Complete Short Stories by Robert Graves
When Don Hilario looked at him quizzically, Wifredo went to the workshop and returned with a particularly unattractive section of local pine, consisting almost wholly of large knots. He asked: ‘Am I seriously expected to fulfil a municipal order for eighty class-room desks with timber of this quality? And what about my saw-blades?’
Don Hilario eyed the exhibit and ventured cautiously: ‘Well, you might hammer out these knots and use the holes for securing the scholars’ ink-wells; but I shall make it plain to Don Aníbal that if you were to take this course, there would undoubtedly be many times more ink-wells than scholars.’
Seven o’clock struck, and Wifredo exclaimed: ‘Pardon me, Don Hilario! The workmen have gone off, and so has my partner. I must lock up without delay. Since I am aware that any invitation to ride home in my battered car will be declined, let me wish you a respectful good night. There is a certain haste; my English friends, the intellectual Graves family, are honouring my house with a visit, and hope to bring Miss Ava Gardner.’
Don Hilario caught his breath and clutched at Wifredo’s sleeve. ‘Do you mean the veritable Ava Gardner?’ he asked slowly. ‘She… is here, in Majorca?’
‘Yes, the one inimitable Ava,’ Wifredo answered easily. ‘The Señores Graves assure me that she is as gracious and intelligent as she is beautiful.’
‘“Gracious and intelligent” indeed! “Gracious and intelligent” is petty praise! For me, Ava Gardner is the greatest artist alive!’
Ava did not, as it happened, come to Wifredo’s with us that evening. She had made a trip to the fine sandy beach of Camp de Mar; but, the weather being bitterly cold – it was just before the fearful February freeze-up of 1956 – she alone was hardy enough to swim. Several carloads of admirers stood watching, and a roar of admiration rose as she tripped down the hotel steps in her bright Italian bathing costume and dived into the tempestuous waves. Yet no would-be life-saver, we were told, jumped in after her; if only because Spaniards, though incurably romantic, are not altogether Quixotic. Later, Ava was whisked on to the Binisalem vineyards, where she spent so agreeable a time sampling our sole Majorcan vintage wine that we did not catch up with her again until midnight.
The next morning, Don Hilario drew Wifredo aside and said urgently: ‘Friend, tell me about her!’
Hating to disappoint the Colonel, Wifredo answered: ‘A phenomenon! So gentle, so beautiful, so humorous.’
Don Hilario sighed. ‘Ah, Don Wifredo, your experience fills me with the greenest envy!’ He added in a sudden rush: ‘I have never, you know, accepted a gift or a favour from you, ever since I came to this factory. Not a cigarette, not a match, not a ride in your crazy automobile! However, I will say that, unlike your boorish partner, you always show the utmost consideration for my feelings in this respect, never making any move which might be open to malicious misinterpretation; and for that I honour you. Indeed, I honour you so highly, and so commend your correctness, that I feel emboldened to make a surprising request: one that you will, I am sure, recognize as being on a quite different level from the mundane round of industry in the ambience of which we daily meet. Don Wifredo, I am a lonely old man; all winter long my wounds ache; I have few pleasures. Well… to be short, if you could, by any plea, prevail on your distinguished English friends to approach Miss Gardner…’
Wifredo answered: ‘Not another word, Don Hilario! And if anyone else in all Palma were to ask this of me – even the Director of the Central Bank, upon whose good will my livelihood depends – I should say: “Impossible!” But when the most courageous soldier of our race makes such a request, how dare I rebuff him? I trust that the matter can be arranged before Miss Gardner leaves the island early this afternoon.’
A few minutes later our phone rang. ‘Robert,’ Wifredo said excitedly, ‘will you meet me at noon in the Café Mecca on a matter of the gravest importance? I cannot explain over the telephone.’
To my relief, Ava had read the marked poem and decided to accept it as a personal tribute; in fact, begged me to copy it out in long-hand and sign it for her.
‘With great pleasure,’ I said, ‘if you’ll do a trade. Ava, I want a print of your most supremely glamorous photograph, inscribed: “To the heroic Colonel Don Hilario Tortugas y Postres, with the heartfelt admiration of Ava Gardner.” Let me write it down for you.’
‘Is “heartfelt admiration” strictly necessary?’
‘It’s essential!’
I wrote out the poem for Ava in a fair hand, and soon after she had flown back to Madrid (with four crates of Binisalem wine among her luggage) a splendidly large signed photograph arrived, duly inscribed for the Colonel: a portrait, I was half-glad to see, of her exotic legend rather than of herself.
Rosa and Wifredo invited us to the most English dinner we had eaten in years: mulligatawny soup; roast beef with roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, a boiled cabbage; apple dumplings with cream; and (as Edward Lear has put it) ‘no end of Stilton cheese’. Wifredo even produced a bottle of vintage port – how he got hold of either the Stilton or the port, beats me – and solemnly toasted Ava Gardner.
We all drank.
Then, in a voice thick with emotion, he announced: ‘Dear friends, in consequence of Don Hilario’s report to the Bank, delivered two days ago, I now have sole charge of the factory, being answerable to the Bank Director alone. Aníbal has been bought out and dismissed; and I am empowered not only to arrange my own timber supplies, but to choose a new sales manager!’
We congratulated him riotously.
‘That is not all,’ he went on. ‘The “Nanniparkér” Nursery Towel-horse now goes into immediate production, as well as a similar contrivance, suggested by dear Rosa, for hoisting wet linen to the kitchen ceiling by means of a cord and pulley. It will equally serve, in better weather, for hams, sausages, strings of red peppers, and ropes of onions. How original, and how very useful! I propose to name it “The Ava Gardner Drying Rack”. Each example will bear a beautiful coloured miniature of my benefactress, taken from the authentic photograph of her plunge into the sea at Camp de Mar. Do you consider that I need write to ask her permission?’
‘She would consider it strictly unnecessary,’ I answered, sipping my port, cracking my walnuts, and thinking: ‘Dear Ava!’
The Viscountess and the Short-haired Girl
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago, Master Toni, the squat, bald, dark-eyed, muscular, smiling proprietor of our village garage, invited me to dinner on his Saint’s Day. The fiesta of San Antonio, which falls on January 17th, is always marked in Majorcan villages by the priest’s rather hilarious aspersion with holy water of as many asses, mules, sheep-dogs and motor-cars as his parishioners may care to bring along to the Church door; and by a bonfire, lighted on the previous evening, which around midnight has usually died down low enough for buñuelos – a sort of doughnut – to be fried over the embers. On this occasion, the fire being still alive after morning mass, Master Toni’s wife Doña Isabel sent her children with shovels to salvage lumps of glowing charcoal for the brazier under our dinner table. The main dish was missel-thrushes stewed in cabbage-leaves, with snails, octopus and saffron rice. We also ate smoked ham; slices of out-sized radish; the first pickled black olives of the season; Minorcan sheep-cheese; fig-bread; ordinary bread; and plenty of Binisalem red wine. I remember the missel-thrushes, because a German lady had been enraged to see a pile of them heaped on the garage floor that morning. ‘How dare you massacre our beautiful German songbirds?’ she screamed.
‘Señora,’ Master Toni answered, ‘your German songbirds are ill-educated; they come to steal the olives. Olives are our main source of wealth: olives, and figs – figs such as I often watched you steal from my trees as you went down the path by our house this last September.’
Missel-thrushes are caught by a method once known as ‘bat-fowling’ in England, but now, I believe, extinct there. Two men station themselves a few paces apart, in one of the broad alleys down which the thrushes fly from their roosts among evergreen
Anyhow, Master Toni, having made merry on the Eve of San Antonio, and eaten quantities of buñuelos, had returned home for a couple of hours’ sleep, then started off at five o’clock to catch tords d’auba for our dinner. But along came the sexton, in overcoat and slippers, to say that his sister, María the Spaghetti-maker, was desperately ill again and that the Doctor must be fetched at once from Sóller. So Master Toni climbed into his antiquated Studebaker; and by the time the Doctor had attended to María (on her death-bed these past fifteen years) and been driven back to Sóller, only the despised tords de gran dia were left to hunt. Nevertheless, Master Toni and a certain Sentiá Dog-beadle, the village odd-job man, managed between them to bag two dozen – a remarkable catch that year. And very good they tasted.
Perhaps I should explain that María Spaghetti-maker had never made any spaghetti; it was her great-grandmother who plied the trade, but the nickname persisted in the female line. There is now a grown-up granddaughter who holds it, though she only sews gloves. Similarly, the timorous and greedy Sentiá Dog-beadle inherited his nickname from an ancestor whose task had been to keep stray dogs from taking sanctuary on hot days in the cool of Palma Cathedral. ‘Sentiá’ is short for Sebastián. There are almost too many things which need explanation, once one begins to tell stories about our village.
After dinner, over the coffee and brandy, I found it easy to swear that I had never eaten so well, or so much, in all my life.
‘Not even in Piccadilly, Don Roberto?’ asked Master Toni shrewdly.
‘Certainly not, I assure you!’
‘Well, Damián the Coachman, Sentiá Dog-beadle and I ate pretty well there, during our famous stay at the Regent Palacio Hotel.’
‘Why have you never told me of this visit to London?’
‘I am a busy man, you are a busy man. I have saved up the long history of the Viscountess and the Short-haired Girl for this fiesta.’
Here then is Master Toni’s story, as I wrote it down that same evening. Respecting his inability to manage an initial St, Sc, Sp or Sm without an anticipatory e, I prefixed one to all the proper names which demanded it. Let that e stay as a convenient reminder of the estory-teller’s Espanishness.
THE VISCOUNTESS AND THE SHORT-HAIRED GIRL
It all began one day in August when two gentlemen, both wearing black coats and striped trousers – hardly suitable clothes for the weather, which was of a barbarous heat – drove up in a very fine taxi from Palma and stopped at my garage. The chauffeur, who knew me, asked whether they might have a private word in my ear. ‘At the gentlemen’s service,’ I answered, ‘unless they are trying to sell me something. I am excessively short of money this month.’
One of the gentlemen, who could speak Spanish, heard what I said. He was a little game-cock of a man, and had a habit of tilting his head on one side inquiringly, as poultry often do. From his black mushroom hat, I judged him to be less important than the other, who wore a black silk stove-pipe hat. ‘Then let me congratulate you, Don Antonio,’ he said. ‘My friend here, Mr P.P. Jonés, will soon remedy your financial straits. If you listen to his proposal, he will fill your pockets with silver duros. My own name is Charley Estrutt, at your service.’
‘He does not require me to violate the Law?’ I asked.
Mr Estrutt translated this question to Mr Jonés, who resembled a large, well-cured ham. Mr Jonés shook his head violently, saying: ‘On the contrary!’ – a phrase which I understood, the word ‘contrary’ being identical in our Majorcan idiom, though we sound it differently.
I asked them both upstairs, to take a coffee. They accepted, and when we had emptied our cups I waited until they should come to the point, after all Mr Estrutt’s compliments on the beauty and tranquillity of our village. When he continued silent, I said boldly: ‘By your gold watch-chains and your reticence, gentlemen, I judge you to be lawyers; and your black clothes indicate that you are here on business, not on a vacation. The labels on your brief-cases say “London”. Therefore, since this village has had the honour of welcoming only one compatriot of yours during the past twelve months, that is to say a certain young girl with hair cut short like a boy’s, who stayed for a week in May at the Hotel Bonsol with a tall foreigner from God-knows-where, may I conclude that your business somehow concerns her?’
Mr Estrutt’s face lighted up. He said: ‘You are very intelligent, Don Antonio! That is almost precisely the case, though Señor Jonés alone is a lawyer. In effect, he represents the short-haired girl’s disconsolate mother, recently widowed.’
I asked: ‘And your profession, Señor? Would it be inconvenient to divulge it?’
Mr Estrutt smiled. ‘No inconvenience at all,’ he said. ‘I used to be an inspector in our Metropolitan Police force. I am now retired, and have become a private detective employed by rich people to conduct delicate inquiries. The remuneration is better.’
I went on: ‘By the formality of Mr Jonés’s appearance, he must be a lawyer of great importance?’
Mr Estrutt whistled. ‘He never accepts less than fifty thousand pesetas a week for a case! The fact is that the disconsolate mother in question reeks of money. Her father was a multi-millionaire from Chile. I worked for the family once; an illegitimate son of his happened to be blackmailing him.’
I remarked: ‘One recognizes your accent as South American.’
He blushed a little: ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘you Spaniards despise South Americans for their abuse of your ancient tongue.’
Since Mr Charley Estrutt seemed a pleasant enough man, for all the ridiculous black mushroom-hat balanced on his knee, I assured him that here in Majorca we speak an even coarser dialect of Spanish than the Chileans. Our talk proceeded in this inconclusive manner until Mr Jonés, who did not understand a word, looked at his big gold watch and made some observation to Mr Estrutt. Clearly, the moment had come to discuss business. I told myself: ‘These people can pay well. I shall certainly not accept the first price they offer – for whatever it is that they require of me.’
Mr Estrutt now put forward his proposal. He explained that the short-haired girl, a minor, having run away from a French convent where she was being educated, had been brutally kidnapped by a Bulgarian artist. The pair had, with great difficulty, been traced to our village. The disconsolate Viscountess, her mother, wished to collect sufficient sworn evidence about the tragedy to incarcerate this Bulgarian heretic for life. Yet scandal must be avoided at all costs, and therefore the Spanish police had not been invited to assist. Well, if I and two friends of mine could testify before an English judge to the Bulgarian’s having dragged the wretched girl to our Hotel Bonsol, and there committed an offence against her, the unfortunate entanglement could be legally proved, and the criminal punished.
Mr Jonés, so Mr Estrutt told me, knew that I had conveyed the couple in my taxi from the mole at Palma to the Hotel Bonsol; that a certain Sebastián Vivés (meaning Sentiá Dog-beadle) had carried their bags up to a bedroom at the said hotel; and that Damián Frau, meaning ‘Damián the Coachman’, the hotelkeeper, had bro
I replied: ‘Speaking between ourselves, Mr Estrutt, the short-haired girl seemed to be in no way acting under duress; in fact, on our journey from Palma she was embracing and caressing the heretic – as I could not help seeing in my driving-mirror – with every appearance of genuine enjoyment.’
Imagine my surprise, when Mr Estrutt winked at me (but with the eye hidden from Mr Jonés) and answered: ‘Don Antonio, in England our young girls have been completely demoralized by the excitements of the recent war. Moreover, the poor child may have feared that, unless she caressed him in public, he would ill-treat her most cruelly once they were alone.’
To be brief, the terms offered us three witnesses for a visit to London were twenty pesetas a day, besides travelling expenses, bed, board, laundry, wine, cigars, and anything else within reason that we might need, not omitting sight-seeing excursions; and another five hundred pesetas each, if we gave our evidence in a way that convinced the Judge. He also asked, would I be kind enough to repeat this offer to my friends, Don Sebastián and Don Damián?
I wanted to know how long we should be away, and Mr Estrutt estimated that we should be home again within three weeks. My reply was that we should answer yes or no after a night’s reflection; but Mr Jonés urged us to sign a contract that same night. He intended to catch the Barcelona boat.
Well, I left the Englishmen at my house while I went to the Bonsol and took Damián for a little stroll. ‘You are a knowledgeable man,’ I said, ‘and acquainted with the ways of the rich. I have been invited to visit London as witness in a kidnapping case. Now, for a commission of this sort, are twenty pesetas a day, all found, sufficient? I shall be away for about three weeks.’