JUST before six o'clock every morning tremendous :tnd explosive noises would issue from a shed adjacent to Can Xumeu, just about half way between the square and the theatre on the main road. Ramon, the bus driver, would be tuning up his motorcycle. The more noise Ramon could make, the better he liked it. His round tanned face, with deep wrinkles at the out­side corners of his eyes, would beam with pleasure when the machine mounted a strong crescendo like many riveting hammers. When it choked and wheezed .uid died, as it frequently did, his forehead would wrinkle, he would unscrew this or that, take off a part or two and look at them, put them back and start the engine again. The more it balked, the more he raced it afterward. No one complained. Nearly everyone was willing to think about getting up at six, and those .already up would saunter down to the shed in time to hear the last few moments of the racket and to see Ramon start shooting toward San Carlos at a mur­derous pace, leaving a trail of dust in dry weather or splashing house fronts on either side of the road if it \~ cre raining. The inhabitants of Santa Eulalia, and particularly Ramon, had an Oriental love of noise. They let doors bang, raced their engines, pounded on I tables, shouted all conversation that did not have to be whispered, encouraged dogs to bark and donkeys to bray. When pigs were killed, by having their throats slit and slowly bleeding to death while a man held each leg, the terrific shrieks, diminishing ever so slowly to a final gasp through ten terrible minutes, was music to the ears of gentle girl children with curls and white-haired benevolent grandmothers. If a child fell down and bumped his head, the whole village street would throb with sympathy. Not so when animals howled or cried with pain.

I told at least a thousand persons that pigs should be knocked on the head before their throats were cut, and each one shrugged his shoulders and smiled in­dulgently, as if nothing mattered less in the world. So cool mornings were punctuated with fiendish sounds, the firing and back-firing of Ramon's motorcycle, death shrieks of pigs and the braying of Guara­piñada's donkey Napoleon.

As a matter of fact, Ramon was the best mechanic on the island, which is not saying much. Mechanical work is not a Latin gift, neither is it Arabic or Cata­lan. The reason the motorcycle acted so badly was because it was old and worn and would have been discarded by a man of lesser talents than Ramon. He always ran it full speed and only his skill as a driver kept his neck intact, for the road between Santa Eulalia and San Carlos was in all states of disrepair. The dust was almost as treacherous as the mud, and the part that had been macadamized under Primo de Rivera was as full of holes and man traps as nature's own bed rock in other stretches that had echoed the "boots of the troops of Julius Caesar.

A few peasants with market baskets filled with produce,
Ramon Drives in
live chickens, etc., got on the bus at San Carlos and at quarter to seven Ramon would drive the bus into Santa Eulalia and stop just beyond the post office. If he overshot his mark, his front fenders would come up even with the first tubbed palm in front of the Royalty. He would honk his horn until his arm muscles ached, and as he honked there would be a mild outpouring from doorways all along the street. The fishermen, squatting around their baskets just ahead, would cross the street languidly to load on the bus roof boxes of fish packed in ice. The bow­legged proprietor of Casa Rosita, the grocery store and bus terminal, would saunter over with a battered ledger in which were written the names of those who had reserved places. He looked like an American cow­boy. Certain days of the week, on Tuesday when the Barcelona boat arrived; or on Saturday, the biggest market day, the bus would be overcrowded and those who had had the foresight to inscribe their names on the list had first right to the seats. If there were more customers than could be jammed without headroom into the aisles, another and even more rickety camion would be urged out of its garage and a second-string driver pressed into service to take care of the over­flow. Often the second-string bus broke down and Ramon would have to make two trips.

The inside of the bus, on days when the windows had to be closed, smelled like a deserted cheese fac­tory that had just been used for shoeing camels. That was because the Ibicenco men smoked home-grown. tobacco they called pota, which means horse's hoof. "Their town clothes were invariably black, made of a thick absorbent material like velvet only much cheaper, and once they became permeated with pota smoke they never lost their flavor. The men who smoked pota were proud of the stuff, as a local prod­uct, and insisted that it was good. I have seen them try the best English sliced plug and dump it from their pipes in disgust. As a whole, though, Santa Eulalia was especially fragrant in the morning at bus time, for the household fires and the larger ones in the hotels and bakers' ovens, were kindled with rosemary twigs which Plate had gathered on the hills and sold for wine money. And the climate was such that on very few days was it necessary to close the windows of the bus or the doors of the cafes. Men lived out of doors nearly all their waking time. To many of the women from the outlying farms, a trip to Ibiza (nine miles) was an important voyage, to be undertaken twice a year only after much dis­cussion and preparation. A few of them, dressed in holiday attire (head kerchief, of dull greenish gold, plum-colored shawl, full accordion-pleated skirt of Veronese green, and a gay turquoise ribbon at the nape of the neck), would be standing in a group and the moment the bus rolled in would take their places, chattering in high-pitched voices, changing from one side to the other, finally settling down and sitting close together as if for mutual protection. No young women ever travelled alone, or even crossed the street alone after dark. A mother or an aunt accompanied them, and she would be as picturesquely and taste­fully dressed, but in darker hues. Eighty percent of the women wore black because they were in mourn­ing. That custom, one of the blights on the lives of
Women in Black
the women that depressed and inconvenienced them most, seemed to be unbreakable. One of the smartest young girls, Eulalia Noguera, told me when she was nineteen that she had been out of mourning only six months of her life and her family was one of the most radical, politically. Even Cosmi, for a few months after Anna's grandfather died, selected a black neck­tie on the two or three occasions in that period when he wore a necktie. He muttered and grinned sheep­ishly when I commented on his choice of cravat, but still he made that slight concession to the conven­tions. Had he worn a colored tie, he knew that the women of the family would have given him no peace, and Cosmi loved peace dearly.

Each morning, Ramon, after honking the horn until his hand was tired, would step down to the side­walk and those who had errands for him to do would gather round. It is hard to say how large a percentage of the objects which found their way from Ibiza to Santa Eulalia and the messages between relatives or business men which were exchanged passed through Ramon's head or his hands. If a housewife needed a teapot, or a foreign visitor had to have a check cashed, when a baby needed medicine – no matter what there was to be done, Ramon accepted the, com­mission. He was not paid for these services, except in rare cases, but he performed them in. an effortless and efficient way. Whenever I saw him, in his dark flannel shirt, with a leather cap into which he stuffed written memoranda, slapping his trousers legs with his driving gauntlets, I thought of some stage driver out West in the early years of the century. It is aston­ishing how much I found in Santa Eulalia that reminded me of American life of thirty years ago. To enter the village never seemed to me like entering a foreign town. Instead I had the sensation of getting back home, back to old days I had been led to believe were beyond recall. That is why now I feel shaken and desolate.

Through doorways, the broad tree-lined paseo lead­ing up from the sea and the cool public well, the nar­row passages or the fields between the houses, men strolled toward the bus as Ramon honked. Guillermo, the blacksmith, in a blue striped shirt rolled up on his lean hairy arms, his shock of curly hair awry, moved slowly toward the center of activities. No one hurried, except a few half-hysterical peasant women who were in fear that the bus would go away without them. Guillermo stood near Ramon when the latter was re­ceiving requests for this and that, apparently inat­tentive, and still nothing escaped his notice. He knew everything that happened in town, and said little about it unless it was especially comical. Life, for Guillermo, was a leisurely pageant, enlivened by com­ical trivialities. His sense of humor was extremely broad, not to say Rabelaisian, but it was capable also of refinement. In certain ways he was the most proper man I ever knew.

Early in the morning there was never music, but only the babble of voices, and the men with the strongest voices made themselves heard most fre­quently. Nicolau had the strongest voice in town. He was a short stocky man with a large nose and a very red face, an army officer who had been retired with full pay just after Alfonso had been chased from the throne. Each morning he emerged from his house, a
The Retired Officer
rather spacious one very neatly kept which stood on the southeast corner of the public square. Nicolau did practically nothing, day in day out. While Gui­llermo and his other friends worked according to their temperaments in their shops or cafes or stores, Nico­lau would sit in a chair on the shady side of the street and talk with them at various distances up to a hun­dred yards. His voice was ideal for giving commands and his brain well equipped for receiving them. He put no other strain upon,it. Like most army men, he liked hunting and he had a fine pair of Ibicenco hounds, lean white dogs with pointed noses like grey­hounds and capable of more speed. In the autumn afternoons, Nicolau would tramp through the woods between Santa Eulalia and San Carlos and once in a while would kill a small wild rabbit or a grouse. Sometimes in rainy weather he would play dominoes noisily in Cosmi's café. He was not a heavy drinker but he tried to be a good fellow and at the time of which I am writing, the early days of the Republic, he had a number of friends, none of them intimate, but all of them ready enough to drink or play dom­inoes with him.

When the government that succeeded Alfonso's was organized, Azaña, who was President in the tragic days of 1936, was made Minister of War. He knew that the Spanish army had been built up by the monarchists to take care of sons and relatives and that of the inordinate number of officers there were few who were not hostile to republican ideas. Instead of disbanding the army, which was of no use except as a threat to free government, Azana proceeded more cautiously. He retired the officers who were most flagrantly hostile to his regime but in order not to stir them up too much he consented to pay them their full wages as long as they lived. They had done practically nothing when they were on active service, but that did not satisfy their ideal. The prospect of full pay, and no work whatsoever, was alluring. It bolstered up their disrespect of a government of the people and made them feel that their enemies, the people, were afraid of them. Nicolau got one thousand pesetas a month for staying out of the army, and among the monarchists joked about it freely. Branches of the family were rich, otherwise he would never have been a captain in the first place. His im­mediate family lived comfortably on his pay, had a rather large house, better clothes than the average in Santa Eulalia, and his wife held herself slightly aloof from the other women and was assiduous about going to mass. Nicolau, as far as I know, never went to church himself. If his wife kept up her religious practices, it was enough to cover him. That was as near piety as the average Spanish man ever got.

Between the post office and the Royalty, Andres the painter would be standing in front of his father's cafe, and from time to time his mother, Magdalena, would look out, her broad shapely arms wet with suds or dusted with flour. Young Andres would be talking in a way that pleased his father and caused his mother much anxiety. The lad did not look like a cafe keeper or a farmer. He was a painter, and a tal­ented one. His parents, bewildered by his aptitude for drawing, had sent him to Valencia to study and he had fulfilled their hopes as far as his progress was concerned. In the academy, though, he had heard of
Don Ignacio's House
socialism and some of the simpler and most humane of its doctrines had touched his heart. He spoke of social justice wistfully, without bitterness, for al­though his mother and father were not rich, he had suffered none of the hardships usually associated with poverty. He had worked hard, but not exces­sively. His influence among the young men of the town was considerable. Soon after young Andres had returned from school, he had been talking in his fa­ther's cafe about the right of workers to control the machinery of production, and Captain Nicolau, shocked and angry, had told him he had better be careful what he said. Andres' father, who had been a revolutionist long before 1931, spoke up and told Nicolau to mind his own business, and from that time on, Nicolau ceased to patronize the cafe.

Once in a while Don Ignacio Riquer's auto would break down and he would ride to Ibiza on the bus. Don Ignacio was a pleasant cherub-faced little man. He wore a neat black suit, with the coat unbuttoned, a white cotton shirt and a black bow tie. His shoes were shined and his trousers, while they were seldom newly pressed, were not so baggy as those of the peasants. His Santa Eulalia house, built in U shape around a broad patio, was just south of the plaza. The front was covered with climbing vines and the windows were broad, in French style, in contrast to the small Arab windows of the neighboring smaller houses. He had had an English ancestor way back in the time of the Catholic sovereigns (his name. was Wallis y Riquer) and took pride in his vocabulary of thirty English words. All the land along the south bank of Santa Eulalia's river belonged to Don Ignacio. He owned miles of the shore, with its rocky caverns and sandy coves. He owned groves of mar­iner's pines and thickets of cane twelve feet tall, fields of wheat, corn, sweet potatoes, olive trees, ga­robas trees, rows of hunchbacked fig trees with props holding up the branches. He was proud of having twenty pure-bred Holstein cows, but his most cher­ished possession was his well. It was situated along the Ibiza bus road, about a mile from Santa Eulalia, and if Don Ignacio gave you a lift to town, as he fre­quently did when his auto was running, he would stop and gaze admiringly at the small white plaster struc­ture, dome-covered like a shrine, beneath which cool waters eternally bubbled. Don Ignacio had worked out the number of gallons which could be pumped from this well without lowering the water level more than a centimeter, and I think it came to 90,000. He loved his farm, his cattle, his hills and coves and trees, but the well, fed by inexhaustible hidden springs, seemed to him the mark of God's special favor.

During the summer, the sun was well up in the sky at seven o'clock in the morning. Sometimes I thought it was the hottest hour of the day. I suppose the heat reached its peak of intensity between one and two in the afternoon, but few of us in Santa Eulalia were on the street in the siesta hours. At seven, the low build­ings adjacent to the fishermen's cafe and on the other side of the street from where the bus stood threw a deep comforting shadow. In front of Casa Rosita and the sheds and small storerooms used by Ferrer, proprietor of Las Delicias, scattered groups would stand and talk a while as the seats of the bus
The Aristocratic Doctor
were filling and its roof was being laden with fish, empty siphons, battered suitcases, straw hampers, bundles tied up in black cloth and straw-vested demi­johns to be filled with wine. The Secretario, always smiling, wore a light grey cotton jacket, and had his hair cut pompadour style. He was usually to be seen with the municipal doctor, whose aristocratic origin prompted him to wear a black coat in hot weather and to walk mincingly among the townspeople as if he could not tell them apart. Nearly everyone disliked Doctor Torres. Some of the peasants had a superstitious fear of passing near him on the street, but at that time he was the only doctor available in Santa Eulalia and in extreme cases it was necessary to call him. Under the mon­archy he had done as he pleased, refusing to go out at night, making excuses if the roads were rough or muddy, neglecting families who owed him money or whom he disliked because one of their members had died on his hands. The Republic had required him to hold a free clinic twice each week, which he did with the utmost disgust. The Secretario had been given his job in the days of the old regime and had contrived to keep it when the republicans took over the administration. His work did not touch on matters of life and death but had to do with ink and papers and he mixed with his neighbors cheerfully enough.

"Which party does the Secretario favor?" I asked one day much later, after I had seen him perform his functions with at least five of them.

"The one that wins," Cosmi answered.

Still, the Secretario did small favors for nearly everyone now and then and was never known to do any harm. Evenings he did not appear in the cafes but sat in a wooden chair in front of his doorstep, his family and a few friends gathered around, and would play the guitar as best he could in view of the handicap of a missing finger.

The owner of the bus and the holder of the con­cession was named Julian, pronounced Houlianne. He looked and acted more like a chimpanzee than any man I ever saw. He hopped about, cackling and smiling, jerking his arms and his moustaches, volun­teering eloquent opinions that invariably were wrong. Always he was one of the most active elements of the morning crowd, but his activities had nothing to do with the bus line he owned. That he left entirely to Ramon. Julian played dominoes and the simpler card games in the Spanish style, that is, with vociferous disputes over every point and a fiendish pleasure in seeing the loser pay. His bus line, except for the extra and gratuitous services performed for the public by Ramon, was conducted with a fantastic disregard for public convenience. That was accepted as the normal state of affairs.

As the moment drew nearer when Ramon must pull out for Ibiza, he would stand near the horn and sound it again until his hand got tired. The peasants in the bus would count their bundles, hitch themselves more firmly in their seats, and often there would be the sound of women sobbing and crescendos of mourn­ful exchanges of farewell. Every family in Santa Eulalia had relatives in Mallorca or Catalonia or the Levantine shore, and when visits were at an end :scenes of grief would occur around the bus that were
Along the White Road
unrestrained and almost contagious. Women would sob and scream, hide their faces in one another's shoulders, others would stand silently and miserably on the outskirts of the crowd, weeping softly into handkerchiefs, stealing a last fond look at the cousin or niece who was going away, and shivering as if the warm sun were attached like a kite to Ramon's spare tire and would follow the bus and the loved ones past the fountain, the broad residence of Ignacio Riquer, the villas with their bright gardens, the rocky hill on which stood the ancient church, the flour mill, the Roman bridge and along the white road south to the utmost ends of the earth

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