On the other hand, what if I were to start out by telling about the last snail we wanted to cook for ourselves, but which escaped us — or rather, which escaped none other than our clever friend Bobby, the young fellow who could surmount any problem the island posed to its foreign guests, excepting of course his own personal problems and those of the private physician’s gynecology? Just imagine — a single vineyard snail got away from him! But I’d better begin at the beginning. Period.
I shall never comprehend why people like us Vigotrices, for whom destiny has reserved no firm place of residence on the globe, have not sung the praises of the sardine, the kind you can get in cans either in olive oil or en escabeche for two reales a can. Consume them with a piece of bread, and you have stilled your hunger for the next ten minutes, or however long it takes until you can get the next can. Doña Inés had piled up many such latas, and she invited us to eat our way through the entire pile, at cost. This was how she re-provisioned her household on an annual basis. Crisp, succulent lettuce grew in her herbal garden, there were jugs of wine and oil, and an old sailor next door brought us our bread. I’m mentioning all this in order to explain that during our first days, without ever leaving the house, we did not suffer hunger. Intellectual nourishment was also to be found on Doña Inés’ shelves, preserved like the sardines: St. Augustine, Cervantes, Pascoaes, Novalis. That’s all that I took with us into our place of solitude, but naming those names here might seem erudite indeed. Reading the urbane, devout Thagastian bishop’s works under the sign of Orion was an experience I shall never forget.
Suddenly there is a gunshot; I look up from my book and gaze in the direction where the explosion is still echoing. A large, many-colored bird drops from the blazing sky to the dark-green foliage of the orange orchard. I catch myself recalling certain verses by Goethe and, turning back to Augustine, I say, “Damn it all, Beatrice, those bratty kids have just shot down another hoopoe! By the time Bobby arrives they’ll be extinct!”
Otherwise, nothing at all disturbed the peace on our island. Just once I saw an eagle. It was flying so low that I could follow precisely its broad sweeping shadow across the red earth.
Sunday began as bright as never before. During the night we had heard more gunfire. “What are they hunting for in the nighttime?” Beatrice asked. “Bats,” I said. “Great substitute for clay pigeons, and cheaper.” The ocean lay calm and contented in the Bay. Not a single sail, not a single wake from a ship already beyond the horizon. Not a single breeze to create on the sea’s surface the familiar shimmering moiré effect. The sky, too, was leaden.
At around noontime some airplanes arrived. They circled Palma and the harbor of Porto-Pí. Oh look! Now they’re diving. And way up, that little dot must be a skywriter. Pretty soon we’ll see his ad, Mallorca clima ideal, and right behind it the word Persil, which will of course earn him more money.
Now and then we heard more shots. Hoopoes, I thought. Maybe ravens, or quail. Sunday hunters? Do they exist in Spain, too?
Several days passed. Beatrice took a short walk into the village, if that is what you could call the dozen houses in Génova, and reported casually that Doña Inés apparently owed some money at the store. The people there ogled her strangely, and hardly even greeted her. Crabby people, Beatrice said; she wasn’t going back. They were probably afraid that we, too, would ask for credit and then disappear from sight. Such behavior was now rather common in the island. That’s how many emigrés kept themselves above water.
A few days later Pedro Sureda arrived — in uniform! And unshaven, and minus his usual loquacity. No jokes, no dance steps, no clapping on shoulders. Pedro, too, just stared at us, as if we were deep in debt, and apparently we actually were in some kind of trouble without realizing it. We owed our lives to a few people who were now beginning to demand the settling of old scores. Someone had told Pedro that we had been shot on orders from on high, and he had come by to see for himself. The fact was that our good friend Pedro simply couldn’t imagine Vigoleis, the fellow with the pronounced death wish, as a corpse. Seeing that we were still alive, he was relieved for the moment. But this is not something that he told us on that day of our resurrection. He, too, remained silent. Why? It wasn’t until the eve of our escape, in a café at a corner of the Apuntadores that was swarming with uniforms of all conceivable political persuasions — some real generals were among them — that Pedro broke his silence. Back then, he said, he had wanted to make sure that I was dead.
He gave us the following report: Pronunciamiento! Our buddy General Franco had mounted a sudden attack in Morocco, and the conflagration spread to the mainland. During the very first night our island had fallen to the insurrection. So it wasn’t clay pigeons after all? People make for better target practice. It was war, but it was a Holy War, one being fought for the greater glory of God and His generals.
The background of the insurrection is obscure, and to this very hour no historian has been able to explain it thoroughly. In all our years on the island I was never able to get a clear picture of Spanish politics. For one thing, I have no sense at all of such developments. Worse still, I just don’t care who wants to exert control over me. As an honorary guest of the island, as an exterritorial and thus exempt from paying taxes, my interest in Spanish politics was all the more feeble. Yet of one thing I was sure: what was happening in Germany, the herding of an entire nation under the leadership of a single bleating sheep, could never happen in Spain. As I had got to know them, the Spaniards seemed much too self-centered for such foolishness, too convinced of their own importance. They were very much their own persons, and would never fall victim to massification. All the rest of Spanish politics, insofar as a foreigner could take notice of it, seemed simply ludicrous.
As an example, let me cite the reaction of cloisters involving both sexes to a stern decree from the Republican government, stripping monks and nuns of the privilege of teaching school. Two religious orders housed on our street maintained separate educational institutions, for boys and for girls. We ran across nuns and monks every day, and exchanged greetings with them. I had many a stimulating chat with one or the other schoolmaster in front of our house. Those people were highly educated. I never spoke with any of the nuns, for that would have been sinful. Some of them were quite beautiful. They gazed out wanly from between the black blinders of their habits, revealing to an onlooker the passionate fires that were consuming them inwardly.
The School Secularization Law was meant as a coup against the clerical orders. But all it did was create for them the simple problem of choosing the proper attire: off with the robes and habits, on with the middle-class duds. The Pope issued the proper licenses, while the Brothers and Sisters closed their schools for three days. They sailed to Barcelona and returned as bourgeois personalities: Señor González and Señorita Sánchez, Don José and Doña Carmen, the men wearing collars, neckties, and straw hats, the ladies in jacket and skirt or, for those with shaved heads, combination wig-hats. The political Left was furious; the Right was delighted. The satirical papers had a field day in all the parties. Then, as new elections approached and attempts were made to force a victory for the Right, everyone including the nuns had to step up to the ballot box. Even nuns living in lifelong seclusion were given a free day, and re-emerged into God’s sunlight. They instantly became the butt of jokes, but they took all this with dignity and recitations of the Rosary.