View of the World Page 9
On the feast of the August Virgin, which occurs on the 15th of that month, I gave a little party at Ses Estaques which in retrospect strikes me as illuminating the situation. The party was for the family of the woman who looked after the house – two daughters and a son. They had been born in the town of Ibiza, although their mother was a peasant from San José who would still intone, after a great deal of persuasion, the old warbling, elusive African melodies. In one generation the young people had moved forward a thousand years or so, even though they were still not quite modern Europeans. On this occasion they spent an hour or two happily searching for sea-snails, and prising limpets off the rocks to enrich the splendid ritual paella their mother would cook for their midday meal. Afterwards the boy went off to watch a football match, while the girls relaxed under the pines, half absorbed in novelettes of the kind in which servant girls marry the sons of rich men with race-horses and yachts. At the same time I observed the girls giving half an eye to the antics of some French women who were disporting themselves (illegally) in bikinis on the rocks near by.
This sight appeared to provoke a certain restlessness in the young women from Ibiza. It was as if they were the not wholly reluctant onlookers at the performance of some religious rite to which they felt they owed some concession of reverence, and after a while, and following a whispered conversation, both girls removed their frocks, and sat there somewhat defiantly in their petticoats.
Our garden, at the very edge of the sea, was a thoroughfare for all fiesta excursionists, and about midday a particularly imposing couple passed through with their formal escort. There were an admiral’s daughter then holidaying in Santa Eulalia, her escort of two younger sisters, and a waiter from the local restaurant – a young Apollo who was not-quite hopelessly in love with her. This was an affair which, despite the obvious disparities, could have been settled in the time-honoured Ibizan way, by a formal abduction, with the girl lodged with some female person of probity until the father’s consent could be obtained. Perhaps in this case a marriage by capture would be arranged, or perhaps Santa Eulalia was already too civilised. It remained to be seen.
Later that day, too, I saw the rather astonishing sight of one of our Pedros taking his wife for a pleasure trip in his boat. This, by local standards, was definitely taboo. Wives stayed at home, and women in boats were almost as unlucky as priests. But Pedro had been taking out mixed parties from the local hotel, so his wife had probably told him that if it was all right for him to take out foreign females, then he could take her too. At this time, the height of the season, Santa Eulalia was crowded with fair strangers, many of them unattached. Their admiration for the hard-muscled, sun-bronzed fishermen, who took them out for boat rides at twenty-five pesetas a time, was sometimes manifested indiscreetly, and a few were said to have gone so far as to make advances when the time and place was right. One of the young fellows thus favoured had only recently confided his doubts in me. Was it not a fact that foreign ladies usually suffered from syphilis?
And so this golden day passed with its contrasts and its confrontations. The French ladies came and went, happy daughters of that full turn of the wheel where sophistication joins hands with innocence, oblivious of the Bishop of Ibiza’s pastoral fulminations on the subject of decency in dress. Pepita and Catalina got badly sunburned in spite of the markedly olive undertone of their Mediterranean skin, and were thus chastened for their first cautious step forward into the full enlightenment of our times. The tide moved up a few inches, and licked at the ruins of our private sea wall. This would be the last season that the house of Ses Estaques would embellish this shore with its patrician decay, because the land along the sea-front had now gone up to forty pesetas a square metre, so the house was to be pulled down and replaced with the stark white cube of an hotel.
Just outside the fine ruin of the archway entrance to what was left of the garden, a family of peasants were gathered round their cart. They lived in a fortified farmhouse in the mountains in the centre of the island, which sheltered several families and was in reality a hamlet in its own right. At this time they were relaxing after a late meal of goat’s flesh and beans. One of the men had invoked the holiday spirit by blackening his face and dressing up like a woman, and the other, sitting apart, was playing a wistful improvisation on his flute. The sister had left them. She had been studying the French women, and the Ibizan girls, and she had pinned back her skirt from the waist so that it fell behind in a series of dressy folds, to show an orange silk petticoat, and was gleefully dabbling with her toes in the edge of the tide.
The men spoke Castilian, and one of them told me that it had taken them half the morning to get down to Santa Eulalia, which, because of the difficulty of the journey, they only visited once a year – on this day. But next year, he said, things would be a lot better. The roads were going to be made up, and the piles of flints were already there, awaiting the steamroller. With a good surface on the roads they could cover the distance in half the time, which meant they would be able to come more often. They all agreed with me that Santa Eulalia was a very wonderful place.
7
Assassination in Ibiza
ANY FOREIGNER who installs himself for the summer in Ibiza is certain sooner or later to be approached by an extraordinary dog. This will be an Ibicene hound on the look-out for temporary adoption. At first sight it may seem ludicrous to the visitor to the island that he could ever be induced to cherish such an animal. The Ibicene hound is admittedly of ancient lineage. Many local savants believe that the Phoenicians introduced the breed when they had an important settlement in Ibiza, and there is even some romantic nonsense talked about its being related to the sacred dog of the ancient Egyptians. But aesthetically it is hard to accept. There is something haphazard and unplanned about its general outlines, suggesting the result of a union between a greyhound and the most depraved-looking Indian pariah. In colour it is brown and white. Its long, pointed face ends in a pale tan muzzle, and it possesses large, pink up-pricked cars, pink toes, and amber eyes. Until one gets to know the dog better its expression, which is really mild and speculative, appears to be charged with a shifty imbecility. But above all the dog’s condition is usually appalling. It will almost certainly be dreadfully emaciated, as a result of the local belief that to feed a hunting dog is to reduce its keenness. Most Ibicene hounds are kept tied up during the daytime, or at best chained to a heavy log which they drag painfully behind them. Only at night are they released, to hunt for rabbits. Despite this absence of immediate charm, the extraordinary fact is that the few dogs that make their escape and turn to beachcombing soon find someone to look after them. The secret may lie in the Ibicene hound’s quiet tenacity of purpose, and the natural tact with which it finally wears away the repugnance engendered by its hideous presence. A ceremonial offering of food is all that is necessary to attach one of these wanderers to one’s person and one’s house. Thereafter the summer visitor never again feels himself a complete stranger. He has been formally adopted by a dog which will guard him and his possessions in the most unobtrusive way, and which will keep its distance and know its place. In fact a natural aristocrat of a dog.
This year, as usual, I passed the summer by the shores of an Ibizan bay round which five small stark Moorish-looking cottages had been put up by local enterprise for holiday occupation. By the time I arrived four of the five cottages had already been taken by miscellaneous foreign families, and each family had already acquired its dog. Within twenty-four hours I had mine too, an errant bitch known locally as Hilda, after the star in a recently shown film who had unknowingly given her name to about one-third of the female animals of Ibiza. Hilda was a normal Ibicene hound, silent and self-effacing in her disposition. Her only drawback consisted in her insistence on trotting in front of my car about twenty yards ahead – a custom carried over from the old days of the vendetta when the watchdog had to be on the look-out for enemies lying in ambush. This reduced my speed when we made excursions together to eight
miles per hour. Otherwise I was reasonably well satisfied.
The local farmer too had got himself a new dog – a six-months-old puppy – but this had turned out to be far from satisfactory. It had what was known as ‘el vicio’ – that is to say it had never become resigned to its hunger – and this had caused it to devour several hens, as well as the farmer’s cat, when it had been released at night. It now spent its days tied up miserably in the thin shade of a locust-bean tree fifty yards from my door. It was roped to a bough over its head in such a way that it could just manage to lie down but not walk about. For at least half the day it was in the full glare of the sun. The farmer had left a bowl for water which was dry when I inspected it, but I doubted very much that it was being fed. Its neck was raw from straining at the rope when anyone came near it. I watched it unhappily for a whole day, and when night came I took a knife, and crept out and cut it free. I was a little nervous about this interference in local affairs, and I was afraid that the dog might give me away by barking, or might even attack me as I groped towards it in the darkness. These fears turned out to be groundless. It probably took me three minutes to saw through the enormously thick, home-twisted rope. While I did so the dog licked every exposed part of my anatomy it could reach, and as soon as it was free it streaked off into the night.
Alas, I awoke next morning again to the sound of its forlorn yapping. It seemed that at dawn it had surrendered itself to its master, and was now tied up even more dreadfully than before, in a tumbril-like cart standing just by the farmhouse door. At about 6.30 a.m. a woman called Pepa, who went round the cottages doing the odd chores, came and knocked on my door. Pepa was a fisherman’s daughter, now middle-aged, who worked eighteen hours a day to bring up and to pay for medical treatment for the spastic child that had been left on her door-step in the town twelve years before. She had a request to make on behalf of the farmer. Was there any chance of my making a trip shortly to Portinaix? Because if so the farmer would be glad to know if I would oblige him by taking the dog with me and abandoning it there. Portinaix was a lonely beach at the other end of the island to which I made occasional fishing trips. She added innocently that someone – certainly a foreigner – had cut the dog loose in the night, and it had slain more chickens. In that case, I suggested, what objection could there be to putting the animal out of its misery? Why not, for example, shoot it, rather than abandon it to starve?
The reply taught me how much after four summers of life in Ibiza I still had to learn about the island mentality.
‘The peasants don’t like to kill these dogs.’ There was a hint of contempt in her voice when she spoke of the peasants.
‘Not even the vicious ones?’
‘No, they’re too superstitious. They’re afraid to kill a dog. If a peasant wants to get rid of a dog he takes it across to the other side of the island and lets it go.’
‘And we get the dogs from San Miguel and Portinaix?’
‘That’s right. That’s where Hilda came from. Mind you, if a farmer happens to be on good terms with a fisherman he usually asks him to take the dog out to one of the islands and let it go. In that way he can be sure the dog will be all right. There are plenty of rabbits on the islands.’
The fate of this dog was now beginning to assume for me a most uncomfortable importance. I fed it several times that day, but there seemed no way of defeating its chronic and ferocious hunger. It was the poorest and most repellent specimen of its breed I had seen, with the face of a monster from a bestiary, and possessed of a kind of mad vitality. In its noisy, hysterical demonstrations, too, it was most untypical of the true Ibicene. I suddenly found that I was feeling the beginnings of an attachment for this appalling dog, and the knowledge frightened me a little. A few more days’ acquaintance and I knew that I should find myself asking the farmer to give it to me. And then, what was to happen when I went back to England? I was relieved of this fear by the appearance of the only other English member of the colony: a middle-aged woman. She was on the verge of tears. ‘That poor, poor animal,’ she wailed. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep for nights, for worrying about it. And of course, it’s simply ruined my holiday. All I want to do now is to get away from this dreadful island, and never set foot in it again.’ What was important about this visit from my point of view was that she had come to ask me to see the farmer and find out whether he would sell her the dog.
The farmer of course hadn’t the slightest objection to parting with the beast. Nor did he want any money. His only stipulation was that it must be kept tied up. So the dog was removed forthwith from its tumbril and tied to a fig tree at the back of the Englishwoman’s cottage. The Englishwoman put penicillin ointment on its sores and bound the loop of the rope, where it touched the dog’s neck, with soft cloth. While she was tending it the dog struggled to lick her hands. It gulped down the quart of milk she gave it, and the moment it was left to itself it started its mournful barking again.
Next day Pepa brought incredible news. ‘You won’t believe this – the Englishwoman’s going to have the dog killed!’ It was the first time I had seen her shaken out of her stolid acceptance of the behaviour of foreigners in general. ‘She says that the dog’s hers now, so she has the right to have it killed. Please don’t ask me to understand the mentality of people like that.’ Pepa had shrugged off the berserk drunks, the betrousered women, the artists with their beards and sandals, the occasional nudist on the beach, and the actor who practised yoga exercises in the village square. But this was too much. To ask to be given the dog, only to have it destroyed!
But the intended mercy-killing turned out to be a harder project than the Englishwoman had expected. None of the local males could be persuaded to undertake the execution, and the village veterinary surgeon – under the pretext that he had run out of chloroform – succeeded in excusing himself too. Undismayed by this setback she took the seven o’clock bus next morning to Ibiza town, nine miles away, where she finally discovered a vet who had emancipated himself from local superstition. He promised to come out next day on his motorcycle, and said that he would arrive at about one o’clock.
Next morning a shadow had fallen upon our little colony. The atmosphere was charged with mass emotion – a kind of mob-hysteria in reverse – that made us shrink from meeting one another. The dog leaped about in the shade of the fig tree as the foreigners, French, Germans and Catalans, slunk up with their last offerings of food.
Pepa, who was to cook lunch for me that day, fussed about the kitchen doing nothing in particular, and then at midday appeared with a strained face to say that she was off home.
‘Me pongo nerviosa.’ (‘I’m feeling upset.’)
‘Didn’t you tell me that you killed the pigs at the matanza?’ I asked her, referring to the great autumnal slaughter when every village in the island is full of the shrieking of pigs.
‘That’s different. Anyway, I don’t kill my own pigs.’
Just as she was leaving she was treated to the spectacle of the dog being given its last meal by the Englishwoman. This contained a fair amount of meat, which Spanish fisherfolk can only afford to give to sick children. Pepa commented on the seeming illogicality of this, in a voice which carried at least two hundred yards.
After that began the waiting. All the foreigners had closed the shutters of their windows facing the direction where the dog sat under the fig tree digesting its enormous meal, its ugly face twisted into a smirk of crazy beatitude. The members of the farmer’s family, who at this season when the harvest was in, spent most of the day doing odd jobs about the farmyard, had disappeared from the scene. Even the mule-carts seemed to have stopped coming down the road. I went into a room overlooking the sea, for no clear reason locking the door, and tried to read, but listening all the time for the executioner’s arrival. I could hear the dry clicking of the distant water-wheels sounding as though the landscape on which I had turned my back were full of ancient timepieces ticking off the seconds until one o’clock. Now I knew a little of the
state of mind of prisoners confined to their cells awaiting the obscene moment when, somewhere under the same roof, the trap door of the gallows will be sprung. I had caught the Spanish horror of this cool and premeditated killing, and as a foreigner, I felt myself included in their disapproval.
The blindfolded mules turning the water-wheels ticked off the seconds. One o’clock passed, then one-thirty, and I was beginning to permit myself to hope that the vet from Ibiza too might have suffered from cold feet at the last moment. But at two o’clock death approached, with the feeble puttering sound of a two-stroke motorcycle bumping slowly up the terrible road. (Later I heard that the rider had stopped at the kiosk in the village to brace his nerves with a couple of absinths.) I went through to the bathroom in the front of the house and looked out through the shuttered window. The vet had leaned his motorcycle against my wall just below, and he was unpacking the kit strapped to his carrier. The Englishwoman came out, and they talked in low voices. ‘I shall require someone to control the animal while I administer the injection,’ the vet said. ‘Rest assured, there will be no struggle – no sensation of pain.’ The woman said that she would hold the dog. ‘It is just as well that it appears to possess an affectionate nature,’ the vet said softly, filling his syringe, ‘– although perhaps excessively excitable. I say this because it is not a good thing to be bitten by an animal of this kind, which is liable to carry various infections.’ The woman reassured him in her halting Spanish. ‘Es muy bueno. Tiene mucho cariño.’ (‘It has much affection.’)