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6. Cosmi and the Punta de Arabie THE northeastern corner of the township of Santa Eulalia, between the shore and the San Carlos road which strayed a mile and a half inland in that area, was called Arable, after the Punta de Arable, which sheltered Cosmi's cove and the pebble beach. It was Arable Cosmi had chosen for his farm and where he and his brothers, the Antonio who opened the café each morning and Pep Salvador, master of ceremonies at the pig-killing feasts, had added by purchase to the land their father had left them. From one of the terraces of Cosmi's still only partly developed truck garden the church and the central part of town seemed unified, a compact clear-cut view. A narrow road which never had had the benefit of Primo de Rivera's macadamistic genius continued on a tangent from the main road of Santa Eulalia near the electric light plant where the San Carlos bus road took a turn to the left. First was the house of Pere, a small deaf fisherman, farther along was Can Josepi where Jose and Catalina (heroic pair) worked as tenants. Another half mile, after passing two more farms, one found oneself in the shade of the largest mariner's pine in all Santa Eulalia. Another enormous and perfect tree, almost a twin of the first, stood fifty yards away.

"Me, I love the earth," Cosmi would say, looking proudly over the beginnings of his project. "Antonio likes the hotel." During the years Cosmi had wandered as a boy aboard French ships in wartime, through the principal cities of France just later (where he had studied French methods of cooking and serving), in Algeria where he had worked for the large fruit companies and finally established a café and hotel in Alger, Cosmi had dreamed of the day when he could return to the town of his birth and develop the acres surrounding his father's old place. Nothing Cosmi planned was small or in any way unthorough. He wanted his land to bloom and yield as did the gardens of the Moors, with all their ancient wisdom and the benefit of modern science, too. He wanted water flowing freely through his conduits and ditches, bubbling and gushing over the ground. One lot had been chosen for goats and pigs, up-to-date hen coops and runs, with a pure race of Brahma hens that would make the restless little Minorcas look like insects by comparison. Antonio, his older brother, had been like a father to him and so Cosmi planned for him as well. Since Antonio loved hotelkeeping they were to have jointly Ibiza's best hotel. They were to build one which, because of its architecture, would fit in ideally with the landscape and the town but which, inside, would be fitted up as the best Swiss hotels were, with fly screens and window shades, running water, baths, all the comforts to match nature's gifts of sea and sunshine and fertility.

To accomplish anything on a large scale in Ibiza is difficult. No one knew that better than Cosmi, and no one was more confident that big things could be
"A Little More Humanity"
done. He did not want riches for himself, or to pass on to his son. His needs were modest in the extreme. But in the wistful way in which he had hoped for the bet terment of Spanish society and of the conditions of workers everywhere, he longed for his island to shake off its historic inertia in a healthy moderate way and keep step with the modern world.

As I say, Cosmi's plans were in their initial stage. The hotel he had rented, while waiting to get capital enough to build, was by no means the last word in appointments. The rooms were badly placed, the windows constructed in such a way as to make screening almost impossible. There were toilets in American style, as contrasted with the Turkish pattern in vogue, but the women in the hotel understood their significance and care imperfectly, to say the least, so to foreign visitors they were practically useless most of the time. However, the food was good, one got used to the flies, and Cosmi's own service and courtesy were so magnificent that it made up for many small difficulties.

Cosmi was dark and tall, with sloping shoulders and immensely strong hands. He moved about with a sure, pantherlike tread. His eyes were black and bright, his forehead high and wrinkled by the facial gestures with which he emphasized his earnest conversation. Always he had dignity and distinction. They rested upon him and went wherever he went, like an invisible garment. He was the first man to whom anyone in straits would go to borrow money. He knew everybody's business and never talked about it.

"What we need is a little more humanity," I have heard him say, again and again. That was his solution for the ills of society. That was his reason for detesting the church with all its intrigue and rigmarole. His employees knew themselves to be lucky. His enemies could find no footholds by which to impede him. No official, no native millionaire, no active politician had such an influence as Cosmi. Good men just naturally stood behind him. To the earth and the sea for sustenance, to the heart of man for better living and fairer relationships. Where have we heard that simple creed before?

How pleased Cosmi was when his well was finished and proved to have an almost limitless supply of cool spring water! He had struck an underground spring and the thought of giving such superior water to his livestock, plants and trees made him very happy. About that time his first and only son was born. Cosmi worked in the hotel until two or later in the morning, slept until ten, then took a lunch and a bottle of wine under his arm and walked briskly out the Arable road. He would stay on his land until sundown, never seeming to exert himself too much, always having time to talk with his passing neighbors, his brother Pep Salvador, a large good-natured Dane nicknamed Pep des Horts (Garden Joe), the loquacious Barberet whose land lay west of his near the San Carlos bus road. Cosmi had a few acres of corn, two large fields of sweet potatoes. He had selected his house lot and liked to stand upon it, sampling the view, the great expanse of sea, the coastline, each rock and cove of which was familiar, the distant town. Best of all he liked to watch his pump.

Cosmi's pump had earned him much friendly ridicule, for it threw a lusty four-inch stream and seemed
La Fabrika de Curas
to the tight-fisted farmers from the dry hills behind the fertile Arabie much bigger and more powerful than was necessary. As a matter of fact, it was. Cosmi could have done with a pump one-sixth the size of the one he had installed, but he wanted water in abundance. He wanted to sell it or give it away, to pipe it all through Arabie and make his neighbors' farms as luxuriant as his would be. Cosmi enjoyed tinkering with the motor, and thinking how powerful it was. He understood the sly amusement of the peasants' faces and took pleasure in it, knowing they were partly right and fundamentally quite wrong.

Pep Salvador, Cosmi's brother, had been a farmer all his life, except two fantastic years he had spent in what he called La Fabrica de Curas (priest factory) in Ibiza. Probably Pep Salvador was the hardest worker on the island, and besides that he was the hardest drinker and the most consummate clown. When his mother and father, dismayed by Cosmi's congenital aversion to the church, had suggested to Pep Salvador that he become a priest Pep kept his face straight and said "Sure." He knew his friends would laugh themselves sick, that his teachers at the seminary would always half-suspect he was having fun at their expense. Cosmi was away or he would have put a stop to it. As it was, Pep Salvador stayed two years in the Fabrika and came away able to give the best parody of the mass I have ever witnessed. Sometimes Pep Torres helped him with it, and what with the candlelight and dimness of Cosmi's bar, the potent liquor and the healthy air of abandon, to say nothing of the organ responses I furnished with my accordion, the performance was effective and enjoyed by all. Pep Salvador's clowning, however, was mostly done in the evening. All day he worked in the fields, his wife, their seven children and a boy cousin with a face like Baudelaire working with him or in distant plots, their backs bent, their movements quick and steady as they advanced along the rows. Pep got his water through an old Moorish irrigation system that still was functioning admirably. His animals had spirit like his. I am convinced that men choose animals like themselves, and influence their character. Guarapinada had this gift in the highest degree, Pep Salvador was not far behind him. Pep's black horse had hardly had a line on him for years. He simply did what Pep told him to do, in a slightly clownish manner, now and then taking a playful nip at Pep's old felt hat or his shoulder. The corn on Pep's fields had a wonderful sheen, and in a grove of his trees the nightingales spent a week or ten days each year, resting in their flight from Africa to Europe. The creek that ran through his property and turned toward the sea to form Cosrrii's boundary was hidden by tall clumps of cane and thousands of flowering bushes with pink petals and glossy green leaves. The old farm house was white, with grape arbors and a white-domed well near the doorway which faced a peanut field and a plot of scarlet peppers.

No other family cultivated so much land as Pep Salvador's and made it thrive year after year, and still each Saturday afternoon Pep was one of the first to drop his tools and light out for the cafés. His oldest daughter, Maria, went with him. While he was carousing she would sit in the café kitchen talking with the women or would walk up and down the street, arm in
Eternity and Modernity
arm with Eulalia Colomar, her slender cousin. Maria by no means represented the father-dear-fathercome-home-with-me idea. She had her father's hunger for life and loved to see him enjoying himself. Some time before dawn they would walk together along the Arabie road, Pep singing or talking to himself, Maria smiling happily and carrying the lantern. Pep Salvador's wife was a fine woman, and a happy one, too, but after the week of farm work she liked best the luxury of a long uninterrupted sleep. She seldom came into town until Sunday afternoon, and even then she returned in time for the evening milking. She was strong and sturdy and certainly had not been broken by childbearing. The striking contrast between Pep and Cosmi, or between Pep's wife and Anna Cosmi, or Pep's daughter and Anna's sister, Eulalia, was that of island tradition and modernity. Pep and his family dressed always in the old Ibicenco style, the shawl, the kerchief, the full pleated skirt to the ground. Anna and Eulalia at their best would have attracted admiring glances in the rue de la Paix. Pep never changed his old felt hat or wore a necktie. On infrequent occasions Cosmi wore the conventional black and looked as a nobleman should but seldom does. Pep sang Ibicenco songs, danced the wild Ibicenco dances with breath-taking grace and agility, was never at a loss for a word or an antic. Cosmi could not sing or dance. He blushed when he tried to talk. He envied his young brother his loquacity and neverending fun-making, and in his dreams for Arabie, transformed and outdoing itself, he foresaw that Pep Salvador's acres would be exactly as they had been for a thousand or more years and knew his own already were different. Maria, Pep's daughter, wore her old-fashioned Ibicenco clothes proudly while all her friends changed to conform to modern style, knowing that she was pleasing her father. I can't say which was lovelier, Pep's Maria or Eulalia Colomar. Maria was brown, intense, far stronger, a type that seemed pure Arab, like her father. Eulalia was lithe and frivolous with a slim figure that would have brought out genius in a Paris couturier. Ibiza's nightingales were from Africa. One could almost catch the scents of Arabia in the breeze that carried across to Santa Eulalia's shore.

Antonio, Cosmi's older brother, had neither Cosmi's vision nor Pep Salvador's perverse energy. He was somewhat cut off from the general gaiety because he was hard of hearing. His smouldering black eyes were alert but wistful. His slow smile bespoke detachment. I loved to see him working in the kitchen, proceeding so surely, with no lost motion, making meat, fowl, fish and vegetables and condiments advance, to the rear march, join forces, go to opposite ends of the drill field. I imagined him sometimes raising his arms like Toscanini and evoking the harmonized odor of stew, a great chord in D or F-sharp minor. He had style, the trait of Cosmi's whole family. And when later there was a rumor that Cosmi was to be arrested, Antonio with one of his effectual motions reached to a nearby shelf, closed his fingers around the handle of an Ibicenco dagger (forbidden of course) and tucked it into his belt and he looked at me with his smouldering Arab's eyes and smiled slowly and went on with his work with fishes and peppers, not saying one word.

No doubt in centuries past the romantic quality of
The Gift of Song
Arabie had appealed to susceptible hearts among those now silent hordes who had passed by sea and noticed the inviting cove and the mouth of the creek quite smothered with shrubs and flowers, or who had wandered there by land in search of fruits or wild birds or fragrant pine-nuts. There was that appeal in the setting of green mountains streaked with Venetian red, the grace of distant roads, the spiked marsh grass at the water's edge and the pasture lands be yond. Just lately its idyllic touch has been supplied by a rare young Valencian painter, Rigoberto Soler.

I don't mean that he painted it successfully. He had not Gauguin's gift of seeing that a tropical landscape and a picturesque race could not be represented literally upon a yard-square canvas. But Rigoberto had the gift of song, of impetuous joy and sorrow, and particularly of falling in love. He had come to Santa Eulalia from Valencia as a very young man, having quarrelled with his father who wanted him to spend his days in a bank, and he had brought with him one of his models, the enchanting, almost-frightening type of Spanish beauty to which Spanish calendars and cigarette ads do not do justice. Rigoberto had put up a small shack near the mouth of the creek, just across from the land Cosmi began to develop a few years later. There was one room and an alcove, to serve as studio, living room, dining room and all. For the siesta there were sheltering pines and thick cushions of pine needles. The cooking was done on an oven of stones at the water's edge. Pilar, the model, was painted in all kinds of Spanish costumes, in the nude, halfdraped in the bath. She was so Spanish that she preferred to wash in a basin indoors rather than plunge into the sea, not fifty feet distant. She was represented picking orange blossoms, grapes, pink oleanders, reclining on rocks, grass, imaginary doorsteps. A phonograph played Flamencos all evening. As he worked with the palette or the frying pan, Rigoberto sang Valencian songs. He knew a thousand, I am sure. In one time of stress, when the town needed music, he agreed to furnish one good song a day and did so by singing them to me until I could note them down. After that Pep Torres, Guillermo and I played the melody until the singers around us caught on. The words were soon memorized.

The love-nest existence has no counterpart in Spanish life. Rigoberto, in Valencia, had spent his off hours in cafés, singing, drinking manzanilla, of which he was enthusiastically fond, telling and exchanging I anecdotes or discussing the happier forms of philosophy, with occasional nostalgic relief. The town of Santa Eulalia, so enticingly within view, lured him away from Niu Blau (the Blue Nest, as his shack in Arabie was called) each day at mail time and frequently in the late afternoon. Pilar, much bored to be alone with nature and stacks of paintings of herself which she did not fancy, inflamed his jealousy by whatever means the countryside offered. They fought and were reconciled so passionately that Rigoberto, always a slight little man, grew thin and pale until his dark expressive eyes seemed larger. She retained or even improved her languid beauty, but even quarrelling eventually bored her and she took a boat for the mainland suddenly one day. Rigoberto devoted himself to manzanilla for some time afterward and so endeared himself to the semi-idle men that members
A Volatile Heart
of the local aristocracy began giving him commissions in order to keep him in town. Also he received notice that one of his paintings of Pilar had won second prize (one thousand dollars cash) in the national ex hibition at Madrid. He forgot his sorrow and started building a house on the slope behind the center of town, far enough removed so that he could enjoy comparative quiet, near enough to reach the cafés without exertion. When Rigoberto entered any com pany he transformed it. He was always ready to sing, he had stories to tell. By that time he knew every native within miles and relished their strange gossip. His dark eyes showed traces of boredom, even suffering at times, but always in a crowd they sparkled.

Ferrer, Guillermo, Pedro of the Royalty, all the men along the main street who had laughed a little at his expense in the days of Pilar began to find him indispensable. The few foreigners took to him immediately, because of his natural grace and geniality and also on account of his magnificent Castillano. I am sure that anyone who had not heard Spanish spoken before could understand Rigoberto.

The experience at Niu Blau did not break Rigoberto's volatile heart, but it convinced him that he should not marry a Spanish woman. He admired the American way of life, as exemplified by the rare specimens in Santa Eulalia, but any foreign girl was a prospect. His romances succeeded one another with varying degrees of comedy and tragedy through the early years of the Spanish Republic. He wanted twelve children, one for each month in the year. Each girl to whom he proposed was tempted by his qualities, his now quite wonderful house overlooking the rooftops of the town and great stretches of sea, his Canto Flamencos on the phonograph, his Valencian rice with rabbit made in his broad fireplace over the coals. Nevertheless, one after another decided she must go away to think it over and none of them came back. Finally he married a charming German woman who, however, was not of child-bearing age and he was somewhat lost to cafés, for he took his responsibilities quite gravely. It took the war to bring him back to his place in the town life again, but that must wait.

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