AND now, in the damp blackness of the evening in the time of short days and mud, of rain against cracked window-panes that cracked last year or year before and never have been replaced, of floors mud­stained with red mud like Indian red from San Carlos way, with buff mud from the slopes to the south to­ward Cala Llonga and the darker street mud of the front street and the back street and the narrow alleys between. Of rain, air-cooled in the spaces where the darkness perhaps was less dense, slanting through paralleled air, sliding downward over glass and shut­ters, soaking into sodden straw and thatch of roofs, seeping through the walls of living masons and into the yard-thick walls of long-dead Moors, staining cracks between boards, wet Roman bridge, encroach­ing under doors, in gullies and drains and all the thousands of footstep pools, one two one two. Dampness; by mud out of rain, in the buildings of cheerful folk who think in building not of rain and December and March but of that other condition not now prevailing and which can be imperfectly remembered. These are the days of the drippings of pines, when the tall dateless palm in the Royalty's back yard has wet diamond crisscross of bark and aloft perpetual swaying.

In this early winter evening, so long time wet and
The Family Pedarcx
blanketed with the siftings of darkness, where feet are wet, sandals stained and between the toes mud and cool water over arches, let us who brought galoshes (making peasant women smile with fingers over mouth) start a pilgrimage on the back street, in door­ways facing the backyards of those we know on the main bus road, and I find that I can pass no doorway.

Directly behind the blank wet brick back of the theatre is a small plaster house set thirty paces from the road and surrounded by the mud and for two months abandoned plant stalks of a vegetable garden. There, inside, squatting in a circle around a dustpan containing four pink coals, in low native chairs, are the members of the family Pedarcx. That is, if there were among them one who could write (except a little Modigliani-faced girl with a wide mouth) he or she would have spelled it in some such way. The father, an old seamed invalid in his low chair and bed half dressed for years, once caught fish, the gleaming ab­surd and mysterious basketloads whose gills worked in rows for not so much air and who knew the shell bottoms and the hidden sands, where forests and meadows swayed on rocks and ledges and a sea-water sky. He had drawn in his nets, mended them in salt sunshine spread upon his toes and his hands cut and stinging from spines. A short man, he had held up his end of the basket, and when he was sick he was through, but he lived á long time and was surprised when one spoke to him, and nodded and acknowl­edged pleasantly through a week's stubble beard. And once in a while he was shaved by the Barberet, pleased with the feel of the sous in his hand in his pocket, and his face was so small and so sore when he squinted in the glass, and everybody laughed on the way home.

Pedarcx played out too soon and (please, gentle­men, this is no poverty tale) his sturdy wife with arms and shoulders lovely after aeons of work was obliged to do what Ibicenco women dislike most, that is to go out daily or whenever she could to work in the houses of others. Señora Pedarcx disliked it less than any of her neighbors, for she was really Catalan and only a few generations in Santa Eulalia and still a little back from the back street and not strangers but nearly that way. Her words were always as if she were glad to use them, as if she had more things and friends and were spreading heirloom trinkets out on a clean wood table to be admired by her and by you. She enjoyed your "Good evening" as others love let­ters in the mail and hold them with both hands to their breast a while before opening them. This Señora was short but very trim and strong, and her forehead was as good as any that has been passed out small to girl babies to grow larger and contain inside what there is of life that cannot be seen outside. At the time of which I write, five years after her husband had been taken sick, she was forty-five and could walk a wonderful straight line, her skirts swinging Pavlova, with one hundred and fifty pounds of po­tatoes on her head, and thinking of pleasant things as she walked along. One daughter, taller by half a head, with a dangerous intensity and a clear olive skin and a list of attributes that poor girls in Spain or elsewhere have an instinct and necessity to guard, had left the island for Barcelona and her mother had
The Vision in the Mirror
been told by a neighbor who had travelled that way a few months before that this daughter was to be married to a working man. Well, I said to myself, I don't know how they do it, but the working men get their share of fine-looking women, and, by God, I am glad, and if he doesn't take care -of Maria, she'll take care of him, and if at forty-five she's the woman her mother is, she will have the laugh on most women in the large cosmopolitan telephone directories. Maria came back to Santa Eulalia once for a summer vaca­tion and a friend of mine painted her as a widow, standing before a mirror in a black evening gown, with her arms raised and her hands at the back of her dark-brown hair, thinking that still there was disaster to come and a little angry that it was not taking shape so she could see and understand just what it would be.

What if Maria, in her bare-shouldered loveliness and apprehension should have had a vision, gazing into that mirror, and had told me what she saw of Spain? Then I could have said, in every doorway on all the streets, "Pack up and let's go.... But where?"

Let be! We are all too stupid, and not at all fore­sighted. And let no year but nineteen thirty-six be proud of its death rate of working men (with or with­out handsome brides) ! Let us all, safe in homes and republics and hotels, smash every mirror in the place!

The Pedarcx boy was strong like his mother and in fishing boats and lugging baskets by the shore grew tall like his sister Maria and he was a fisherman (knowing much of what the Captain knew about those realms of up-and-down eyes, streaks, shapes, colors, mud spots, reed zigzags, caverns silences) years before he was old enough to be deprived of his vote. He was a good-natured boy who swung his shoulders a bit from side to side as he walked, and he smiled and even blushed when you spoke to him, and if Juan the Captain who had taken him into a man's boat when he was only a kid, if Juan had softly asked him to spit in the eye of a Guardia Civil the Pedarcx boy would have done it. Otherwise he was as gentle" as his little sister Catalina. Just now, in the evening mud and rain, they all are sitting around a pan of coals, waiting for their dinner. The old man, his hands mildly fumbling invisible nets finding holes and tan­gles, Señora with her eye on the stew pan and smiling, sweating a little, smelling stew of spined rock fishes and potatoes she had lugged and peeled, a large space of candle-lit air where the daughter widow Maria sat in Barcelona, the fisher boy with hands that could rip the back fin right out of a ten-pound mero, and dumpy smiling Catalina.

Had Maria, standing with arms upraised (La Argentina) before her glass, seen blood in the sun and blood red in the other red earth of her native town, would she have known, even then, I wonder, that her small sister Catalina would be the first in the town to plunge a knife in a beating human heart and draw the blade forth blood red.

When I first saw Catalina Pedarcx she always had a small child in her arms, her sister or some neighbor's baby. She was singing under her breath a semi-tone chant ah-a ah-a ah-a which had drifted to Ibiza from the African shore and she had a neat little dance step, swinging forward and back, other foot, forward and back, in front of doorways. Her face was round, not
The Young Doctor
oval like her mother's, and her ankles were not slender like Maria's. One felt that she would not be pretty but very complacent and kind, also patient, long­suffering, meek and perpetually stepping forward and back singing ah-a hours at a time with babies. To such come adventure and romance, false whispered promises, bewildered thrustings of knives and damp prison walls.

When Catalina was fifteen years of age with a girl's naïveté and a woman's body, a young doctor came from Madrid to Santa Eulalia, was properly shocked by the filthiness and fastidiousness and general Tsar­like tone of Doctor Torres and decided to practise in the town. There was much coldness on the part of the old doctor (fifty-five, black coat, black tie) but young Doctor Gonzalez could not be ridden out by Matutes or Torres' aristocratic relatives because the young man had a brother who was a priest and an uncle who had often been asked for a cigarette by the ex-King Alfonso. The townspeople, even those who regretted the clerical and political affiliations of young Gon­zalez, soon found that he was an excellent and con­scientious doctor. He washed his hands a hundred times a day, he gave his most expensive medicines to the poor and told rich women there was nothing much wrong with them. In short, he had had splendid train­ing, liked his profession and the main street and the back street, and doors along the encircling hills and on hidden tortuous roads in the country were open to him. He rented an apartment, set up a modern office in the front room and to the delight of Señora Pedarcx offered a job (her first job) to Catalina because she was soft-spoken, poor and had her mother's instinct for cleanliness. Catalina prepared and served the doc­tor's breakfast, cleaned his office, kept hot water bubbling continuously on charcoal burners, and he taught her to receive the patients in an outer-'room and usher them in in turn when he was ready for them. She bought a new dress, new silk stockings (her first pair), wore neat black shoes instead of cloth alpargatas and she was happy and proud to be work­ing, and the whole family felt more secure and smiled. The doctor was content, for already he had sensed the advantage in employing a local girl instead of importing one from outside and keeping her under lock and key day and night.

Doctor Gonzalez built up his practice more quickly than he had hoped, and at odd times was lonesome, so he wrote the girl who was waiting for him in Alba­cete. They decided to get married sooner than they had planned. The doctor went away for two weeks (his wedding trip) and asked Catalina to sleep in his apartment and guard his instruments. Catalina, in her fresh new clothes, had stirred the thoughts of some of the young men, one of them a cousin of ex­Captain Nicolau, a young man of a family that would never think of uniting itself with the Pedarcx, but young Nicolau made skillful and violent love to little Catalina, promised her marriage and life-long happiness, and before the doctor's wedding trip was fairly under way the bed to which he had planned to bring his young bride was being ecstatically tested. Within forty-eight hours everyone on the island sus­pected what was going on and Señora Pedarcx, al­most hysterical, hurried to the Cuartel and begged the Guardia Civil to interfere. Nicolau was warned
A Girl's Mistake
away, Catalina (hardly understanding fully what she had done) was sent home and her mother guarded the doctor's office until he returned and then tearfully apologized. Catalina's brother got back from a fishing trip, started out to find Nicolau and was waylaid by Cosmi and Captain Juan. In Cosmi's back room they talked to the boy and explained a lot of things he didn't understand, that Nicolau's uncles were this and that, that years in jail and exile from the island afterward were a heavy price for what had already irrevocably occurred, that poor girls on the mainland were often misled by handling and promises. The boy blushed, then cried and gently Cosmi took his knife away and the Captain gave him a job in his own boat and insisted that he set out for Tagomago that night. As he walked down the road, the boy swung his shoulders not quite so strongly in the rhythm of waves and thought along the road and under stars and in the boat, on a coil of anchor rope, and felt as if something hitherto firm had slipped, and he wished it were firm again.

Catalina, crushed but still tingling with pleasure, sitting jobless in the plaster room with her fumbling , father-this fifteen-year-old child, who the day be­fore had rocked small children and sung ah-a ah-a, had thoughts go through her head and feelings course tip and down and around. And what she did was to take a kitchen knife (her father not seeing), slip out tuf the house and wait in front of the dance hall where Nicolau was dancing. And when he came out, she stabbed him with the knife clean through the heart, and he died four minutes later.

The whole thing was a mistake, but remember Catalina sitting in prison (they laughingly called the Ibiza jail the Hotel Naranjo) and watching the one small orange tree in the courtyard growing ever so slowly, and feeling inside and in the mornings and when she turned on the boards at night the begin­nings of more forward and back in prison cells or doorways and the eternal Moorish chant ah-a ah-a. Remember her because her story is by no means finished, and her exit from prison was infinitely less banal than the events leading up to her incarceration there.

Forget her momentarily in the patter of rain, in the drive of chilling rain which does not cut, in the sucking of mud sounds by back-street footsteps and we come to a rain-soaked wall and a bit of concrete sidewalk, perilously high on the gutter side and ob­scured in the darkness until just ahead, in front of a baker's shop a dingy street lamp holds a tiny snake of grapefruit light which enables one to see what one already feels, namely, that it is raining, and little else. As the sidewalk's nearly ending strip is faintly visible, arises on one's right, behind a doorway, a chorus of barking, not of earthly dogs, no threat, no joy, no invitation, but assorted yips and yaps not of puppies but infirm, and as you knock upon the door (closed only because of the rain) a voice from an overstrained larynx implores the dogs to be quiet and you to come in and amid more undisciplined barking a smiling face, shaven head, steel-rimmed spectacles, alive pale-blue eyes, and behind him his wife in a knitted shawl and a parrot in a cage squawks "Pa'amb oli." The man is ex-Sergeant Ortiz (years ago of the Guardia Civil), his good wife Carmen who speaks
The Ortiz Dogs
carefully with the manners of Madrid, and the par­rot's cry means bread and oil, which is the Spanish equivalent for bread and butter, for the Scriptural daily bread and for that which was cast upon waters and is God knows where by now.

The dogs-they cannot be ignored. They bark, sniff at trousers legs, look at one another with their one good eye, turn their faces aloft, puff, wheeze and when they have done what they can, they amble back to baskets (rag-lined for their convenience), favorite chairs from which they are dumped as the chairs are offered to you, back rooms, corners, places by the fire. They are not like other dogs, and in the course of years the Sergeant (aged seventy-two) and his wife (sixty-nine) have collected them as one gathers misshapen stones for the borders of gravel paths in suburban gardens. Not one is a big dog, and none excessively small. They have a strain of pug or of spaniel, eyes worn dim, too fat and almost drop­sical and perhaps because the Ortizs know that no one else on earth would be drawn to them, those dogs have too much food and all they can absorb of affec­tionate conversation. The Ortiz dogs and the parrot came from abandoned plush parlors of families re­spectable but now extinct.

Next to Admiral Platé, ex-Sergeant Ortiz is the best amateur fisherman in town. He has a dory moored at the mouth of Santa Eulalia's river, and early each morning he goes there, walking a mile in the morning air with fishing tackle in hand and a slice of bread and oil, and he thinks, sitting in his boat and pulling in now and then a good fish, of days and evenings in barracks, all the length and breadth of Spain, of comrades, promotions, evenings in Madrid. Of Carmen, how she was, and the pen­sion coming in and, after all, although he had doubted it faintly in his youth, how life goes on at seventy and morning air smells of seaweed and the red wine warms the gullet and the line of the hills one could read like music as the current shifted the boat and the Cala Llonga slopes wheeled gently to the left and into the picture came the Santa Eulalia million ­years-ago cliff with the fortress-church, the priest's house, the new hotel Buena Vista, and later the tiny shrine on the highest mountain around which women led sick donkeys who had recovered and within hung broken off arms and legs and heads and even bellies of porcelain dolls (which were parts of babies allowed to get well). Swing boat, farther north, for the red­streaked pine-covered hills, high hills, of San Carlos and around to the east to the Tagomago cliff, and what can a man, either twenty-seven or seventy-two, find better with a fish tug in the morning? And Carmen caring for preposterous dogs and the parrot and speaking to them the best woman's Castillano in the town and probably on the island, keeping up the manners of extinct parlor families from which such ruins came and hoarsely barked. Not forgetting that each afternoon Señora Ortiz put on a black-silk dress and a mantilla and went to Cosmi's backyard, where under a tree she taught to spell and to read and a little to write the blue-eyed Can Cosmi's Catalina who by now had jilted runt Francisco, the back-street butcher, and was to marry Vicente Cruz, as good a man and master mason as anywhere there is.

The Ortizs might have appeared to be futile peo­ple,
Three Score and Ten,br> with their yapping dogs (Pa'amb oli parrot cry) and a pension check each month, but my mind moves forward and I must hint to you of another time of war, when in the large port town of Ibiza, with form­erly ten thousand inhabitants, when death was in the air and the crumbling walls and above Franco's airplanes seeking just such as they, only two of our human family were not taking shelter but were stay­ing on the main street in a room marked Red Cross, not looking above when motors droned nor around them when iron fragments flew. Old Carmen, with her arms around distracted women standing behind carts of corpses looking for some specific and familiar corpse, and the ex-Sergeant (hoarse voice, blue eyes) pouring wine from jugs, tying bandages and all Ibiza in the hills, not cowardly but simply unaccustomed. And in the harbor, where accidentally bombs fell, were fish, belly up, and rowboats stove in, and day and night the Ortizs working.

In Memory of Sergeant Ortiz and Carmen his wife I wish each and all of you seventy happy birthdays, as the Bible suggests, so that you may have a well­rounded life and sharp last recollections to take with you to the grave!

Meanwhile we pass along, although twice already urged to stay for supper, and crossing the muddy lane leading westward to Rigoberto's hill, we find attached to the dim street lamp what is known as Es Forné Nau, in other words the New Baker's Shop. There are two bakers in Santa Eulalia, one called Old, the other New, according to their length of serv­ice in the town. The New Baker is a big round-faced roan, bare arms well muscled and a hearty laugh, and his hair and clothes often dusted with flour. He has a small straw-haired wife, sharp in repartee, an up­standing girl from the mainland, of a good tough family. First came the baker, and Cosmi and Ferrer and the others liked him and he decided to stay. Then he ordered the oven from Barcelona and was in town a few months waiting for that. There was a German servant girl Anna he proposed to, but she had an aluminum salesman somewhere, so he went to Ali­cante and brought back Manuela (who had the same coloring as Anna but features sharper), and I never knew a couple so pleased when the bride got pregnant right away. They worked hard, built up a good trade, made good bread which we smell as we stand in the rain by the shop. And Manuela changed her shape and outline until she looked like the third from the left of the Cala Llonga hills, and when the child was born dead, and joy for two weeks went from the New Baker's round face, the fine little disappointed tough girl was the first to say in front of Cosmi's bar: "Ah, fotre! Then we'll make another." So Anna Cosmi smiled, and the crowd at the bar fairly roared and the big baker put his arm over Manuela's shoulders and at that moment snapped out of his mood-and everything went on.

At this point in our pilgrimage, while we are stand­ing in the mud beneath the street lamp to which the baker's shop is attached by one of Guillermo's iron scrolls, a change takes place, one which deepens the darkness or removes in the lemon-orange pattern­dotted lines of light in unison. Windows recede, then fade. To be brief, the electric light plant has broken down. In houses, women by charcoal fires and groups
The Light Plant Fails
of men in the cafés say "Ah" as the visibility lowers, and laugh and good-naturedly curse as the darkness takes its hold and prevails. There are scrambles for candle ends and matches, flickers, dancing shadows on white walls, and the town has made its readjust­ment from the white invisible current to the wax and string between the fingers, drops of oil in iron cups. It is as if one century, bowing slowly into the wings, and expected back, makes way for her mother whom the audience remembers. Ferrer, smiling profanely and chewing on his supper, sets a lantern in his door and waits. And as big fish glide on still nights when the Captain sets his flare, so come customers to Las Delicias, the lovable improvident ones who have not made ready-and sous and candles are exchanged.

In the early nineteen thirties, the light plant of Santa Eulalia was the town's hugest joke and got a laugh several times each week when the wind blew wires together, or belts broke, or for some reason un­explained the wabbly machinery in the mill house stopped twitching and lay still. On stormy nights, of which there were few except in the equinoctial sea­sons, the lights were sure to go out soon after dark. But more mysteriously when stars hung in the sky and the air bore the scent of the pepper trees, all windows and bulbs and cracks would never suddenly, but like Belmonte taking his time, swing back the gold side of the cape and let us touch bottom in star­light.

"Ah, fotre! Carrai!"

"Attrecedre!"

And the scramble for candles and matches and saucers would follow.

The first electric-light plant, in the building with the flour mill, was set up and directed by Mallorca Pete who, with sausage-stuffed wife and Brancusi baby Miguelito, lived on the ground floor of a quite new house facing the sea and next door across a va­cant lot with hen houses and two goats to Can Xumeu and the telephone office. The Mallorquin, as Pete was always called, was a small man with a noncom­mittal face and freckles on his arms, not more than thirty-two years old, and not a relative of Matutes but nearly so. Matutes, for some reason he did not disclose, had wanted Pete to leave Mallorca and come to Santa Eulalia for the purpose of setting up a light plant, and no one like Pete ever thought of crossing Don Abel. So the short fat wife had faint pain of long­ing in her eyes when she sat on the doorstep and looked across the sea and saw steamers which re­minded her of Mallorca boats.

Eventually Pete's dynamo began to turn, but all that resulted in the bulbs was a pitiful twisted red line that would have been outshone by two glow-worms under a tumbler. There was a fortnight of tinkering and at last the bulbs were coaxed into throwing forth a fair amount of light, and then after two hours the plant broke down completely and there was no light at all. Steadily, as the months succeeded each other, this condition was slightly improved, so that perhaps two nights a week there would be no interference with the service, and maybe only two nights there would be practically no light at all.

In the dwelling houses, still equipped with graceful iron lamps for burning olive oil or fish oil and where the women and children went early to bed or were
The Plant Folds
absent on holiday evenings, the failure of a light bulb ,r two was not a grave inconvenience. To the owners )f cafés and the incredible cinema at Gork's, sudden darkness so unexpectedly and so often was a nuisance, and especially because no allowance was made in the bill. Cosmi was the first to rebel. He warned the Mallorquin that if the service was not improved he would disconnect the lights himself and depend upon candles all the time instead of half the time. Matutes, Cosmi said, had money enough to buy a good dynamo and generator and instead had foisted on the town some relic he had picked up for nothing in a Mallorquin junk yard. Ferrer, Guillermo, Sindik and last of all Juanito of the Royalty followed Cosmi's lead, and within a few weeks the light plant folded up. Pete's wife hoped in vain that her husband would be sent back to Mallorca, for which island between feedings of Miguelito she yearned, but Matutes seemed to think he had given Pete his chance and straightway abandoned him, probably to save the price of a couple of third-class tickets on the boat he himself owned. The Mallorquin was left strapped, an unconvincing electrician in an anti-electric town. He got a job in the mill, where the water wheel had turned faithfully while his dynamo had been letting him down, and walked rather lonely and dusty to the corner of the road and back to his house three times each way each day.

About a year after Santa Eulalia had turned back to candlelight and kerosene, a Frenchman, Georges I Halbique, came to the town to spend his summer va­cation. He was an electrical engineer, had a few thou­sand francs to invest, and decided to try his luck.

His principal assistant, who had worked with him

a while in France, was a young Catalan named Pri­mitivo. I liked Primitivo right away. He had irrepress­ible energy, playful like that of a cub panther, so that even in the heat of summer noons he made box­ing motions with his hands and shoulders, smiled, waved boyishly and was always glad to see you. He had been lightweight boxing champion of Catalonia and seemed glad to be alive. Not long after he arrived Í in town, Cosmi told me one reason for Primitivo's joy i of living. It seems that in a street fight resulting from ; a demonstration in Barcelona in favor of Catalan in­dependence, Primitivo, having to pass through a group of Guardias who were swinging their sabres, had had the presence of mind (perhaps because of quick thinking in the ring) to cover his head and shoulders with the dead body of one of his friends, so { that the body was badly cut and Primitivo was one of the few to get through and be alive.

Not less attractive was Primitivo's young wife and her mother, both Catalans, looking somewhat alike, with gracious manners and the calm aspect of those who have walked through worry like a bramble field and are on the road again. In Santa Eulalia all the native women walked well, but Primitivo's wife and mother walked superbly.

Halbique, being French and aloof by nature, and unable to forget by night the francs he had spent and was spending, took little part in the life of the town, but Primitivo, who could understand and speak Ibi­cenco and was incurably companionable, became a familiar figure on the main street without delay.

The new light plant was built on the north side of
Films of Yesteryear
a town, two hundred yards beyond the theatre, at the intersection of the San Carlos and the Arabie roads. As soon as work started I detected a republican aroma. The contract to put up the building was given to Vicente Cruz, who had energy and youth and hap­piness like Primitivo and was to marry Cosmi's Cata­lina. Gleefully mounting a pole with borrowed climb­ers was Marc Colomar. Shipments of machinery and materials were more than usually delayed by Matutes. Customers who had been the first to abandon the Mallorquin signed up first with Halbique and tried to assuage his worrying. However, the dynamo and generator were finally delivered. They were new and shining, and the belt was new and in case one belt broke there was another in readiness. Guillermo, Gork and others were doubtful but willing to be convinced.

The new plant functioned quite well. Breakdowns were few and of brief duration, and when the days grew short and the equinoctial rains poured down the lights burned steadily until just before midnight, when three black winks gave warning, and in the cafés there was a rush for candles again. The other effects on the life of the town were as important. Guillermo, Pep Salvador and a man from San Carlos way, who in 1935 was to become republican mayor of Santa Eulalia, formed a company to bring talking pictures to the theatre once a week, and thereafter on Sunday evenings the farmers and their wives and children came streaming in from the hills, and in the horseshoe of boxes around the rim of the auditorium sat families gay in holiday clothes, and eager faces leaned forward in the balcony. Startled cries and exclamations, protests, encouragement were shouted as the picture progressed. On the stage in dimness, left of the screen, stood Pep Salvador piquantly trans­lating the most important phrases from French or Spanish into Ibicenco, and when the film was an American (cowboy pictures the Ibicencos liked far best) Guillermo would come hurriedly to find me for the preview, and Pep Torres would supply Ibicenco words if I lacked certain ones and, braver because of the darkness, I would project my inadequate voice in nothing like Pep Salvador's style or aptitude, but it seemed to make the picture clear. I sometimes wonder if our Hollywood cowboys, riding their bronchos without pulling leather, shooting up saloons saving always the honest Western girl, were working at the time for breathless galleries and families so tense in boxes in Santa Eulalia, and if so, whether they did not think highly of themselves.

Primitivo, as soon as the plant was running, had a normal amount of time to himself, and with the young linesmen he had trained as a nucleus he formed an athletic club and taught all comers to box, until he could offer some hair-raising bouts on Thursday evenings.

Meanwhile, Primitivo's wife, an expert dressmaker, organized a sewing class to which came daily, chat­tering and watching every movement on the street as they sewed, Eulalia Colomar, Manuela (sister of Juanito of the Royalty), Odila the daughter of ex­Captain Nicolau, and a half dozen other girls between fourteen and eighteen years old. Soon in the Sunday afternoon parades up and down the main street, the modern dresses began to be less uniformly hideous.

Joan of Arc
Of the young girls of the town, who were to have lifted the island gaily on their upturned palms and revolved it, legs trippingly dancing, until it caught up with the clock I shall say no more just now. They deserve a chapter of their own. Only on the back street, across a vacant lot from Es Forné Nau, we reach the house of the family Noguera where. lived Eulalia Noguera of whom I often think as an Ibi­cenco Joan of Arc. It is true that she led no armies, although she received one with infinite tact and grace, and to compare her to the peasant girl who 'n vi­sions is not quite fair because Eulalia had no visions, but instead a crystalline sense of reality. Probably she will not be roasted at the stake but made to carry water jars over endless pathways through the grave­yard of a broken dream, or if liberty flickers and holds its white light again she will smile and sing and be one who has never denied it.

The house has three rooms, the central one for sew­ing and eating and a bedroom on either side. It is one of the very few houses where, through troubled years, under monarchy, dictatorship, young republic, Ler­roux and Robles, Azaña, no matter what or whom, each member of the family (women, too) has been united in the cause of freedom. Not even Cosmi had a wife who knew what political developments meant to him. Anna Cosmi was matter of fact and practical, and for her the sun did not shine except when she could see it. Noguera, lanky unprepossessing builder, had a wife who knew the source of his misfortunes and who was willing that they all should suffer for their good ideas. She had never set foot in the church, or given way to economic pressure. She was proud that her husband was a republican from birth and that contracts had been withheld from him by power­ful groups on that account. She had remained aloof from cautious neighbors and had taken in sewing all her married life to augment the family income.

There were two daughters, Maria and Eulalia, and because Maria the older was pretty as a little girl and conventionally beautiful as an adolescent, Eulalia was considered rather plain and thought of herself that way. As a matter of fact she had a fine oval face like El Greco's daughter, except for a pert snub nose and humorous intelligent eyes. If there was a fault in her construction it was that her legs were a trifle heavy, or at least her ankles. When I first knew her she was sixteen years old and worked for Cosmi in the kitchen, and from the kitchen escaped snatches of song. The Ibicenco music, from ancient hymns and galley chants and nurtured and crossed in the hills through hundreds of harvests, was fast being for­gotten. Old men and women remembered dozens of couplets and melodies, but the young ones disdained them, all except Eulalia. Her memory was prodigious, her voice flexible and clear, and to moods of weather, hen-plucking, cleaning of fishes that flopped all the way to the pan, thoughts of childhood, present, past and future, she sang in Cosmi's kitchen, and often Rigoberto, passing by, would hurry in, his face alight with pleasure.

"What was that, Eulalia? Please let's hear it again."

And Eulalia, never bold or bashful, would laugh and compose her face for singing, and, her eyes smil­ing or pensive, according to the song, she would
Songs from the Hills
repeat until Rigoberto's voice was heard too, and he would continue up the street with a new tune very old, and the small flame of that hill music would re­vive and be carried in two torches instead of one.

A chauffeur from Ibiza who came to Santa Eulalia each Sunday tried to induce her to elope, and Eulalia, genuinely astonished that anyone should notice her and not her beautiful sister Maria, started out with him, spent one night in the house of one of his rela­tives on the hill near the church, then thought better of the adventure and returned to her home. Her mother and father, who had been deeply distressed, made her give up her job at Cosmi's and kept her at home, sewing. After a year had passed and Eulalia had worked industriously, showing no further lean­ings toward romance, she was allowed to do part­time housework in the homes of certain persons her mother knew and trusted. Thus it was that she came to our house mornings, bringing jugs of cool water on her sturdy hip, conjuring sparks and then heat from charcoal, cooking joyful eggs and singing bits of Ibi­cenco song, telling what had happened the night be­fore or several years ago and laughing, commenting always with clarity on world events, the reverbera­tions of which had reached her, with malice toward none except those who soil all forgiveness, and always an indomitable spirit. Eulalia in the morning, the Cala Llonga breeze in the afternoon. Those elements, cool when the heat was simmering and when chill was encroaching, frank and warm. I wish your song and sound sense were everywhere, Eulalia, and I long this moment to kneel and receive cooked eggs from you and to hear all the things I am deathly afraid to know, to borrow your courage. And, please, how is my faithful dog I had to leave with you? And your father, re-sold into slavery, and your Uncle Mateo who took the helm of the schooner that bore some of the good men away, or Uncle Edmundo who was left behind?

Or. the rainy evening, Edmundo, whose house is next on the back street, is surely not at home. His second wife is cooking for his first wife's children and not fretting, knowing that Edmundo cannot fish when it rains, and that in cafés and peering near-sightedly through steel-rimmed spectacles he is plowing with seaman's walk through the mud between doorways, always near the crowds and somehow apart and alone, his voice gruff and his eyes near-sightedly smil­ing, black shirt, fingers castanets, dancing fiercely the jota or singing hoarsely as will be sung many times at Cosmi's and Can Xumeu and Antonia's this night:

Pescando la sangonisa
Salio un pes' gordo
Pescando la sangonisa
Salio un pes' gordo
Arrimé con el farol
Y era un mocoso
Asi de grande (hands outflung to indicate length)
Asi de gordo (fingers around circumference)

I do not say that Fear, in peddling up and down the street, did not visit nearly all the houses, but the (lay he came around, Edmundo was out to sea and Eulalia, his niece, must have been far away. Of this you will be amply convinced.

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