IN SANTA EULALIA there were several kinds of farmer. Let us consider Don Ignacio Riquer, a merry, round-faced man slightly below medium height, plump but not fat, with a ruddy complexion that got ruddier when he smiled and shook your hand.

"Bon dia, Don Ignacio. Commen' vos trubau?"

"Very well," he replied, smiling ruddily. He was proud of his few words of English. "My great-great­grandfather on my father's side was English," he would say. His name was Wallis (probably Wallace). [)on Ignacio would be found at Cosmi's bar quite often in the afternoon with Rigoberto, whom he ad­mired. Most of the other aristocrats went to' the Royalty, where not so many of the natives would see them drinking, but Don Ignacio thought it was more important that his cousins and uncles should not see him indulging and that occasional visits to Cosmi's, in his shirtsleeves, improved his standing with his neighbors. Also, that his wife was less likely to hear about it.

Senora Riquer was plumper than her husband but quite good-looking. She must have been twenty years younger than Don Ignacio. Like most Spanish women oof her class, she did absolutely nothing and didn't seem to mind it. She slept late every morning, ate heartily in the heat of the day, took a good long siesta in the afternoon, had another tremendous meal con­sisting of soup, rice, fish, eggs, meat, fruit and cheese with plenty of red wine, played the piano in a vigorous perfunctory way, sat in a rocking-chair observing the moonlight on the sea, leaf shadows on the dusty road, listened to the night birds (the periodical soft whistle of the butcher-shop owl, F-sharp, timed to the second, the reply of its mate, G-flat; the chiboli or rock plover whose clear night song was heard from the shore and the intermediate slopes although the bird was seldom seen), ate a handful of chocolates and bonbons and let the winking of the lighthouses stir her consciousness in a night island pattern, Tagomago which blazed forth once a second without turning, turned dash dot-dot, blood-orange, sharp yellow, blaze, dash-dot-dot. If Ignacio were in the room she would make a remark now and then that that required no answer, "I saw Esperanza today," "I tore my black lace dress" (she always wore black lace), some obser­vation like that with no bearing on the human strug­gle, the rising of man from the muck to the trees to { the dry land, no reflections on the march of great nations and peoples over the ground which supported the stones which held up her rocking-chair. No Ibe­rians in the mists of history, no Phoenicians spreading the through unexplored sea paths as the fish found Rome way to strange caverns, Carthage not a word, poof, ditto Arabia. Señora tore her dress, saw her cousin, dropped a melon on the dining-room floor, spied a lighthouse, heard a bird. Her husband, in his shirtsleeves, glanced at her ample bare arms and her
A Woman Content
ankles in black silk stockings, adjusted his spectacles and smiled. Later in his nightshirt he would smile as she undressed. They were happy. Oh, yes. I do not mean that they were bored. Damp night grass and plover's song. Tai-alai of familiar lighthouses. The champing of Holstein cattle in a long old-fashioned barn. Don Ignacio's red face on the pillow, smiling. Señora's stretch of contentment with her corsets off. In March, wild strawberries. They were placidly happy in March as they were in May, unless it rained two or three days at a stretch in March or in Novem­ber. Then the plump white-skinned twenty-year­younger Señora thumped the piano harder and stood by the rain-swept windows watching the stain of Santa Eulalia's river encroach upon an angry sea, and ate chocolate creams, and right after dinner they went to bed, Ignacio smiling.

I repeat that the Señora was not bored. There was not that frozen death in her face that marked the faces of most of her aunts and cousins. No priests sniffed in the offing. She never thought about God. Her gossip was not malicious and she liked a good joke. And when wheat grew and the corn fields shimmered, when ge­raniums were red and petunias pale, if the sea pounded steadily against the shore and the moon rose new and each night changed her shape and hour, Señora Riquer, thirty years of age and sound, felt the sea­sonal stirrings and the daily warmth and coolness and breathed in a rhythm of our island and had nothing whatever to worry about.

There must have been something about Don Ignacio besides his physical appearance to single him out from his brothers, the tall saturnine Don Mariano who lived on the Casino balcony at the port, or Don Antonio who had transformed a large sea cave on his estate in San Antonio into a lobster pound. I say there must have been something because Don Ignacio as a young man was sent to Madrid to study medicine.

"Did you want to study medicine?" I asked him once.

He smiled even more broadly than usual. "Me? No," he said. " I wanted to study Madrid."

He studied Madrid so minutely that, before his course was half finished, he got syphilis. That is odd, is it not? Don Ignacio, heir of hundreds of acres and employer of a hundred tenant farmers, caught the same old bug that waylaid the fisherman Mateo Rosa. There was that bond between them. Don Ignacio, then aged twenty-four, made use of what he had gleaned in the medical school to cure himself in the old-fashioned way and then, later, when 6o6 came along, he took a few shots of that, for luck, ad­ministered by his old professor.

"That's nothing," Don Ignacio said to me.

In an earlier chapter I have told how Don Ignacio several mornings each week rode in to Ibiza and sat for a couple of hours in his municipal office. Also that he had an almost miraculous well. Next to his well, he prized his Holstein cows. He loved to walk along the row of cow-sheds admiring the animals and he took pride in telling all foreigners that he could send them milk each day that was rich and pure. He lost a few sous on each litre he sold, because the price of cattle was very high and delivery very difficult. Never having had to worry about money, Don Ignacio was able to view his fields and barns with an eye for their
A Generous Landlord
beauty and productiveness. When wheat yielded full and firm kernels and the corn was tall, he beamed with pleasure. If crops were scant he shrugged his shoulders and said, "Well, another year." His tenants knew they would never be cheated or starve and if they added to his riches they increased their own profits in equal proportion.

If there is injustice in the system by which Don Ignacio (doing nothing but pleasantly stroll around) reaped half the fruits of the labor of the farmers (who with their wives and children worked every daylight hour) no one blamed Don Ignacio. He had always taken things as they had come, without disturbing doubts or complicated analyses. He was generous, un­exacting and, when bad moments came to him later, unmistakably game. If I have portrayed him in one or two of his less dignified moments, do not be de­ceived. There were instances of his charity which he never talked about at Cosmi's bar. His tenants were not hounded through life with a feeling of insecurity, for neither Don Ignacio nor his father nor his grand­father had ever let one of them down. They are lucky, no matter what happens to Ibiza or to good men there who dreamed of freedom, that Don Ignacio is still alive. He will do his best for them, good-naturedly, thinking only on the surface, enjoying what he can of life. Let it be written of him that his dependents were his friends as well, that he really loved his land and never neglected it, and that his wife, twenty years his junior, was not restless or bored.

What exactly is an estate? Is it the people who own it? The people who live on it? The acres of red earth, brown loam, waving grasses, shrubs, blossoms, the Of Farms and Farmers ragged shore line and the straight stone walls, pines, olives, garobas, almonds, orange and lemon trees, apricots, wheat, corn, alfalfa, melon and sweet potato vines, the roots in the soil and the stalks, fronds and branches in the sunlight, the water bubbling under the earth and coursing through creeks and irrigation ditches, the birds, fowls, colored fish around the ledges, the smell of earth and leaves and hay, up­rooted vegetables, plucked fruit, of livestock and manure and seaweed? Is it a succession of days, pass­ing east to west across a slowly changing landscape? One sees, standing on the hill just south of Santa Eulalia's river, wide expanses of Don Ignacio's real estate and what is known as tangible property. The tangibility of trees obscures the tangibility of low white walls and thatched rooftops. What remains is good to look upon. There is the large house in the town, the city house inside the battlement walls of Ibiza, the new house on the shore opposite Cosmi's, the farm house on the Cala Llonga slope, the houses of the tenant families. These cannot be seen all at once but one knows where they are, in this or that knoll, behind this or that mountain, on the Calle San Jaume. In Don Abel Matutes' bank are pesetas, duros, sheaves of 25-peseta notes, 50-peseta notes, 100-and 500- and 1000-peseta notes, and legal papers, contracts, promises to pay and be paid, mortgages, stacks of closely written pages in elaborate legal Cas­tillano. There is good will all over the place, and credit. Why, certainly, Don Ignacio, let me lend you 50,000 pesetas. Don't mention it. Of course.

The estate is beautiful, the people were beautiful, the earth, sea, sky, cereals, vegetables are beautiful.
The Produce
The good will is still beautiful. Nobody knows what to think of the pesetas or the promises to pay. Don Ignacio, who never had had to worry before, did it in a gentlemanly way when the moment came, with bows and smiles and uplifted chattos of manzanilla. There were those who squealed like stuck pigs, but not Don Ignacio. Not at all. He had had syphilis and a lot of wholesome fun. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

Still, whenever I think of the slopes and woods and acres under cultivation, the shapes of my favorite trees and the smell of rosemary and laurel, the gait of the peasant girls and the greetings of peasant men, I cannot forget the produce. Perhaps that was most beautiful of all. I am in the stores of Santa Eulalia, or the market place in Ibiza, Valencia, Palma, Bar­ celona, Alicante, Madrid. I shall not say Nineveh because I was never there. As a child I regretted lost cities, but what need have we of such reminders now? Madrid. Oh, yes. There was Madrid, and I carry it like a photograph in the inside-pocket of my mind and each day it wears, is soiled, gets thinner, cracks, wrinkles-still it is Madrid. And a ghostly bombard­ment continues night and day and what crumbles is the petrified meat of my heart. We are all Madrid and we all must be shot to pieces, quarter by quarter, until the shells begin to fall in the quarter of our self­respect, and then God knows what we shall do.

I am thinking of what comes from the earth, what grows and is harvested and moved away toward far and distant markets from Don Ignacio's estate. How cool and beautiful, how comforting and non-inflam­matory! There are eggplants in straw baskets, royal purple, black at the larger end, ivory and magenta near the stalk, so many shapes and reflections. Toma­toes in huge clusters, ranged singly side by side in boxes, deep ox-blood, pale vermilion streaked with green, defiantly green. Braids of garlic, onions in sacks, potatoes, sweet potatoes; and the melons, cum­bersome purveyors of Oriental perfumes. How many melons have been carted along Don Ignacio's narrow winding roads to the Ibiza bus road, over the divide through Jesus to the harbor? Neat footsteps of mules and silence of men driving, perfunctory whacks with the stick, short naps, so many overtakings and being overtaken and proceeding in single file. To walk through the market in Ibiza, brushing the leaves of carrots or of spinach, seeing peas in the pod and string beans. How many sacks of grain and corn, in carts, trucks, in the holds of Matutes' ships (he had them all), in trains! How much bending of backs and creak­ing of tackle to hoist the produce into lofts! The men­tal calculations, the scribbled notations, the coins and bills, profit and loss, gross and tare, weights and meas­ures. All this set in motion before the days of the Phoenicians and continuing and growing day by day except when interrupted by a state of war. I should like to dream of a warehouse and an outdoor market place and to wander there through all the produce of Don Ignacio's acres, looking up to pyramids of cauli­flower, across prairies of melons, pausing to bury my arms in a wheat-bin the contents of which would be bought by Hannibal, selecting from a million egg­plants the richest purple and most pleasing shape and finding it was one I had bought myself at Las Delicias.

Would the contrast be too cruel if, on awakening, I
The High, Dry Hill
should lead you across the Roman bridge, through the plaza, along the main street of the town as far as the theatre and there turn westward up an unpromising lane which rises slowly until we can see over the town rooftops, up the coast as far as the Tagomago cliffs and far out to sea? Just before we reach Rigoberto's land, the lane takes a right-angle turn to the north and we face the San Carlos mountains. On the main­land they would not be mountains, perhaps, but relatively, on the island, they loom high and volumi­nous, about five miles away. We follow the lane and the slopes around us bulge with uncovered ledges and are littered with stones. Between the stones, although we shall never see them, are plovers' eggs in pairs. That elusive night bird, so seldom seen, comes to such slopes as fell to Pere des Puig in order to lay her eggs. They build no nests but the eggs are so perfectly camouflaged to represent the Scriptural stony ground that they pass unnoticed and hatch in safety. So that melodious night bird, whose song far surpasses that of the nightingale or mocking bird or any of the others whose names lend themselves to verse so readily, sings as sweetly for Pere des Puig, outside whose walls she comes to rear her young, as for Don Ignacio, in whose lush seaside meadows she finds her food.

Pere's house fits against the hillside. The roof is flat and built to catch rainwater, for Pere has no well. Inside there are steps between the front room (com­bination kitchen, dining room and living room) and the bedrooms behind it. The walls are of plaster, whitewashed inside and out. All the houses in Santa Eulalia are whitewashed once a year, just before the important feast day which occurs the first Sunday in May. The ceiling of Pere's living room has narrow rough-hewn beams from which hang strings of red peppers, garlic, sobresada, butifara (short thick dark sausages that look like blackjacks) and wild leeks. Fish stew, with potatoes and tomatoes, fish rice fla­vored with saffron, home-made sausages, wine and peasant bread form the principal diet of Pere and his family of daughters. For dessert they eat dried black figs (called churracas) and almonds, or pomegranates in season. The cooking and light housework is done by Pere's oldest daughter (a child of ten in 1930, a girl of striking grace and beauty in 1936). Pere's wife died when the youngest of the seven girls was born.

The sheep and the goats on Pere's few acres found just enough to eat if they applied themselves con­stantly to the task. All day and on quiet nights they stumbled around, sometimes on their knees, some­times stretched erect on their hind legs to reach the tops of shrubs or the low branches of trees. They were not fat, but neither were they painfully thin. Pere, who had the appearance of a grave man, was never ï harsh with them. He spoke to them gravely, only when it was necessary. When it was necessary he lifted them in his strong and beautiful hands. He had no names for them but thought of them according to their color or their size. If Pere worked steadily from daylight until dark he managed to earn about the equivalent of two dollars and a half a week. Not that he handled that much cash. He traded his labor for pork and wine, as well as pesetas. It was good labor, not the sweating resentful kind, but an hour or a day of steady work, handling things gravely, carting sea­ weed, pausing to look around him or to say "Good
The Abode of Beauty
day," giving what he had (his time and strength) for what he needed at home. Each Sunday evening he went with his accordion to the dance hall and re­ceived a duro (about fifty cents) for playing. He had to buy salt, sugar, coffee, saffron and some of the small rock fishes with many fins and bones. He had a few almond trees, enough for his year's supply, and a few squat fig trees. Now and then he accepted as part payment for one of his animals a few ribs or a leg after the butcher had slaughtered it. Probably Pere and his family ate meat once a week. Vegetables were plentiful in the stores and very cheap, so he was able to buy sweet potatoes and white potatoes. Bay leaves and rosemary for seasoning were to be found on any nearby slope.

It was usual in Santa Eulalia for a man who had lost his wife and been left with a growing family to marry again as soon as the period of mourning was over. Three years was about enough mourning for a wife. Pere had not married a second time. His bleak farm on the crest of the hill was not attractive to marriageable girls or even to widows, so the women did not make advances to Pere and he was too busy, what with the Sunday dances, to think much about them. Then, about the time when he could have looked around for a second wife, his oldest daughter, Eulalia, suddenly was transformed into the most beautiful young woman for miles around. Had one of the worn rocks split open and produced a rare flower which never faded and which he could silently ad­mire, Pere could not have been more pleased. He was pleased also that he had lived to see the Republic and that his daughter would have a chance for decent schooling without the degrading influence of priests. He was stunned, almost, by the respect and admira­tion Eulalia had for him.

The school children were released about half past eleven each morning, just before the bus got back from Ibiza. Those who lived at a distance, like Eulalia des Puig, waited in and around the post office until the mail was distributed. Then Eulalia, marshalling her small sisters, would proceed down the main street to the lane that turned westward just be­yond the theatre. If I had nothing else to do at that moment I would contrive to meet her somewhere along the way, just to ask how her father was and send him my regards. Eulalia would stop very politely and gracefully and her hands would rise and pause gently clasped on her breast and she would smile in anticipation of my question, her eyes glad and her lips parted to reply.

"Oh, thank you. My father is well," she would say, and the stony farm would be turned to gold, and Pere, in new driving clothes with smart leather gloves, would be standing by a blooded Arab horse and all the landscape and the glittering sea would sing with noontime praise.

"Please give him my regards and say that I hope to see him Sunday."

"It is very kind of you to have inquired about him. He will come down Sunday I am sure."

I was proud of Eulalia, and of the Spanish Republic, and of so many good men and lovely girls for whom vistas were opening. I liked young girls' dresses made from faded cloth from a dead mother's hand-carved dowry chest. I respected respectable goats and sheep
Goats Seek the Shade
who foraged on stony ground so worthily. I liked grey stones, in fact. There were certain grey trees that were very bare in certain seasons and whose bare colors vibrated with those of the rocks on bare hill­sides and produced a silver mystery. I liked to think of Pere being served at lunch in a cool whitewashed room that contained so much admiration.

And still, when Pere played the accordion he ap­peared to be melancholy. Some old and sad wisdom seemed to steal over him and deepen the lines of his face. I suppose now and then he pondered as to how it would have been had Eulalia been rich and hand­some instead of poor and handsome, and undoubtedly he was tired of hearing the tunes he played, for he never had time to learn a new one, From my seat at the piano I used to watch him on the stage, just a few feet away, and when the Royalty's Pedro or Anna Cosmi's brother Marc or some other enthusiastic dancer brought drinks for the orchestra I would hand Pere's glass to him and receive his amazing smile. Eulalia never attended the dances because someone had to be at home with the younger children, but on Monday at noon she took the Sunday duro from her dress pocket and spent some of it with dignity for salt or potatoes, which she carried with her up the hill.

No water bubbled from the ground on Pere des Puig's hill. The Moors had terraced what land they could find there and had walled it with the plentiful stones. The sun beat down from early in the morning until late in the afternoon and the goats and sheep sought the deep shade of the garobas trees or the thin ghostly shade of an apricot tree. Of table scraps for the pig there were few, so he ate corn and raw sweet potatoes. I think Pere's mule enjoyed the view. I have seen him spread his nostrils, raise his long ears at the afternoon stirring of the breeze and turn gravely to­ward the San Carlos mountains, the Tagomago cliffs and follow with his attentive mule's eyes the shore line. And dry lizard lightning snapped and crackled in the rocks.

Can Josepi was on the Arabie road not more than three hundred yards from where it branched off from the San Carlos stage road. The house stood with its back to the road, with flat and fertile acres at its feet, facing the fishermen's cove, with Don Carlos Roman's new house and the cliff called Vei Isglesi in the left foreground. Over the doorway and along the front of the house beams had been extended to support mag­nificent grape vines with twisted stalks as thick as your wrist. The leaves and clusters shaded the house front and a long cool corridor through which Jose's cart could be driven past the house to the adjacent stable. Inside there was the long living room, with {, three bedrooms behind, and a short stairway led up­ward to a balcony, also shaded with vines, behind { which was another room quite detached from the rest of the house. Adjacent to the kitchen alcove but with no connecting door were the pig sty and the stalls for the mule and the cows. By God knows how much labor and years of saving Jose and Catalina had -, achieved the price of a queenly black cow which they loved and fed with the best they had and cleaned carefully her glossy coat, not from tenderness regard­ing animals (of which they had less than might be expected), but in memory of painful gettings out of
José of Can Josepi
bed and staggering through dawns and of shelling corn at night. Then later the cow had had a calf, a mouse-colored daughter which soon had turned black, like her mother, and in due time gave milk as well.

The owner of Can Josepi was a sergeant in the Guardia Civil, born in Ibiza and stationed in For­mentera, a narrow sandy island that lay southeast of Ibiza and could be seen from the balcony of Can Josepi. He was a mean man, detested by the inhabi­tants of the small island he ruled with arbitrary power, and particularly by José and Catalina from whom he squeezed the last ounce of work in order to cheat them more at the time of the yearly reckoning. Because the house was larger than most farm houses, the sergeant insisted on crowding José, Catalina and the four children into two back bedrooms (in one of which a kitchen was rigged up) and renting the main room, downstairs bedroom and upstairs balcony and bedroom to visiting foreigners. Thus José and Cata­lina, although inconvenienced beyond the endurance of any lower animals, began to learn something of the outside world.

The land around Can Josepi was not as extensive as Pep Salvador's, nor quite as fertile, but it was good rich earth and around it ran the raised irrigation flume left by the Moors. It never lacked water. Wheat, corn and sweet potatoes were the principal crops, but due to Catalina's initiative and Jose's strong back they had also planted tomatoes, peppers, white potatoes, carrots, cabbage and, at the request of a Frenchwoman, a bed of leeks. José and Catalina were quite different in character, but they shared an immense capacity for work. Not a moment were they idle. Before dawn they got out of bed, half stunned with fatigue. Catalina made coffee and gave the chil­dren bread and oil while José fed the animals. From that time on they both were busy, milking, hoeing, planting, reaping.

When I mention Jose's broad back I do not mean that Catalina's was frail. I have seen her obscured by a load any man could be proud to have shouldered. Her childbearing had not been the complicated and expensive affair which is associated with the process in America and elsewhere. A neighbor midwife (five duros) and two weeks out of the fields were enough for her. The boys, her children were all boys, grew up in the mud around the animal sheds, began doing odd errands and trivial jobs as soon as they could walk, and in the days of the Republic went sullenly to school. In spite of a lifetime of work that would have raised a countrywide scandal had it been imposed on an American convict, four haphazard confinements without benefit of medico, and the absence of a fairly important tooth, Catalina was not an unsightly woman. Her warm brown eyes had the light of under­standing, her greeting was shrill and cordial, she waved at one in a comradely way from a distant corn field or potato patch, surprised one when on Sunday sometimes one saw her in holiday clothes. One night I saw her dance the Ibicenco dance in which the woman circles demurely while her partner leaps like an amorous bird, and the graceful simplicity of her movements, the sureness with which she dodged her partner's flying knees and feet, the way in which she modified her style for each succeeding man, made me thoughtful, and thereafter I looked at her more care­
On Saturday Night
fully. Good work, human race, I said to myself. What a lot of vigor and endurance! Why be reluctant and ashamed? It is possible to love one another.

Would you have thought that a man like José, who had never signed his name, who could count to forty only with difficulty, who toiled prodigiously sixteen hours or more each day, would have taken the trouble on Saturday night to amuse himself and even on weekday evenings sometimes, when the wind was right and the sound of my accordion and Pep Torres: trumpet reached the back bedroom windows of Can Josepi? It is true. José had still the instinct of play. In a situation where he had had to work a little less, he would have enjoyed himself more.

One paid José for the milk once a month, but he did not appear to make collection on the first, unless the first of the month fell on Saturday. José had splendid manners out of doors. He gave other mule drivers a fair share of the road, greeted passers-by spontane­ously, was sorry, in fact momentarily deeply affected, if someone was bereaved and shook one's hand joy­ously if all was well. On the first Saturday after the first day of the month there would be a timid knock on the door, if it were closed. Otherwise suddenly one would be aware that José was standing nearby. He would be wearing a cap which should have been worn by a Paris voyou or a Hollywood gangster, but his sturdy carriage and open smile would more than counteract the desperate effect of the cap. His expression would be like that of a boy who had just decided to skip school and go fishing. He would ask "Comm' vos trubau?" or "Tot va be?" (Is everything going well?), inquire for absent members of the 1 family, then stand there heroically, hands at his sides and submit to a painful moment of silence.

"How about a glass of wine, Jose?" one would say, and his tenseness would relax. A glass of wine was an­other social objective to and through which he could steer. "Un poc de vi pajes" (a little wine of the country), he would say happily.

Still he would remain standing, not like a statue but like a model for a statue who is momentarily awaiting the word to step down from the platform.

"Won't you sit down?" one would ask.

He would obey. There is no other word for his method of accepting a chair. Then he would sit erectly, cap in hand, glass of wine in the other hand, poised.

"Have you heard from Señor Page?"

"Oh, yes," José would reply. "He and the Señora sent us two dollars last Christmas. That was very kind. He was a good man, Señor Page. Worked very hard with his head. Sometimes I used to hear his typewriter going half the night."

Richmond and Phyllis Page had lived two years at Can Josepi and had become a part of Santa Eulalia and of the struggling family whose toil above, below ) and around them had filled them with awe and ad­miration. José and Catalina spoke of them affection­ately and wistfully. And the two-dollar Christmas gift, months, even years later, would make José pause, shake his head thoughtfully and grope for a time in metaphysical areas.

I have no idea how long José would have sat and tried to make light conversation in case I had not
The Weight of Three Duros
mentioned the matter of the milk bill. Often I was tempted to try the experiment. Always Jose's uneasi­ness and tension, his scarcity of words, the sweat on his bronzed forehead, made me ashamed of myself. I was careful, in fact, never to pay the milk bill directly to Catalina because José, once a month on a Saturday night, liked to feel the weight of duros in his pocket. Otherwise he never handled money. Whatever small cash transactions were necessary were carried out by his wife, who spoke a little Castillano and understood foreigners more easily. José never spent too much of the milk money, but he felt different, fingering it in his pocket on a Saturday night at the café. He knew he could toss a duro on the bar when it came time to pay, instead of searching his pockets for small change and fearing between drinks that he might not have enough. He would sit quietly at a table watching a card game, or on the fringe of some conversation touching on politics or life. When the others asked for drinks he would have another, too, and he would recognize his friends proudly when they passed by on the way to the bar or the door. Days and nights of work had not extinguished him. The mild excitement kept him awake, his eyes wide open and smiling. He nodded when someone made a clever play at cards or when Cosmi, defender of the faith, said something in favor of humanity. Broad back, noble head without words. Man who lifted and strained. Sitter among men, in clouds of candle and tobacco smoke. You could shoulder a two-hundred-pound sack of potatoes without batting an eyelash, and still the weight of fifteen pesetas in your pocket made you free. I sup­pose José would spend about sixty centimes (less than a dime) and go down the Arabie road to his home with fourteen pesetas forty.

Such a man would have liked to have land of his own. He would have been glad not to worry, for the owner of Can Josepi had threatened now and then to expel the family and could do so at a moment's notice, Perhaps, in that case, José could have found another farm to work on shares, more likely he would have become a hired man.

Catalina, whose outlook was broader and whose mind was more flexible than her husband's, was the more cheerful of the two. They enjoyed their food and ate plenty. They shivered when the sun was not shin­ing, but the sun shone nearly every day. They suffered from no superstitions. The trouble was that they had to work too hard all their lives, and it was getting them nowhere. Their sons will have a harder time. It is best not to think of what they are in for. It is best not to think at all.

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