THERE was seldom a group of five or six men on the shady side of the street in the center of town that did not include Guillermo the blacksmith. His blue shirt, imperceptibly striped, his shock of curly hair and his indolent and at the same time attentive attitude were easy to identify at almost any distance. His forge was in a little shed next to Sindik's carpenter shop and almost opposite Guarapiñada's "Tot Barat." His vise stood on the covered sidewalk which was littered with bars, sheets and scraps of iron. Several times a day, whenever a customer appeared, Bernardo, the hard­working apprentice, would wipe the sweat from his eyes with his bare arm and go looking for Guillermo, Usually he found him at Cosmi's or Gork's, some­times at Can Xumeu in the next building, now and then at Andres' small bar near the Royalty or An­tonia's fishermen's bar on the edge of the square.

"I'll be back in five minutes," Guillermo would assure his companions. And usually he rejoined them within an hour.

It would have seemed to a casual observer that Guillermo did almost no work at all, he was so often on the street and in and out of the various bars. His sour-faced father-in-law who sat all day in front of Las Delicias snorted and ground his teeth disgustedly each time Guillermo appeared. Bernardo, the assist­ant, did all the steady tedious work. Nevertheless, without Guillermo very little iron work would have been done in Santa Eulalia. He had a wonderful eye and an understanding of iron. He could design a gate that would fit its concrete posts. His door and window fastenings were not unsightly and they functioned well. He could estimate quantities and stresses and strains. There was almost nothing he could not repair, if the customer was a friend of his. Guillermo did his blacksmithing in the way Rubens accomplished his murals. The spade work was Bern ardo's-Guillermo was called in for the finishing touch.

The contrast between Guillermo's shop and that of Sindik, the carpenter, next door was amazing. Neither Sindik nor his sons nor his assistants paused a mo­ment in their work. They were bent over lathes or benches, hammering, planing, sawing or sandpaper­ing every minute of the working day. Conversation was discouraged, drinking forbidden during working hours. And still, because Sindik's honest head worked slowly and contained no ingenuity, the results of his frightening energy and application to duty were meagre. Guillermo, who loafed nine-tenths of the time, accomplished as much or more. As a matter of fact, the work Guillermo agreed to do was usually delivered within a day or two of the time he had said it would be finished, while with Sindik it was a matter of weeks.

Unshaven and collarless, his arms and his clothes soiled with soot and cinders, Guillermo was not pre­possessing. On Sunday, with a clean shirt and a clean
Guillermo the Blacksmith
shave he was a strikingly handsome man. His blue eyes, made more expressive by long lashes and finely turned eyebrows, twinkled sardonically but never maliciously. There was nothing happened on our end of the island that he did not know about. Ideas, for Guillermo, did not exist. He had never given one moment's thought to the brotherhood of man or to economic interpretations of history. But he knew all about the men and women around Santa Eulalia and he enjoyed hugely their minor and major predica­ments.

Some very bad writers have spread much misinfor­mation about absinthe, and the government of France,. which permits nearly everything within reason, forbade the sale of absinthe years ago because of its supposed effect on the birth rate. I simply wish to submit, in the interest of science, the following facts: Guillermo, on a dull day, drank twenty glasses of absinthe and on Sundays and holidays forty or more. He was forty-five years old, unusually sound and strong, had seven sons conspicuously healthy and bright (the youngest born in 1931), ran his shop, supported his large family and never was disorderly. Sometimes, I must admit, he had difficulty in follow­ing the music in the late hours of the weekly dances. If Guillermo arose early on Sunday, as he almost al­ways did, everything went well with the orchestra that night. He would drink enough in the morning to put him soundly to sleep after lunch. Then he would wake up at five o'clock, refreshed and completely sober, and would not have time before the dance be­gun to drink enough to impair his coordination. On rainy Sundays now and then he would sleep late in the morning. That was bad. He would not feel the need of his siesta and by nine o'clock at night whole notes, half notes, quarters and eighths streamed and capered like seaweed under troubled water. He was loyal and conscientious, however. I have seen him continue long after he was unable to tune his guitar. I would tune it for him, place it in his hands, put the right sheet of music on his music stand and tell him when to start.

Few men were as fond of music as Guillermo. Of course there were no music stores in Ibiza and it was difficult to order music from Barcelona. We got sev­eral Spanish Paso-dobles that way, but most of the dance music I arranged for our strange group of in­struments, and the guitar was very important to us because so many strings and keys were missing in the bass section of the piano. Whenever I had finished an arrangement, I would stroll past Guillermo's shop with the music in my hand. He would drop whatever he was doing and come with me to the theatre to try out the new piece. At first it was difficult for him. He had had almost no musical instruction and had to learn his part by painful repetitions. Within a few months he could read quite complicated scores at sight. Pep Torres, who played the violin and trumpet, had all the industry of Sindik the carpenter. He had raised himself to his fair degree of efficiency by hard work and dogged persistence. Guillermo learned as much or more without effort, and always his per­formance had a touch of something not to be written on paper, a lilt, a subtle rubato, a twang, an inner voice. His expressive blue eyes twinkled. If I threw in an extra note or two on the piano, he gleefully
Music on Rainy Days
shouted Ole! Moments of music were perfect moments with him. His thoughts, unhampered by ideas, had formed moving patterns, like fringes on a pantry shelf. Guitar strings, tones of trumpets, click of cas­tanets. The dancers caught the beat, became more male or more female. Olé! Guillermo, swaying and holding his guitar, was like Casey Jones at the throt­tle. We had some breath-taking engine rides, I sitting on a stool and Guillermo on a chair. Always when we were practising in the empty theatre Gork and his customers would come in, one by one. They would take seats quietly, in chairs near the piano or in the empty boxes which formed a horseshoe around the bare concrete floor. If the day was rainy, the masons, Vicente Cruz and Juan Costa, and their quadrilles of helpers would sit around us. And Pep Torres would join us, Pep, splashed with mortar, freed by the rain from his work, pulling up a chair, grabbing up his trumpet and hopping the melody, Olé!, in the midst of a chorus. Once in a while a mason's helper in his overalls would bashfully sing a tune and ask if we could play it, and I would note it down, scribble a guitar part and a violin part hastily, and the man would be overcome with appreciation and pleasure. Gork his sacristan's face would break into a bashful smile. He would leave us, baggy knees of corduroy trousers, and shuffle back with a bottle of cognac or gin. Yes. I liked best the rainy days like that. It was pleasant when the sun shone, too, and the theatre was cool and the woman whose house was next door and who used the same well would open up the well doors on both sides, and smiling women, too timid to enter, would listen from there.

On the broad paseo, Guillermo had a home, but he was almost never in it except to eat and sleep. That was true of nearly all the men who lived in the town. The Ibicenco women found that state of affairs quite natural. They did not scold or rant, least of all Gui­llermo's wife. Her job was to cook, keep house and take care of seven growing boys. She did it scrupu­lously well. Her father, the sour-faced retired sea cap­tain who sat all day in front of Ferrer's in order to watch Guillermo, would have liked to make trouble but Paja was severe with him. Whose business was it if Guillermo took a drink now and then, as long as the pesetas kept coming in? The father-in-law could only scowl and mutter, but Guillermo was sensitive to approval or disapproval and often chose the back entrances and the back street in his progress from bar to bar.

One of Guillermo's important functions was to act as town scribe. For this he made no charge, no matter how many hours he put in. Many of the brightest men in town, as I have said, could not read and write, and their business correspondence and letters to the many members of their families Guillermo wrote for them in his meticulous handwriting, almost like engraving, of which he was justly proud. Thus it was that Ferrer and others were able to gather around with the rest at noon when the bus came in and accept from the postmaster's green-eyed daughter their share of letters and postal cards. It was a common sight to see Guillermo leave his shop with a letter in his hand and a neighbor walking beside him interpo­lating voluble explanations as Guillermo read. The blacksmith's curly head would be bent wisely. His
The Town Scribe
sloping shoulders stooped a little as he walked. There was always a certain jauntiness in Guillermo's walk. He was graceful with the cape. He swung a beautiful muleta. Guillermo, in gold and silver spangles, a mat­ador's queue at the back of his neck, silent bull-fight music to guide him along the main-street arena, on his way to take up his pen and write Gutierrez and Company in Barcelona about a shipment of canned sardines and inkfish. The neighbor would follow ad­miringly each flourish of the pen and Guillermo would read his careful Castillano phrases, sign the man's name, seal the letter, search the box-office drawer for stamps (he always did his writing in the theatre bar) and then they both would shout for Gork and drink together. Often farmers coming in from the country would tell their needs to Gork and he, with baggy pants, would amble up the street to the blacksmith's shop. Guillermo would always respond. He never seemed to be too busy with his own affairs. In the end, the man from the hills would offer to pay, and GuiIlermo would make a marvellous gesture, all the fingers of his right hand spread, his arm flung upward, toss­ing payments to the skies, destroying the thought of payments, scattering aloft torn payments and all exploitations of art for coins, and, smiling, he would glance at the bar and the farmer would shout loudly for Gork even if Gork were only two feet away.

The Ibicencos never forget small favors done them and invariably find an opportunity to reciprocate.

One Sunday morning I was driving along the San Juan road. I noticed a woman standing by the road­side with a child in her arms, and after I had passed her, something in the recollection of her attitude caused me to stop and turn the car around. I found that her baby had fallen into the fire and was burned badly about the face. The mother had been waiting by the roadside, hoping for a vehicle headed toward Ibiza. I drove her in, questioning her and trying to decide how badly the baby was injured, and took her to the best doctor I knew. She tried, of course, to pay me and assured me that she had relatives in town who would see her safely home. More than a year later I was sitting in Cosmi's back room and Anna came in to say there was someone outside who wished to see me. I found in the outside room the mother, dressed in her best kerchief and shawl, a bashful man with huge red hands and wrists, and a baby. The man held the child and pointed to the face which had been burned, his eyes beaming with joy. Not a mark re­mained. Very diffidently the woman took a glossy black live rooster from beneath her shawl and held it toward me. Beside her on the table was a basket of eggs and another filled with dried black figs and almonds. Anna Cosmi, who is sensitive to social situ­ ations, nudged me lightly and indicated with the slightest imaginable movement of her alert black eyes that I must accept their gifts. The family had made the trip by donkey cart from Santa Gertrudis to find me, making inquiries on the way. A forestero with a beard? Ah! You mean Xumeu. In Santa Eulalia I had been given an Ibicenco name, Xumeu. They had been very busy on the farm or they would have come much sooner, they assured me.

The feeling of a live rooster's body is strange when the heart is beating between the palms of one's hands. Many times I think of the thousands of heartbeating
Shadow Mousson
kindnesses that have been done me and for which I have made no adequate return. To all of you, wher­ever you are, who have given me help and sympathy I should like to send a young Spanish mother, very bashful in bright colored clothes, and a red-necked stalwart farmer with a child in his arms. I should like to post outside your doorway a donkey and two­wheeled cart and lay on your table a basket of eggs, each one of which is stainless, and figs and almonds. I should like to leave you standing, thinking with a live black rooster in your hands.

Among the small shopkeepers, Mousson the butcher, whose place of business was between Cosmi's hotel and Andres' café on the side of the street that was sunny in the morning, was a lonely figure. He was a short man with a long face and a body slightly out of proportion to his legs. His house was small, rather dingy, and whenever the weather permitted a blind woman (probably an aunt) sat in a low chair, listen­ing. On the other side of the doorway was a small tree which had been stripped of its leaves and branches and had died, and on this tree hung the carcasses of the sheep and goats Mousson had slaughtered and was offering for sale. He sold enough meat to main­tain his family, but not so much as Francisco on the hack street or Jaume on the paseo. The strange part of it was that he never seemed to establish anything but a distant relationship with his customers. All the ether men on the street had friends and enemies. Mousson had neither. He dressed in faded clothes that fitted him into the general coloring and seemed to pass unnoticed in the crowd that gathered around the bus or in the post office at noon. His oldest daugh­ter, Marguerita, had married Pedro of the Royalty, one of the most genial and voluble young men in town, and still it seemed as if Pedro took no notice of his father-in-law, and Mousson seldom spoke with Pedro. The blind woman sat in the sunshine, heard the bleat of the animals before and when they died, heard the customers come and go. The two younger children, Catalina and still another Marguerita, were both pretty but looked undernourished. No doubt the continuous butchering impaired their appetites. I never heard anyone speak ill of Mousson. No mem­ber of the family had disgraced his by committing crime. He had no political affiliations. He was neither rich nor poor, neither clever nor stupid. He was a shadow dimly clad in shirt and trousers, and whatever plane he had attained was uninhabited except for him.

I must record another scientific fact for what it is worth. I had organized a daily class in English for the young girls and boys. They were so eager and their parents so eager to have them learn. Each week I had a friendly oral and written examination and invari­ably undernourished shadow Catalina, thin ten-year­old daughter of shadow Mousson, knew more of the English words than any of the flesh-and-blood chil­dren, all of whom were smart and anxious to win. So whenever I passed the doorway the blind woman si­lently smiled.

The only man who actually joked with the blind woman, making her the butt of embarrassing remarks as if she were a young girl, was Pedro of the Royalty. He was the town's geniality and tact, the apostle of
Pedro's Kingdom
glad words, late hours and the joy of progress. I want you to understand a little of his spiritual kingdom, built first with brick and inlaid with gold. It is best to begin with Santa Eulalia's sidewalks, because Pedro's footsteps were ringing on them in solo per­formance most often, so that where there was con­crete they sounded out lustily, then were lost in patches of soft dirt, resumed and lost again, ducked into doors, returned. He stepped briskly on errands when the sun had driven the others to cover. In the section of the town near the Cuartel his whistling of a tune, homeward bound at two, three or four in the morning, his knock, knock, knock on the door in the moonlight, his doorlatch (warm and soft from sleep Marguerita opening, sometimes not remembering) was taps as Ramon the bus driver's motorcycle bom­bardment was reveille. When it rained, Pedro was out while others were in and he cleaned his black patent­leather waiter's shoes fifty times a day.

"Pedro!" an habitué of the Royalty, or Juanito the proprietor, or Juanito's anxious mother, would call.

"Vengo" (most joyfully) would sound from the next room, or a store or café a hundred yards distant. Pedro would come, swiftly, eagerly, but not in a sweat. Most often his voice would reply from a vine­covered plaster shack in the Royalty's superb back­yard, where he secluded himself at odd moments in order to post his numerous accounts. None of the regulars paid cash for their drinks. Now and then they got conscience-stricken and bothered Pedro for a bill and he laboriously prepared it, forcing himself to do well a task that was not the most natural for him. He added his columns twice, or more if they did not check, itemized everything carefully, used new pens and clear ink and otherwise kept himself up to the standards of professional pride. He had been the best mason's helper on the Balearic Islands. His am­bition was to be the best waiter in the world.

"Who are you?" is asked of one of Gorki's derelict characters.

"A man, praise God," is the reply.

This attitude, this generous extension of member­ship in the human family, was Pedro's natural way of thinking, or rather, of acting. His young daughter, Señora Riquer and the blind one sitting by the sacri­ficial tree, all were women. A small boy crying be­cause an older brother had run away from him was an injured man, brooding or weeping over untold wrongs and injustices.

In an astonishingly short time the old Arab house on the corner had been taken down, the stones that had formed its three-foot walls had been re-mixed with cement and a hideous modern structure had been put up, two stories high, with walls only six inches thick. The backyard had remained intact and did much to redeem the place. Pedro, on the evening before the opening festival, had put aside his work­man's clothes, the overalls splashed with earth and mortar, the stained alpargatas. He had bathed him­self carefully and devoted a long time to his hands, not from vanity, but because a waiter of the sort he aspired to be could not have bruised and calloused fingers. What the venture of the Royalty meant to Juanito, the young proprietor, or his mother Isabel, what it meant to Don Carlos Roman and Don Rafael Sainz, what it meant to Cosmi as competition, are
Open House at the Royalty
different stories. To Pedro, it meant being born again. I le had had one strong call in his earlier youth, the sea, and this had slipped away from him because of his impulsiveness with Marguerita. Now a profession he admired and whose possibilities he understood was opening for him. For weeks before the hotel was ready he consulted those of us who had lived in large cities as to how to serve. Innumerable details he had studied and considered and memorized. He knew his townsmen would not demand or expect too much, but he dreamed of a high standard, of strangers com­ing to the remote island and the small island town and receiving their manzanilla in exactly the right kind of glass, neither scant nor overflowing, free from bits of cork, at a proper temperature, placed where it should be placed. His reward was to be their appreci­ation of his efforts, not their tips. All Spaniards are comparatively indifferent to tips, and Pedro espe­cially so.

The opening ceremony in connection with Santa F Eulalia cafés or hotels was an impressive one. The proprietor proclaimed open house, the whole country­side knocked off work and the day was spent like an ordinary holiday, except more spontaneously. Cosmi, when he had opened his place, had sent printed invi­tations by the hundreds, to aristocrats, foreigners and neighbors alike. Juanito of the Royalty wanted as much as possible to keep his place for the rich and the visiting foreigners, without offending the rest of the town. That would have been no mean problem for Olivier of the Ritz in Paris. That it was solved, even partially, must be accredited to Pedro, whom we left trying to scrub the plaster from beneath his broad finger nails. The morning of Juanito's opening Pedro appeared in a spotless white linen coat, white shirt with black bow tie, black trousers and black patent-leather shoes. His black hair was well combed but not slick with grease. He did not, like most of his well-born customers, smell of stale bay -rum. He laid a napkin across his sleeve, and he was in no way offended or even dampened in spirits when the whole town roared with laughter. He knew that he did not look as they had seen him since he was a boy and that most of them cared not a hoot whether he served them from the off or the near side. He was grateful to a republican world for giving him his big chance. Everyone expected that a day or two later the white coat and the black tie would be discarded, but noth­ing of the sort took place. Pedro's stainless coat be­came as much a fixture of the main street of Santa Eulalia as the eucalyptus tree in front of the Casa Rosita. Cosmi, being a proprietor, did not feel the need for keeping up such an unvaried sartorial stand­ard. He was always neat, always distinguished, but he wore no collar or tie. Pedro was the town's head waiter and sooner would one see the sergeant of the Guardia Civil parade the town in pyjamas than Pedro out of character.

The Royalty got away to a good start. The blue decorations, straw chairs and especially the prices (the scale of which Juanito set higher than was cus­tomary in town) made the ordinary drinkers feel it was not their place, and many of the men who had avoided cafés since the (for them) catastrophic days of April, 1931, crept out of their holes and foregath­ered at noon for their apéritif. In the way republicans felt safe at Cosmi's, the old guard began to breathe freely at the Royalty. Juanito was troubled by it, his mother Isabel even more so, because they both were afraid of politics. Nevertheless, the clients created their own atmosphere. A room containing Don Carlos and his boys, ex-Captain Nicolau, the Pilot, whose sister taught the girls' school as it had been taught in the days of the monarchy, the Catholic building con­tractors, the new young doctor Gonzalez, whose 'brother was a priest, Don Rafael Sainz the enor­mously fat Madrid banker, a former American bank clerk and his mother-in-law who looked like a Helen Hokinson and was the leader of Duluth's four hun­dred, a Baltimore woman who carried the blue book (open at the page containing her father's name) when she went swimming, Father Torres, the old doctor, who conducted the public clinic without having a basin of water on the premises, etc., etc. such a room was not likely to exude a republican aroma or to buzz with a hint of progress. Juanito, having been advised by snobs, had formed an ideal that was in no way Ibicenco, while Cosmi had hoped to crystallize and improve the best Ibicenco tradition. Meanwhile they were good friends.

At noontime, when the bus returned and the mail was distributed, the crowd I have just described would be at the Royalty, indoors because the side­walk would then be white hot. Next door, at Andres', old Vicent the mason would be having his absinthe and, goaded by Ramon or Mariano of Casa Rosita, would be upholding some reasonable proposition against their insincere arguments. The old man had few teeth and his step was not brisk. His clothes were fantastically patched. Nevertheless, he could do a terrific day's work, and he frequently did so.

You know who would be at Cosmi's, laughing and chatting around the mahogany bar: Ferrer, Gui­llermo, Pep Salvador if he was in town, Pep Torres, Vicente Cruz the mason (now fiancé of Cosmi's Cata­lina), Antonio the young barber, Bernardo the black­smith's helper, Juan the captain of the fishermen, Mateo Rosa (dreading to go home to his fretful little wife), Pep des Horts from Arabie, Rigoberto Soler, Toniet Pardal all smiles, Marc Colomar and a group of boys about his age who were just beginning to work, Miguel Tur, Julian (the bus owner who chose his café by prices and disagreed with practically everything that was said to him anywhere), Edmundo and other gentlemen most useful in a tug of war.

At Can Xumeu the faces would be crafty, from the high dry hills. Maseru, the Barberet, Sindik would be there. The fishermen who were not at Cosmi's would be in Antonia's. A morning's work done, a meal in prospect and then through the hottest hours a blissful sleep. They all went to their shops or stores or build­ing jobs in the afternoon, but most of the work was done in the morning, and the rest of the day meant gradual relaxation and an evening in good company. At noon, the street was like a gamelong with cafés for gongs, so that by touching it here and there differ­ent tones of fellowship would sound. Lunching lightly in Santa Eulalia had never come in vogue. One ate heartily and one knew that in restaurants and houses all around one's friends were laying in a good store of nourishment, too, that the strong red wine was being passed from hand to hand and gurgled merrily. There
The Santa Eulalia Breeze
was no thought of saving one's energy for some unnatural use in the afternoon. One ate and drank, and be damned to energy, and then, a long long sleep, going down from the springboard of chicken rice and quarts of Val de Peñas into caverns blue and topaz, protected by a net from flies, and sinking, remembering dimly that at four would begin to be felt the Santa Eulalia breeze, the sea wind from the skyline of Cala Llonga.

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