head.
Pep's daughter, who was familiar with the island customs, admired the
senor's hat with a kind of gratitude. The people of the different
quarters, which formerly divided Iviza, were distinguished one from
another by the style of wearing their head-dress and by the shape of the
brim, almost imperceptible to any but a native of the island. Don Jaime
wore his like the youths of San Jose, and unlike those worn by the
inhabitants of other parishes. This was an honor for the parish of which
she was a daughter.
Ingenuous and pretty Margalida! Febrer enjoyed talking with her,
delighting in her surprise at his jests and at his tales of other lands.
She would be coming with his dinner any moment now. A slender column of
smoke had been floating above the chimney of Can Mallorqui for half an
hour. He imagined Pep's daughter flitting from place to place preparing
his noonday meal, followed by the glances of her mother, a poor peasant
woman, silent in her dullness, who did not venture to set her hand to
anything pertaining to the senor.
Any moment he might see her appear beneath the shadow of the porchu
which gave entrance to the house, the dinner basket on her arm, her
marvelously white face, which the sun slightly gilded with a faint tinge
of old ivory, shaded by her straw hat with its long streamers.
Someone was stepping into the shelter of the portico, beginning to climb
up to the tower. It was Margalida! No, it was her brother Pepet, Pepet
who had been in Iviza for a month preparing to enter the Seminary, and
whom the people had on this account given the sobriquet of Capallanet,
the Little Chaplain.
CHAPTER II
ALMOND BLOSSOM
"Good day to you!"
Pepet spread a napkin over one end of the table and placed upon it two
covered dishes and a bottle of wine which had the color and transparency
of the ruby. Then he sat down on the floor, clasping his hands about his
knees, and kept very still. His teeth shone like luminous ivory as a
smile lighted his brown face. His mischievous eyes were fixed upon the
senor with the expression of a happy, faithful dog.
"You have been in Iviza studying to become a priest, have you not?"
The boy nodded his head. Yes; his father had entrusted him to a
professor in the Seminary. Did Don Jaime know where the Seminary was?
The young peasant spoke of it as a remote place of torture. There were
no trees; no liberty; scarcely any air; it was impossible to live in
that prison.
While listening to him Febrer recalled his visit to the elevated city,
the Royal Fortress of Iviza, a dead town, separated from the district of
Marina by a great wall, built in the time of Philip II, with its cracks
now filled with waving green caper bushes. Headless Roman statues, set
in three niches, decorated the gate, which opened from the city to the
suburb. Beyond this the streets wound upward toward the hill occupied
by the Cathedral and the fort; pavements of blue stone, along the center
of which rushed a stream of filth; snowy facades half concealing beneath
the whitewash escutcheons of the nobility and the outlines of ancient
windows; the silence of a cemetery by the seashore, interrupted only by
the distant murmur of the surf and the buzzing of flies above the
stream. Now and then footsteps were heard along the pavement of the
Moorish streets, and windows half opened with the eager curiosity
aroused by some extraordinary event; a few soldiers climbing leisurely
up to the castle on the hill; the canons coming down from the choir, the
fronts of their cassocks shining with grease, their hats and mantles the
color of a fly's wing, wretched prebendaries of a forgotten cathedral,
too poor to support a bishop.
On one of these streets Febrer had seen the Seminary, a long structure
with white walls, and windows grilled like a jail. The Little Chaplain,
as he thought of it, grew serious, the ivory flash of his smile
vanishing from his chocolate-colored face. What a month he had spent
there! The professor was driving away the tedium of the vacation by
teaching this young peasant, wishing to initiate him into the beauties
of Latin letters with the aid of his eloquence and a strap. He wished to
make a prodigy of him by the time he took up his classes again, and the
blows grew more frequent. Besides this were the window grilles, which
allowed glimpses of nothing but the opposite wall; the barrenness of the
city, where not a green leaf was to be seen; the tiresome walks
accompanying the priest through that port of dead waters that smelled of
putrid mussels, and was entered by no other ships than a few sailing
vessels that occasionally came for a cargo of salt. The day before a
still more vigorous strapping had exhausted his patience. The idea of
beating him! If it had not been a priest who had ventured it he
would----! He had run away, returning on foot to Can Mallorqui; but
before leaving, he had taken revenge by tearing up several books which
the maestro held in great esteem; he had upset the inkstand; and had
written shameful inscriptions on the walls, with other pranks
characteristic of a monkey at liberty.
The night had been one of storm in Can Mallorqui. Pep was blind with
fury, and had used a club upon his back until Margalida and her mother
had been compelled to interfere.