The Europe That Was

by Geoffrey Household

  El Gallo was silent. Face to face with the man he resembled and might have been, he was shy.

  El Mosco started to talk. Even by walking on there was no getting rid of him. The mate was reminded of the persistence of touts on the Buenos Aires waterfront.

  ‘Bueno, hombre, bueno!’ he said at last. ‘But come to the point! What the devil do you three want?’

  ‘A favour,’ el Gallo replied bluntly. ‘A favour that we have no right to ask, being poor. But it has nothing to do with work or money.’

  El Gallon dignity had stopped the mate in his stride up hill from the river. He met the docker’s eyes and turned impulsively across the street into a wine shop.

  ‘Sit down! I am listening.’

  The Monk began the tale of their romeria through the villages and put over very well—though more by tone and gesture than any richness of vocabulary—the beauty of the dusk and of Agudas.

  ‘So, you see, what with the wine and so sympathetic a society—but no doubt you have done the same yourself.’

  The First Officer had. ‘Three cups for the gentlemen,’ he ordered. ‘And what then?’

  ‘It so happened,’ the Cock confessed, ‘that in the enthusiasm of the moment and without the least disrespect to yourself I said I was the First Officer of the Artxanda Mendi.’

  ‘Man! But there’s no harm done! No doubt with a little study of navigation you would be as good as myself.’

  ‘If it was only that! But this exaggeration—I told it to three girls.’

  ‘I had already guessed as much.’

  ‘And these gentlemen, my friends—I swore that el Fraile here was Chief Engineer and el Mosco his Second.’

  ‘Without asking so much as by your leave,’ added el Fraile.

  ‘You didn’t deny it,’ el Gallo accused him.

  ‘One might as well deny God Almighty to a priest.’

  ‘I see that the situation got out of hand,’ said the mate sympathetically. ‘But what does it matter?’

  ‘If it was only that!’ repeated the Cock. ‘It’s that we invited the girls to visit the ship.’

  ‘And to go down river as far as the mouth,’ the Fly wailed dramatically.

  ‘They are very pretty, very well brought up,’ said the Monk in his most fatherly manner. ‘We cannot think of them going back to their village in tears and saying they made the trip to Bilbao for nothing.’

  ‘If it depended on me, amigos, you could receive them on board dressed up as admirals! But the captain would object.’

  ‘We weren’t going to propose that! No! Something much less! Would it be possible for your lordship to say that the officers have been changed, that we had to go to Cadiz by the first train this morning?’

  ‘And that we explained the matter to you, and begged you to entertain them?’

  ‘But you don’t have to see them again!’ the First Officer laughed.

  ‘I know,’ the Cock agreed. ‘And if they were women I wouldn’t mind ditching them. But they are three decent little girls of our own sort.’

  ‘A point of honour,’ the Fly explained.

  ‘Of delicacy,’ the Monk corrected him.

  ‘They have never been on a ship, you say?’

  ‘You would not believe how excited they were!’ said the Cock. ‘And the eldest is already seventeen.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Never to have stood on a deck seemed to all four men as astonishing as never to have ridden in bus or train.

  ‘You will take another cup?’ the Fly invited.

  That had to be said. He could only pray that an unknown proprietor would give credit.

  ‘I have to be on duty. So if you will excuse me …’

  ‘When you return from Cape Town then.’

  ‘With great pleasure when I return from Cape Town. Well, amigos,’ said the Artxanda Mendi’s mate, getting up, ‘the foreman will be waiting for you.’

  ‘We are not working today.’

  ‘But the Florinda?’ asked the First Officer, who had observed how his companions wolved the little saucers of entremeses which came with the wine. ‘She is in need of a full gang and another if they could get it.’

  ‘It was more important to see you.’

  ‘You are from Castile?’

  ‘From Old Castile.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I will do what I can.’

  The Cook, the Monk and the Fly crossed the bridge over the River Nervion and aimlessly plodded down the road opposite the wharfs. Without work or any spirit of holiday rest they had time to feel their tiredness. They did not go far—a safe distance down stream from the Artxanda Mendi—and then climbed the steep hillside. They found an uncomfortable nest among the rocks from which they could look over the roofs of the narrow belt of houses.

  It was the top of the tide. There were rolling clouds beneath the surface of the river as the fresh water coming down from the mountains stirred yellow sediment. The Artxanda Mendi, which had seemed a mere slab of iron among the tracery of cranes and masts and signal gantries, was suddenly in the middle of the stream—a graceful black and white arrow aimed straight at them until she turned to port on to her course for Portugalete and the open sea.

  She came abreast of them, and they heard the four clangs of the engine-room telegraph as the First Officer rang from Dead Slow to Slow Ahead. She was gallant with house flag and code flags saluting the yard where she was built. A new Spanish ensign flared red and yellow over the wake. On the bridge were three more bright patches of colour, so close together that they were probably holding hands in alarm at so many strange men so very occupied, with no time for more than swift explanation and the occasional warm word of courtesy.

  El Fraile sitting motionless, hands clasped round his knees, watched with paternal approval.

  ‘They are there!’ shouted El Mosco. ‘All three of them! On the bridge!’

  El Gallo lay on his stomach with his head on his arms. He half turned for a single glance.

  ‘Of course they are there. Let me sleep, Mosco! I am hungry.’

  THE PEJEMULLER

  They were so angry that they entirely missed the point. Their voices were hoarse with fury, and gasping for insults as for breath; so that, at the end, they never knew whether they had witnessed an atrocious crime or a supremely chivalrous act of deliverance. The little Andaluz was equally capable of either.

  That fairground was no place for creatures compounded of fire or, perhaps, of water. Magnificently earthy was the crowd of tall Basques: farmers, fishermen and townsmen full of the vigorous Rioja wine which rooted them to their soil and gave to their good-humoured spirits the cruelty and luxuriance of trees, overshadowing all but their own kind. The spirit of the Andaluz was rootless and extinguishable as a flame.

  The town was two fields distant from the turbulent circle of lights, and that was far enough for the calm of deep stone wall and murmuring plaza to have lost their influence—more especially since few respectable women were at the fair. The sea was only a lane away, but lying unobtrusive in its summer silence. Bounded by the darkness of a ring of oaks, the fair became an individual world with its own repetitive pattern of life, gay in the clinking of glasses and money, the clattering of hoop-la rings and balls, exasperated by the clarion music of Spanish roundabouts, the cries of showmen and the popping of the shooting galleries.

  Paco Igarzábal and Salvador Aguirre strolled tolerantly along the outer aisle of booths. They were well dressed, but showed their solidarity with fellow Basques by wearing boinas on their heads and no ties around their collars; only by an air of patronizing joviality did they reveal that either of them could have bought the fair and fairground.

  They had visited the Six-Legged Calf and the Hairy Woman. They now halted outside the booth of the Mermaid, feeling in massive pockets for small change. The entrance was not painted with any of the exciting monsters that decorated other booths. It was surmounted by a large, severe and well-lettered placard, announcing PEJEMULLER AUTÉNTICA (Genuine Mermaid); it
added OF CANARY ISLAND WATERS—as if there were different and no less authentic breeds of mermaids from other waters.

  Paco and Salvador entered the booth and joined the half-dozen men who were standing on the dusty turf before a curtained recess. The mermaid’s proprietor, seeing that there was now a quorum, closed the stretched canvas door. He was a little fellow with slender, flaring nostrils, thin lips and pointed chin. He looked more like a clerk than a showman, for he was dressed in neat-shabby black. A drooping bow tie, though only a length of black tape, suggested the minor intellectual.

  He delivered no advertisement, seeming to trust in the rarity of his exhibit. He turned out the central light, drew apart the curtains and said Señores, look! in a tone of modest pride, as if wondering that to him it had fallen to catch or make or care for the mermaid.

  The glass tank was some five feet long. The top was open, so that the customers could see that it was brimful of water. The sides and the back were hidden by a stucco of pebbles and marine growth, some real, some painted. A faint green light illuminated the pejemuller.

  Her body to the waist was that of an undernourished girl of twelve, the breasts just forming. From the waist down she was conventional fish. The tail was a marvel of its creator’s artistry, for it sprang from the skin in little, irregular scales, leaving no definite line at which the sceptic could declare it to be attached. The scales grew larger over the full and powerful curve, sliding upon each other sleekly and naturally, then lessened as they passed, as imperceptibly, into the smooth membrane of the flukes.

  She lay supported on one thin arm, facing the customers. Her face was yellowish, and small even for her dwarfed body. The eyes were pale and expressionless. The sandy hair was long and sparse, and so tangled among the rock and seaweed at the bottom of the tank that it could not be said to float, or not to float. She breathed, sometimes violently, but no bubbles came to the top of the water. Her only other movement was a slight and graceful swaying of her flukes. This she performed as if it were a drilled duty, now forgetting for too long an interval, then offering an extra wave or two to show repentance.

  Paco Igarzábal leaned upon the rope which divided him from this phenomenon, and gave himself up, with a lusty pruriency, to close examination of its anatomy. He was a wholesale grocer and he best appreciated life when it was delivered in good coarse truckloads. He and his friend, Salvador Aguirre, were boon companions whenever they were not engaged in making money. They played billiards together on two evenings a week; they went to the bulls together, and they visited the stews of Bilbao together. The chief reason for their friendship was that they did no business together.

  Salvador was a man of some education; that is to say, his system of book-keeping was up-to-date; he could carry on the correspondence of his timber yard in correct Spanish; and he did not believe in God—though not, of course, a declared atheist, for that would have been to identify himself with the enemies of timber merchants. He was immensely busy within the limited area of his interests, and his workmen called him the wood-louse.

  Salvador twisted himself this way and that among the onlookers in order to examine the tank from various angles. He apologized importantly and continually, and at last delivered his opinion.

  ‘I will tell you how it is done,’ he said. ‘There is a glass sheet which runs away from us diagonally—’ he belched and had another shot at the word ‘—diagonally across the tank from top to bottom. Thus, friends, you see an unbroken sheet of water, but the mermaid is in an empty compartment.’

  ‘Then how does she breathe?’ asked a fisherman. ‘There would be no air.’

  ‘She is wholly immersed in water,’ answered the showman, the Andaluz. ‘The pejemuller, gentlemen, does not, as I have myself observed, breathe like a Christian. She admits water into her body through a system of gills.’

  ‘But where?’ roared Paco. ‘Where does she keep them?’

  He suggested several possible positions.

  ‘Caballero!’ protested the showman abruptly. ‘Be decent! She can hear.’

  The pejemuller showed no sign of hearing. She waved her tail in languid response to the enthusiasm of the world outside her tank.

  ‘But can she understand?’ asked Salvador Aguirre with a precise little smile. ‘She seems to me to be an idiot.’

  ‘She understands as much as you,’ replied the Andaluz with a show of courtesy.

  Paco shouted with laughter, and slapped his friend on the back.

  ‘I say it is a little girl,’ declared Salvador, his wrinkled face working with an excited obstinacy that hid humiliation. ‘I say that the tail is of coloured scales of mica, and that diagonally—’

  ‘It is a pejemuller,’ interrupted the showman.

  ‘It would not be your daughter, perhaps?’

  The face of the Andaluz burned and went white as ash.

  ‘It appears I am among brutes,’ he said.

  ‘And whom, señor, do you call brute?’

  ‘Since you have said, señor, that I would exhibit my daughter …’

  ‘Man, I said there was a diagonal and—’

  ‘There is no diagonal.’

  ‘There is a diagonal.’

  ‘You know as much of diagonals as of your father.’

  ‘You lie!’

  ‘Stupendous bastard!’

  Paco Igarzábal swayed forward his big frame between the two smaller men.

  ‘Let us see, friends! Let us see! What is this? Are we going to kill one another for a little difference of opinion? This gentleman says that there is no diagonal and that, by logic, the pejemuller is a pejemuller. My companion says that there is a diagonal, and that the gentleman is perhaps exhibiting his afflicted daughter.’

  The Andaluz leapt at him, just as Paco expected—for he was never one to miss a chance of sport. Paco grabbed him by the opening of his black waistcoat, and held him at arm’s length. The Andaluz twisted and stamped, answering the renewed insults of Salvador, who was kept back by Paco’s other arm.

  ‘Let us see!’ repeated Paco. ‘A little calm, gentlemen! All this for a diagonal, that can be settled in a moment!’

  ‘Hijo de puta!’ hissed the Andaluz.

  ‘Big names!’ Paco answered, unaffected. ‘How much will you take to show us the tank?’

  ‘More than I paid for your mother,’ the Andaluz retorted, and spat in his face with a clean trajectory parallel to the arm which held him.

  Paco Igarzábal barked with anger and flung him to the ground. Onlookers crashed down upon the struggling men, trying to separate them. The tank rocked on its trestles and spilled water over the edge. The mermaid held her pose, ceasing only, since no eyes stared at her, to move her tail.

  At last the tumult of bodies cohered into two groups. The fisherman, huge and benevolent, held the Andaluz. Paco and Salvador were surrounded by the rest of the onlookers, all counselling prudence at the tops of their voices. Not a word could be distinguished in the uproar. The tent heaved and shook as passers-by pushed down the door to listen to so magnificent and delectable a row.

  Paco was now more angry than Salvador—if indeed there could be any choice between two men who were living in a fantasy of rage—but, seeing himself surrounded by fellow townsmen who were wont to respect him for his supercilious calm, he choked on his stream of oaths and shouted at the Andaluz in a voice that quivered with the effort of control: ‘Listen you! This is to end all argument. I will buy your mermaid and your tent! Understand?’

  This astonishing offer brought silence. The Andaluz seemed to recoil as if his spirit were about to leap into passion beyond the reach of all humanity. The fisherman who held him tried with sincere simplicity to conciliate.

  ‘Sell him the mermaid at your price, friend!’ he said. ‘Don Paco has money. And thus—in peace!’

  ‘Ten thousand pesetas,’ offered Paco.

  ‘I am a caballero,’ answered the Andaluz, each word a slow, reluctant gasp of pain. ‘I carry this vile trade among brutes who have no
upbringing, but I am a caballero. You have called me a liar. You have said that this unhappy thing is my daughter. Now you think that for your money—’ his voice rose to a scream ‘—Where, among whom am I? Ay, my pride! My shame! Cabrones! Must I show you what it is to have a heart?’

  He fell upon his knees, and the fisherman, not knowing whether this unexpected limpness was a mere feint or the illimitable appeal of a defeated soul, rested a light, embarrassed hand upon his shoulder. The Andaluz dived beneath the rope and flung himself at the nearest trestle. The green light went out. The tank thudded on the ground, and the water flopped in two solid masses against the canvas of the booth. The plate glass tinkled and crashed as the Andaluz flailed it with the trestle.

  Men fumbled for the switch, heaving and swearing in the corner where the showman had turned off the central light. No one crossed the rope to enter that shadowy hell where a spirit translated its devastation into the material.

  White light glared. At the back of the booth stood the Andaluz, the trestle in his right hand, his left around the waist of the pejemuller. She clung to him with her arms round his neck, pitiable as a shivering monkey. She was even smaller than she had seemed in the tank; her tiny yellow head was against his cheek, but the glittering tail did not reach his knees. Except that she clung to what she knew, she was not human.

  The Andaluz walked through the tent and over the prostrate door. He still held the trestle in his hand, but it was no fear of physical violence that parted the crowd of powerful Basques. He passed under the harsh lights of the roaring fairground, blood and filth upon his face, clothes dripping water. He walked proudly. What march, what music of sunlit trumpets he heard, that too was accepted by the onlookers. They followed.

  He took the lane to the sea, where, beyond the circle of trees, only the softness of the night gleamed on the black and changing mirrors of that marvel which flapped against his thigh. He strode over the rock and down to the boat-slip. The ripples of the Atlantic, inch-high, hissed as they parted over the descending stone.

  ‘God guard thee, little friend!’

  He loosened the thin arms from his neck, and flung the pejemuller into the night sea. She took the water cleanly, rose once and went under, her tail seeming to flick the starlit surface.