Complete Short Stories (37 page)

A rough-house ensued. Wifredo was the stronger of the two; but at some stage or other of the Civil War, Aníbal had attended a hard course in street-fighting, and learned all sorts of clever tricks from his SS volunteer-instructors. Both combatants were seriously injured.

The factory had not been running too well even
before this. Worn-out but irreplaceable machinery; power cuts; timber shortages; new national fiestas commemorating the triumph of the Forces of Light, on each of which the management was obliged to reward the workmen with double pay for taking a patriotic vacation; trouble with the syndicates; decrees forbidding the dismissal of a single workman however inefficient, dishonest or redundant – all
this had been bad enough; but a complete breach between the partners brought matters to a crisis. Wifredo and Aníbal now obstinately pursued their own uncoordinated policies: Wifredo designing his furniture in a yet more provocative English style, Aníbal starving him of suitable timber and making no attempt to sell whatever he might manage to make.

Realizing that the factory would soon go bankrupt
unless someone intervened decisively, Rosa did so. She had the good sense to phone a certain Cathedral Canon: elder brother and confessor of the man who stood with a whip above these warring partners – the Central Bank Director himself. After explaining her predicament, Rosa begged the Canon to impose peace by whatever means he thought best, short of ruining both households. ‘Very reverend Father,’
she said, ‘although it is true that Don Aníbal began this disgraceful quarrel by calling Wifredo gross names which no man of honour could accept, I must admit that Wifredo’s reply did nothing to ameliorate the situation. It is equally true that Don Aníbal struck the first blow; yet Wifredo failed to turn the other cheek. Now, however, he repents of his un-Catholic attitude. It is no joke that
every day, on going to the factory, he must carefully remove his wrist-watch and place it on a shelf, together with his spare reading-glasses, for fear that they may both be splintered in a fresh hand-to-hand encounter.’

The Canon listened with encouraging snorts, and finally gave his opinion. ‘My daughter,’ he said, ‘I can see only one way out of the trouble which you have so clearly presented.
It is that you and Don Aníbal’s wife must form a realistic alliance for peace. Until your husbands can be persuaded to clasp hands in friendship, you must insist, at least, on their jointly asking the Bank to appoint a permanent arbiter who shall settle all disputes between them. Such an arrangement should involve no great expense: some retired military man of rectitude and discretion will, I
have no doubt, be pleased to undertake the task. Not for a monetary remuneration but, let us say, for a daily allowance of refreshments. Thereafter, your two husbands need not meet except in this arbiter’s presence; though the Bank will of course desire them to accept all his decisions without
question – as football players accept those of the umpire, on pain of being ordered off the field. If
you can answer for your husband’s agreement, let us arrange a meeting between yourself and Don Aníbal’s wife at my house tomorrow; there, with God’s help, all will be decently settled.’

The name of Aníbal’s new wife, the pretty ex-dental receptionist, was Gracia Joncosa de Tulipán. (Another floral combination of names: ‘Reedy Grace of a Tulip’.) Gracia was a tough girl and also, like Aníbal,
stubbornly anti-clerical. She attended the meeting, but warned the Canon straight out that, since the initiative had clearly come from Rosa, Aníbal would reject the plan of arbitration as energetically as if it had been proposed by the Kremlin itself.

This brought a frown to the Canon’s roseate face. Yet he refrained from dredging up Gracia’s reprehensible past, and merely begged her to imitate
Rosa’s truly Catholic spirit. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers!’ he intoned, wagging a fat finger.

‘Blessed are they indeed!’ Gracia echoed, impressed against her will by the huge, cigar-scented study: its dark, forbidding bookcases, its dark, forbidding pictures of saints being flayed alive, being grilled over hot coals, or merely kneeling in ecstasy on a mountain crag surrounded by winged demons.
‘But my Aníbal,’ she went on, ‘will at once convince himself that such an arbiter was chosen by connivance between yourself and Don Wifredo as a means of ousting him from his post.’

The Canon replied smoothly: ‘Dear daughter, your hot-tempered husband must have no fear. Assure him that I, a Canon of Palma Cathedral, solemnly guarantee to find an arbiter of such absolute rectitude and insight
that he might well be a descendant of King Solomon himself. If, however, your husband refuses my assurances, I shall feel that the Church has been spurned, as well as the Bank, and will inform my brother of his obduracy.’

Gracia saw the red light. She cried: ‘No, no, most reverend Father! Pray do not talk in that sense! Aníbal is, at bottom, a peace-loving man, and entertains the highest esteem
both for yourself and for your distinguished brother. Let me try to make him see reason.’

‘You will do well to try, my daughter,’ the Canon answered grimly; and so the interview ended.

Aníbal threw another fit when Gracia delivered the Canon’s message. ‘It is a hold-up!’ he is reported as exclaiming. ‘Must I indeed hand over my wallet to these shameless gangsters with a truly Catholic smile?’

Yet there was no way out when the Bank Director offered as a possible arbiter the retired and much-decorated Colonel whom I shall call Don Hilario Tortugas. During the Rif War he had been shot on three separate occasions, through calf, knee and shoulder, finally losing all the fingers of his left hand in performing a deed of such terrific valour that it earned him the Grand Cross of San Fernando.
For Aníbal to challenge the integrity of
so outstanding a hero would have made him ridiculous. Moreover, Don Hilario, bored by inactivity, had readily accepted the task, asking a daily honorarium no larger than two cups of coffee, a salami sandwich, a bottle of beer, and a Canary Islands cigar. The coffee must be scalding hot; that was his one stipulation.

The arrangement worked well enough.
True, Don Hilario could claim only the most meagre knowledge of how a factory was run – an educational fault displayed in Spanish history by a long sequence of gallant, honourable, high-ranking Army officers who have found themselves charged with their country’s economic fate. Nevertheless, experience in the command of men had sharpened his natural intuition as to whether people were telling him lies,
truths, or half-truths; and, when disputes arose on technical points he decided them by a careful study of the partners’ voices, faces, and demeanour, rather than of the documents laid before him. Thus he settled the vexed question of the ‘Nanniparkér’ towel-horses by arguing that though Wifredo would doubtless turn out a superbly professional product, if given the required materials, Aníbal’s
lack of confidence in these novelties suggested the wisdom of postponing their manufacture. He also ruled: ‘The factory should, however, bear the expense of creating the prototype, and of selling it at a minimal price to an influential foreign family by way of justifiable propaganda.’

Don Hilario’s daily appearance at the factory did much to restore the morale of the workmen. They used to boast
in the cafés: ‘We have the famous Colonel Tortugas on our payroll – he who once ran his sword through seventeen Cabyls, one after the other, though wounded in a score of places. There’s a fighter for you!’ Yet Aníbal found it difficult to swallow his resentment: ‘Only imagine! That ancient military relic set over me as supervisor and spy!’ He continued to make things as difficult as he could for
Wifredo, by misrepresenting both the supply situation and the sales prospects; at the same time complaining to Don Hilario that Wifredo spoiled the workmen and showed an utter ignorance of modern furniture trends.

On Rosa’s advice, Wifredo kept cool and behaved as Englishly as possible, in the hope of provoking Aníbal to over-reach himself by some crude act that could not escape official censure.
But he was secretly worried by Aníbal’s attempts at ingratiating himself with Don Hilario. For instance, when he gave Don Hilario a box of a hundred
Romeo y Julieta
cigars on his Name Day. Don Hilario, needless to record, firmly declined the gift, swearing that much as he enjoyed a good smoke, he could never allow himself to deviate one hair’s breadth from his more than Draconian code, and must
avoid even the suspicion of venality. Nevertheless, Wifredo saw him eye the box with badly disguised wistfulness.

From time to time, Wifredo offered Don Hilario a lift back to the centre of town in his boat-shaped 1922 Renault two-seater – Majorca is where
good cars go to die, and they take unconscionably long about it – but Don Hilario always insisted on walking, even on wet days when his wounds
troubled him. He would accept no more and no less than the daily two cups of sweet, scalding coffee, the Canary Islands cigar, the salami sandwich, and the bottle of beer stipulated in the contract. Once only, his conscience permitted him to borrow from Wifredo a couple of cigarette papers with which to roll his own cigarettes; but paid them back the very next day.

So much for the situation at
the factory. Now for that of the ‘influential foreign family’. We had an unexpected visit from Ava Gardner, a close friend of our Maryland friend Betty Sicre. Betty suggested that Ava should take a short holiday from the exhausting social life of Madrid to visit soporific and truly rural Majorca. There she could catch up on sleep, study Spanish grammar, swim daily, and consult me about how to finish
her random education by a crash-course in English poetry. We had met Ava at Betty’s house a few months before and found her great fun; afterwards she sent us a huge bouquet of red roses, an attention which my wife and I appreciated all the more because, as we already knew, Ava is not one to distribute idle favours. She was feeling lonely at this time, her elder sister having just gone back to
the States, and would borrow each of Betty’s four small sons in turn to keep her company at night. ‘The other boys at the American School will think me a sissy,’ the youngest but one had tearfully complained, ‘if they find out that I sleep twice a week with Ava!’

At Palma’s Son Bonet airport, she came rushing towards us across the tarmac: a startled deer, pursued by a hungry-looking wolf. When
the wolf saw her suddenly engulfed in our large family – the children had played truant from school by telling their monks and nuns that an aunt was arriving from London – he slunk off slavering. But word flew from end to end of the airport that the famous Ava Gardner had finally come to Majorca; and crowds went milling around in search of the red carpet, the bouquets, and the press photographers.
Meanwhile, we hurried Ava into our Land-Rover, and hauled her baggage off the air-line truck. One filmstruck enthusiast saw a woman who closely resembled his idol bandying nonsense with our children in the dusty car; he stopped, narrowed his eyes, and passed on – it could not, of course, be she. We made a clean get-away.

Ava explained that there had been two really troublesome Spanish wolves
aboard the plane. The first, seated across the gangway, kept addressing her in an experimental sort of Italian, until she slammed shut the
Oxford Book of English Verse
(supplied by Betty for the poetry course) and said: ‘If you must interrupt my reading, why don’t you at least talk your own language?’

The wolf answered gallantly: ‘Signorina, I decided to give myself the honour of employing your
own musical tongue.’

Ava looked puzzled. ‘You must have got things mixed,’ she said. ‘I happen to have married a Sicilian, but my Italian is even worse than yours.’

The wolf leered at her craftily. ‘Do not think to deceive me! All our papers assure us that you are a true daughter of Naples.’

‘Then they’re lying. I was born and raised in North Carolina.’

A horrid doubt overtook the wolf. ‘Then
I am mistaken? You are
not
Sofia Loren?’

With a cry of indignation Ava leaped up and took refuge in a vacant seat forward, but found Wolf No. 2 waiting there to pounce. So she read the
Oxford Book of English Verse
in the washroom, from which she emerged when the plane had landed; only to find the wolf waiting for her with amorous yelps at the foot of the landing-steps. Female film stars, it seems,
are bound by a strict code: they must never insult journalists or press photographers, never refuse to sign autographs (unless desperately pressed for time), and never either slug wolves with overnight bags or poke out their eyes with parasols.

Ava’s plans for improving her Spanish grammar and catching up on sleep did not come to much. There are too many places in Palma where gipsies strum at
guitars and dance flamenco all night; and Ava can never resist flamenco
.
Besides, her first visit to Majorca attracted such immense attention that she was forced to change hotels four times in five days; but it fascinated us to bask for a while in the spotlight of her glory. Though far preferring, she said, a meal of shepherd’s pie or sausages-and-mash at our Palma flat, she gallantly took us
out once or twice to the lusher restaurants.

After dinner, in one of these, she asked me for her poetry lesson, and I told her that so few poems were worth reading, and so many were wrongly supposed to be worth reading, that she had better make sure she would not waste her time by this poetry course. Washing for gold could be very dull work. Then, changing the metaphor, I said that a clear, personal
voice was better than all the technical skill and daring experimentation in the world – really good poetry always makes plain, immediate, personal sense, is never dull, and goes on making better sense the oftener one reads it. ‘Poems are like people,’ I said. ‘There are not many authentic ones around.’

Questioned about the monstrous legendary self which towers above her, Ava told us that she
does everything possible to get out from under, though the publicity-boys and the Press are always trying to clamp it even more tightly on her shoulders. Also, that she has never outgrown her early Hard-Shell Baptist conditioning on that North Carolina tobacco farm, with the eye of a wonderful father always on her; and still feels uncomfortably moral in most film-studios; it isn’t what she does that
has created her sultry reputation, but what she says. Sometimes she just can’t control her tongue.