A clip-clopping of horses’ hoofs. Equestrians? A berlin comes speeding up, there are shouts of olé! and olá!—“We know you, neighbors from Son Maroig, Miramar, Son Tatx, Es Mirabo! Where are you off to with your steaming steeds?” “To Palma, to the ship!” “The ship? To Barcelona?” “Yes, and then on to London, art exhibition, Tate Gallery, Turner!” “Turner? Caramba!”—“Won’t you join us? We’re in a hurry!”
Papá and Mamá are one heart and one soul, and both of these organs throb only for art. They get in, the carriage rushes on downhill. In Palma the members of the Art Club board the ship, in Barcelona the Suredas purchase necessities for the remainder of the junket, and in London they get undressed, then re-dressed in the proper outfits.
Back home the majordomo greets the first guests—and also the last ones, as the perfect guardian of door, home, and entire premises that he is. His livery buttons shine. His mutton chops are at the ready for all eventualities. Just a short while, then just a short while longer—the Princess and Don Juan should be back any moment now. Yet no matter how politely this loyal servant repeats his announcement of “just a short while,” the hour finally arrives when even the greatest time-killer is forced to notice that the clock is no longer striking. Besides, empty stomachs are making their presence felt.
As the moon rose at midnight and climbed above the Teix to enclose with its ghostly light the Valley of the Muza and the Royal Suredan charterhouse, the majordomo finally declared that the “short while” had expired, and that the host and hostess were now surely on their way home. But they didn’t come home. Had something happened to them? Had they fallen into a gorge? Why didn’t the servants go outside with lanterns and search for the princely couple in the darkest declivities? Oh, those two! They are both romantic souls, nothing is wrong. They’ve probably decided on the spot to saddle up a pair of donkeys, clamber up the Puig Mayor, and enjoy the world-famous sunrise. Or maybe they’ve gone off to play l’hombre at their neighbor’s palace, or… or… there were so many possibilities, and why should anybody worry? Finally, general departure: the horse carriages are summoned, those who arrived by donkey throw their legs over the albarde, and now they all leave fond greetings to Doña Pilar and Don Juan. Bona nit!
The majordomo locked the doors, dismissed the servants for the night, and lay down on his pillow. The next day, he continued to follow his orders: the Princess would give him further instructions when the couple came home. He waited.
A few days later a brief message arrived from Papá and Mamá to the children from Barcelona: they were on their way to London. “Turner!” “Turner?” The majordomo, too, had no idea what this meant. But he had his orders: wait for more orders. Which he did. Then the children heard nothing more. No one heard a single word from the parents who had absconded from the palace. Were they really in England? And who or what was “Turner”? The curate in Valldemosa, an educated man, figured out meanwhile that a Turner is someone who does gymnastics. It was a German word, coined in Germany. So now Don Juan and his princess were doing gymnastics in London—and why not? This wasn’t the craziest thing they had ever done.
Each servant, male and female, was assigned to one of the children. There were more than a dozen to be taken care of before winter arrived. The parents were simply gone. The majordomo obeyed his orders, refusing to act contrary to the wishes of his master and mistress. The servants dispersed and sought employment elsewhere, in order to share their bread with the abandoned children. For their part the children got older, went wild, and turned into a marauding band that came to be feared in the whole valley, not unlike the horde of Sureda dogs that had menaced nighttime Palma. Pedro said that this was the greatest time of his life, this interregnum with no Papá and no Mamá, no hearth and no home.
This paradisiacal situation lasted two years. Then their parents came back home, artistically edified and enriched. Besides Turner, who was in fact a painter and not the gymnast that his name would suggest, they had seen a great deal of art: the Elgin Marbles, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portraits of children, the portraits of aristocrats by Thomas Gainsborough. Time passed quickly. They picked up their children from the servants living nearby. How they had grown! And almost all of them, Jacobo, Pedro, Pazzis, were doing art! It had to be in the blood. Several children had died, and this cast a temporary pall over the happy reunion.
The majordomo delivered his report: nothing had happened. “You faithful servant!” cried Don Juan. “You heart of gold,” the Princess added with emotion. “Unlock the door!” The mutton-chopped steward did as he was bidden and cleared the table, on which certain things had changed over the course of two years. The silver was tarnished, the damask tablecloth was yellowed, and the flowers wilted as at an abandoned gravesite. Underneath the covers, the faux sheep cheese from Mahón sat in mummified condition. There were dead flies, desiccated spiders, bees, wasps, cobwebs, the smell of decay. In a word: a pitiful memento mori.
Some weeks later, Don Juan’s personal spoils from their artistic voyage arrived in Valldemosa. Heavy crates were carried into the cloister. The Elgin Marbles? No, it was a cargo of exhibition catalogues, theater programs, tickets, menus, newspapers, and brochures. Two years’ worth of alibis for Don Juan. Had there been a murder? Was somebody plotting against him? He needed only to reach into one of his crates from England, and his head was free from the noose. Neither Don Juan nor the Princess was ever accused of a crime committed during their two-year absence. And no one came forward to accuse them of a crime against their own family.
That’s how people get poor. And yet the final collapse arrived unexpectedly.
The banker dispatched an urgent messenger to the Palace of the Kings of Mallorca in Valldemosa, where Don Juan was reading his Quevedo, where the Princess painted her pictures, and where Pedro and his brothers played soccer with the skulls of dead Moorish sheiks, Fatimas, and eunuchs that they had dug up in the crypts, to their father’s horror. The banker’s emissary was a classic Messenger of Doom, the kind one reads about in novels or, better yet, gets to see on the tragic stage. His arrival had an effect like a sudden smack at a beehive. People began rushing about, back and forth. They bumped against each other. They shouted. They issued orders. It was like the old times of the Moorish hegemony, when the family first took on the cognomen Verdugo. Had the infidel once again arrived at the gates? Could one again hear shouts from the ramparts: “Death to the Castilians! Death to the Suredas!”?
The event signified peril for the House of Sureda, but this time Mohammed had not sent his Moorish scimitars to besiege the charterhouse. Instead, he sent one of his minor prophets, the botones from one of the Palma gentlemen’s clubs, to deliver the sad news. The cloister would be foreclosed the very next day, the entire property auctioned off. Don Juan! Save all the irreplaceable works of art that you can!
Don Juan’s banker had got wind of the enforced auction, and decided to warn his friend.
Don Juan Sureda Bimer of the House of Verdugo sounded his horn and called down from the battlements of his castle, “The enemy is approaching! Save the valuables of the Palace of the Catholic Kings of Aragón and Mallorca! To the boxes!”
Large and small, major- and minor-domo, botones, hired hands, maids, hangers-on—each was given an assignment. Don Juan personally wrote out tags to be placed on beds, chairs, plates, and platters which famous personages had slept in, sat on, or eaten from. Then everything was carried over to one of the nursemaids’ houses at 11 Street of Bitterness. The naming of this street was a triumph of local political premonition, for now a nameless destiny was being fulfilled within its confines. Every single item that was of value in Don Juan’s eyes got lugged over to the nursemaid’s abode and deposited there, piled up in wild haste. The treasures were heaped on top of each other; the floors sagged under their weight; chairs and baskets jutted forth from the windows. There were boxes containing porcelain, hundreds of salon chairs, armchairs, and stools, plus mattresses piled one upon the other like so many layers of f
ossilized strata. And then Don Juan’s anxiously hoarded collection of alibis: boxes, more boxes, chests, packages—the sweat poured all night long.
Anyone observing these nocturnal goings-on would have to conclude that a palace was being plundered by a mob. Down with feudal domination! To the gallows with the princes, counts, and barons! Death to the Suredas! Afterwards it was determined that plundering had in fact taken place, although the items stolen were among those that the master of the palace had designated as unimportant: the treasures of the Kings of Aragón and Mallorca. To him, the most valuable property was the chairs that had been sat upon by celebrities, the cups from which they had sipped their coffee, the mattresses they had lain upon either alone or in company of others.
When the embargador arrived the next day, he found the site empty and deserted. Apart from a lone chair, he could identify nothing fit to be auctioned. He had to settle for the immoveable parts of the estate, the buildings and grounds. And when he sat down on the single remaining chair—now a prop in a tragedy different from the one Vigoleis was living through—with the intention of writing down his official report, he ended up flat on the ground. The chair had only three legs. With this gesture, the civil servant brought to completion all that the now-defunct charterhouse had to offer.
Don Juan escaped to the hills, his children resumed their marauding, and the Princess continued painting. The three-legged chair did not wander off with a special tag to the arsenal on Bitterness Street. Instead, Don Juan remained true to his custom and had it taken to Palma, where relatives of his had meanwhile rented an apartment. Life went on. Now the family was “tenement nobility,” and the three-legged chair represented their best effort at displaying high style. Was there a shedding of tears? Spanish grandees don’t cry over minor matters.
“Wait, Beatriz. I’ll go get a ladder next door. They’re always willing to lend us one when we have company. Then you can get that topmost mattress ready. It’s the one that was slept on by Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán. I know you’re not much of a fan of that writer, but it’ll be hard to haul anything else up there to sleep on that would be more to your liking. Let’s just see…”
This mountain of a bed, consisting in layer upon layer of mattresses, bore tags that exhibited the following strata of famous slumberers: Don Gabriel Alomar—Don Felix Rubén Darío—Don Miguel de Unamuno — S. A. R. Luis Salvador—Don Federico Chopin—Jovellanos—Mother Ey—Don José Miralles—Archbishop Obispo—Don Antonio Gelabert —Azorín—Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán. I would have liked to lie on top of my fellow-countrywoman Mother Ey, about whom Pedro told us some fascinating tales, whereas Beatrice announced a preference for Chopin. But rearrangement of the mattresses was as good as impossible without emptying out the whole room. So we decided to accept the stratification as it came about hastily during the wild night of enforced removal. And anyway, this mountain of mattresses had attained its size according to certain laws of destiny. For example, the one labeled “Alfonso XIII EL REY” did not end up in our largely democratic heap of pallets.
One aristocratic trait in Mamú’s personality that I admired greatly was this: she couldn’t sleep in strange beds. She therefore took her own bed with her on her travels—or rather, she owned several such personal beds. She always sent one of these ahead together with her load of large baggage. Other people, on the other hand, are proud to be able to tell their grandchildren that they have slept in beds in which kings, popes, celebrated whores, saints, or dictators have sweated out their lust and their fear, their piety, hypocrisy, death agony, or contempt for the Divinity. Beatrice also doesn’t like strange beds, whereas I myself hover too insecurely between the earth and the sky to have much concern about the surface I sleep upon. On this evening in the Sureda panopticon, before climbing on top of the Valle-Inclán mattress, Beatrice took a sleeping powder, not for fear of any infra-poetic vapors emitted by that romantic libertine, but out of sheer terror that she might hit her head against the ceiling if our own body heat should cause the ghostly pile beneath us to come alive, much as fleas can be animated by the scent of human blood. I took no such precautionary measure, with the result that I received a bump on my forehead when the souls underneath us got restless, making me have vivid dreams about what each of them was going through as they slept on Sureda mattresses. Mr. Silberstern, who will make his appearance in a later chapter, would have hit the ceiling with his belly—that is how narrow the space was between Valle-Inclán and the beams of our ceiling.
Next to our sleeping quarters was a room full of chairs. Although the eviction from the castle had taken place two or three years previously, it was impossible to imagine how anybody could have piled up these hundreds of chairs in such a way as to avoid getting buried beneath a cascade of tumbling poltronas. The room was chock full. Not all of the chairs in this collection were catalogued. But every last one of them had, at one time or another, served as a place of repose for some notable personage—and who, in Spain, is not notable? Don Juan at first intended to put labels on the unidentified items, but then he decided against it for two reasons: he did not want anyone to accuse him of historical falsification, and he simply could not face the idea of returning to the Valley of the Muza. And besides, a sufficient number of chairs were already tagged with famous names in the interest of posterity.
In the presence of these thousands of chair legs, it once again became apparent how false and mean the suspicions of Mamú’s Christian ladies had been that Vigoleis was a Communist. For now he would have to be overcome with distress at the thought of his one single, borrowed chair. Here the chairs were struggling beneath their own weight, as well as under a heavier mythological burden. I felt not the slightest twinge of envy; I remained as cool as a historian registering facts, so long as they were certifiable as such. This, too, was a Waterloo, and that was all it was. It was difficult to reconstruct what had happened at the site.
Another room was reserved for the crates and baskets containing historical porcelain and flatware, as well as for the bedclothes, blankets, pillows, and bedspreads, all of them in bundles bearing labels. Most of this collection had already been consumed by moths or gnawed by mice and rats. I rummaged out several boxes filled with gold and silver livery buttons. When their shine suddenly faded and their heraldic symbolism disappeared, Don Juan removed these buttons with his own hands, but permitted his servants to keep their uniforms.
Dinner jackets, hats, ladies’ suits, children’s clothing—a theater wardrobe of astonishing variety lay in a pile beneath the staircase, covered with burlap. And in a special box, carefully packed in straw, the noble family’s chamber pots. Among these there was one worth mentioning, not for the personage who utilized it—a tag revealed the name attached to this most private of utensils—but for what was visible inside it. But let me quickly prevent any misunderstandings. In a later chapter a similar misunderstanding will prove absolutely crucial, but in the present instance I wish to draw attention solely to the decoration and inscription inside this ethnologically significant household item, to which we must give our attention anon.
Paintings by El Greco and Murillo; Italians, Dutch masters; incunabula, manuscripts, the entire palace library—Don Juan was unable to rescue a single item. One shudders at the thought of sardines being grilled and paella simmering on cottage hearths all over the Valley, over flames fueled by irreplaceable treasures of the nation’s past. And yet we ourselves, we who call ourselves representatives of the great Western cultural and intellectual tradition, we who boast of our command of the alphabet, who read books and perhaps even write them—were we any different from those Valldemosans who didn’t care a fig about frying their fish on a fire produced by a first edition of Quevedo?
We had, as it were, no money. And without money even the most sublimely educated person will revert to the hairiest barbarism, unless he prefers to adopt the glassy-eyed look of an ascetic and simply starve. Our pesetas were just enough for an olla potrida, the popular stew, but not enough for us
to buy fuel for an open hearth.
“We’ll consume a historic chair!” Pedro always came up with the right expression. I tugged a chair from the bottom of the pile. It was hard going, but I did it so well that a whole bunch of chairs came plunging down from the top. We had to barricade the door to avoid being buried in an avalanche of furniture.
Since we were lacking a hatchet, Pedro was about to kick the chair apart when I stepped forward to prevent such an irreverent act. I put the chair on the firestone of the capacious hearth, which was separated from the rest of the kitchen by a low partition. I set it afire, using material purloined from Don Juan’s archive of alibis: theater programs from his “Paris” file. Then we began wagering over which direction the burning chair would start to lean. This was exciting business, and we repeated the ritual before every meal. I recall one elaborate chair whose name-tag had been gnawed away. Although it burned with blinding flames, it leaned neither to the right nor to the left, nor did it bend forward or crash down backward, nor did it crumble in on itself. It simply carbonized without losing its shape, leaving only a black skeleton. At the beginning of the process we joked about this special saint getting burned at the stake. But then we turned silent, because things were becoming uncanny. Beatrice, normally so very rational, claimed to espy the outlines of a human figure in the little blue flames shooting out of crevices in the chair. The smell of resin and incense was so strong as to take our breath away.
The Island of Second Sight Page 76
