Complete Short Stories (42 page)

‘A great solace for the Count’s family,’ I said.

‘For what remains of it. He has a nonagenarian aunt in Madrid, and a second cousin, a nun, cloistered at Cartagena.
The seven-hundred-year-old title is at last extinct.’

‘There will be an all-night vigil at his house?’

‘Yes, Don Roberto. My husband and I hope to see you there presently.’

How much did I know about the Count, after a casual acquaintance of four or five months? Not very much, really. He was what is called a character. My mother always warned me against becoming a character. I remember that
when I once asked her the meaning of ‘a character’, she said, ‘Like people who feed birds in public gardens, and usually have two or three perched on their heads.’ But the Count would never have done anything so obvious and vulgar as that. Vultures, in a cemetery, perhaps. He was a neat, ugly little man of fifty, always dressed in the same grey fustian jacket and trousers, with a French hunting waistcoat,
and his hirsute but well-manicured hands were, as a rule, fidgeting at the links of a thick gold watch chain. He never wore a hat, and his bald head was lavishly freckled. A humorous contempt for the world showed in the curl of his nostrils, and the anger smouldering behind his black eyes attracted me; most Majorcans are childishly stolid and complaisant. The Count talked a beautiful Castilian
and a still more beautiful Majorcan. Our island aristocracy converse in
Mallorquí àulic,
a courtly dialect of their own, close to Provençal, and distinguished by numerous thirteenth-century forms that have disappeared from
Mallorquí plebeu,
the language of commoners. I gathered that the Count was recently widowed and had no children. I knew that he was an admirable Latin scholar, and an authority
on the late-medieval Peasants’ Revolt; he talked of publishing a monograph on Christopher Columbus, to prove him a Majorcan outlaw who had fled to Genoa after his family estates were confiscated at the collapse of the Revolt. The Count lived alone, attended by a valet, at Ca’n Deià – a tall sixteenth-century house, adjoining the church, which had his coat of arms carved above the lintel. Except
for an occasional game of
truc
at the café, with the mayor, the schoolmaster, and the doctor, he took almost no part
in village life. Women and children seemed to be scared of him, though I could not understand why, since he never raised his voice nor made a scene.

Every villager of consequence went to pay his last respects that evening. The Count ranked as a local man, because he owned Ca’n
Deià; but the family seat was the Palacio Deià, at Palma, and until he settled among us, only six months before his death, Ca’n Deià had stood empty for generations, though it was opened and ritually whitewashed once a year, at Easter. The furniture, pictures, and china suggested the early 1830s as the period of its last tenancy. According to the sacristan, who preserved ancient village traditions,
one of the Count’s collateral ancestors – ‘one afflicted with most informal habits’ – was then guarded there by a couple of servants, to save his family the embarrassment of keeping him at home, or the disgrace of confining him in a madhouse. The sacristan explained that the unfortunate young fellow had had to be sewn into his clothes to prevent him from removing them in public, especially at Mass.
‘He came here during the Carlist Wars,’ he once told me, ‘in the very year when a famine reduced the village to eating locust beans. It was he who contrived those silhouettes hanging on the passage walls. Are they not curious?’ The silhouettes were intricate cut-outs, made of white paper: a palm tree, hunting scenes, pipe-smoking gallants in extravagant costume, heraldic designs, enormous doves,
flowers, mermaids, and unicorns, all crazily juxtaposed on a background of blue sugar-loaf paper, but formalized by plain gilt frames.

The dead Count lay upstairs, among white roses and Madonna lilies, wearing court dress adorned with splendid orders. The flower scent nearly drowned the smell of camphor, and carefully placed rose petals hid, I discovered later, the more conspicuous holes (moths?
mice?) in the black velvet of his suit – there had been no occasion for him to wear court dress since Alfonso XIII’s abdication, more than twenty years before. The Count’s face had been decently made up by the midwife, and everyone agreed that he looked as peaceful as a child; she had not disguised the characteristic half-smile at the corner of his mouth.

When I went in, a memory made my own
mouth twitch sympathetically. ‘
¡O Señor muerto!
’ I muttered. It was a joke that the Count had told me himself, about a village theatrical show he had once seen. A faithful page, discovering the murdered body of his liege lord, should have cried out, in desperation: ‘
¡O Señor! ¡Muerto está! ¡Tarde llegamos!
’ (‘O my lord! You are dead! We have come too late!’) But the actor had learned his part
from a prompt script without accents or punctuation, so he tripped onto the stage and gaily exclaimed,
‘¡O Señor muerto, esta tarde llegamos!’
(‘Oh, Mr Corpse, we are coming this evening!’)

Downstairs, in the stone-flagged parlour, we mourners occupied a long
line of low, corded chairs, such as almost every Majorcan family keeps for baptisms, funerals, weddings, and first communions. But these
had been borrowed from the sacristan’s house, next door; Ca’n Deià contained only huge seignorial armchairs in faded red velvet and tall black leather ones with octagonal brass studs. Black coffee and biscuits were served, and a box of cigars lay open on the two-inch-thick tabletop. As the last man to have seen the Count alive, I had to tell my story several times. For the sake of good manners,
I embellished it by recalling his comments on the unstinted hospitality that the village worthies had shown him – the devout priest, the correct justice of the peace, the learned schoolmaster, the indefatigable doctor. But one genuine and most enigmatic remark of the Count’s I kept to myself, for fear it might perhaps hurt someone’s feelings. He had thrown the words over his shoulder as he turned
toward the reservoir. ‘She landed yesterday, you see. Not far from here. That is why I must leave you.’

Our solemn gathering grew somewhat cozier at eleven o’clock, when the electric light dimmed and recovered three times, as a sign that half an hour later it would be cut off for the night. At this signal, most of the villagers took their leave. Those of us who remained drew up our chairs in
a circle around the table, and the Count’s burly Majorcan valet, our host, lit long ecclesiastical tapers stuck in pewter candlesticks. Two bottles of brandy, and another of
anís
appeared on a tray, and we soon started talking freely. There were seven of us: Guillermo, the valet; the schoolmaster, who had literary pretensions; the emaciated sacristan; María, the midwife; Don Tomás Fons y Pons,
the Count’s family lawyer, whom I had not met before; Catalina’s husband, who drives our village bus as well as owning the café; and myself.

‘An ideally constituted party,’ said the schoolmaster, beaming. ‘More in number than the Graces, and less in number than the Muses.’

‘But,’ said the sacristan, ‘precisely equal in number with those who sufficiently honour the memory of the deceased gentleman
upstairs to keep an all-night vigil for him!’

‘I have seen no member of the nobility about the village,’ said Catalina’s husband, ‘though news of his accident must have reached the capital hours ago.’

The lawyer stroked his white moustache, hemmed, and explained: ‘Many are out of town, the rest are attending the Italian opera. But we can expect representatives of all the great families at tomorrow’s
funeral service. They cannot well omit this act of courtesy to one who was not only the senior nobleman of Majorca but also hereditary pomander-bearer to His Majesty the King of Spain.’

‘The hypocrites, how they disliked my master!’ the valet burst out. ‘His father fell in love with a beautiful peasant girl from Costitx at the
Martinmas pig-killing, and had the good sense to marry her, instead
of seducing the poor innocent and flinging a hundred-peseta note in her lap, as any of them would have done. She was a woman of great character, was the old Countess, and pious to a fault. Those degenerates pretended to scorn our Count as the offspring of a misalliance, yet they envied him his learning, his courage, his independence of spirit! None of them but would have been the better for a few
spoonfuls of wholesome peasant blood in his veins. The old Countess died when my master was five years old, and he adored her memory; indeed, some say that it was the unfortunate nobleman’s ruin.’

‘Come, man!’ María, the midwife, challenged him. ‘How can adoration for a mother’s memory ruin anyone?’

Guillermo appealed to the lawyer. ‘Don Tomás, correct me if I am wrong, but this is the story
as told in the servants’ quarters, and we are sticklers for accuracy.’

‘Tell it your own way, Guillermo,’ said the lawyer.

‘Well,’ the valet continued, ‘Don Ignacio, the Count’s only brother, two years his junior, drove a fast car down the La Puebla road. Rain had fallen, and the tarmac was slippery with mud from the potato carts. He had his wife beside him, and both were killed instantly when
they skidded and hit a tree. Their graceful, green-eyed, thirteen-year-old daughter, Doña Acebo, came under my master’s guardianship – she had no suitable aunts or other relatives on either side of the family – and since he was a bachelor, this embarrassed him a little. But he accepted his responsibility, and, finding the child sadly ignorant, though not lacking in intelligence or humour, removed
her from the convent school where she had studied, and became her tutor. They lived in the Palacio Deià. He taught Doña Acebo history, heraldry, geography, botany, French, and Latin. She soon dropped her school friends, because none of them had the same interests or enjoyed the same liberty as herself, and my master kept her out of Palma society – “Lest she should turn into a profligate modern
woman,” as he said. Only three hours a day she studied, yet they were worth thirty hours at a convent, for he taught like an angel, and work was more like play to them. The family chaplain, of course, attended to her religious needs. My master took Doña Acebo everywhere with him – to theatres, concerts, bullfights, cockfights, freestyle wrestling matches – but both enjoyed far more the entertainments
of their own devising. They were formidable jokesters, and would leave the palace at all hours, disguised as gipsies, or drunks, or pedlars, or peasants, and have a thousand droll adventures in the bystreets of Palma.’

‘Give us an example,’ said the schoolmaster. “‘A thousand droll adventures” is no way to tell a story!’

‘Well, they once competed as to who could first earn fifty pesetas from
a stranger by barefaced fraud. I was the timekeeper. My master, wearing a
cloth cap, a false beard, and spectacles, visited a second-hand bookstall, where he paid five pesetas for a volume on apiculture. He then added a zero to the figure on the flyleaf, wrapped the book in a sheet of brown paper, slipped into a café to find a newspaper, and went through the obituary notices on the second page
of
La Ultima Hora.
Discovering that a certain Don Fulano de Tal, an importer of uralite piping, had died only two streets away, he took the book to his house, and inquired for Don Fulano. “Alas, he is dead!” sobbed the widow. “Alas, and doubly alas!” echoed the Count. “Don Fulano, a valued friend of mine, ordered this volume a week ago, and I have just managed to procure it in Barcelona.” He was
turning sorrowfully away when the widow asked leave to inspect the book. “Ah, a practical treatise on beekeeping,” she said tenderly. “My poor angel must, after all, have contemplated the tranquil country life that I so often urged upon him, begging him to sell his business in good time. How right I was, for an overworked heart carried him off. I must buy this as a memento of his affection. How
much did it cost you?” My master showed her the price on the flyleaf, and mentioned another five pesetas of postal charges. In the circumstances, he was prepared to forgo his commission, and the widow let him do so, thanking him for his nobility of heart. That game took less than half an hour, but Doña Acebo had already won the contest. She sold two out-of-date twenty-five-peseta raffle tickets for
an automobile to some German tourists and was home before my watch marked five minutes.’

‘Proceed with your story, man!’ said María, the midwife. ‘You mentioned the Count’s ruinous love for his dead mother.’

‘I am coming to that. The innocent comradeship between the Count and Doña Acebo could not last forever, because, as she grew older and plumper, she came to bear such a close resemblance
to the portrait of her grandmother, the old Countess, whose Christian name she inherited, that they might have been twins. In short, when she reached the age of fifteen, my master fell in love with her, much to his alarm and confusion. What should he do? The two had become so deeply attached to each other, from living alone in the great palace, with only the chaplain and us servants as chorus to their
prolonged comedy, that it seemed most cruel to send her away. But would it not be worse if she stayed? After much heart-searching, and with the chaplain’s dubious approval, he decided to marry her. Of course, though marriage between uncle and niece can be sanctioned by the Church, out of respect for a well-known gospel precedent, such unions are extremely rare. Here in this village, if an uncle
were to show a niece undue tenderness, conches would be blown all night around his house, and filth left on the doorstep. But to a Count of Deià all things within reason are permitted, for did not his ancestors play a distinguished part in restraining the Majorcan clergy from allegiance to the anti-popes at Avignon? Nevertheless, it was a costly and troublesome procedure,
even for my master, to
secure a dispensation from the Vatican; to begin with, the Bishop of Palma had to supply a covering letter, explaining the peculiar nature of the case, and the Bishop raised technical difficulties.’

‘Enough, Guillermo!’ interrupted the lawyer. ‘Leave the intricacies of canon law to canons, and stick to the facts! The Count of Deià and Doña Acebo were married, and it proved no happy marriage.’