Our day was at an end.
Our day was at an end, and it also was supposed to mark the end of the first volume of these applied recollections of mine. That would have been a happy ending for a book that begins unhappily. We would find Vigoleis and Beatrice sleeping in the heavenly bed of a real princess, their shimmering linen sheet strewn with Keating’s Gold Insecticide Powder, hummed into slumber beneath a gossamer net by mosquitoes, and left unplagued by bad dreams during this night under Orion, who outshone the threefold constellation of my would-be assassins. Outside, the fireflies sparkled and the crickets fiddled furiously in anticipation of the big rains to come — to our dreamy ears it sounded like Bach fugues played on the organ that Mamú was going to have installed in Miramar — she had already received a cost estimate from an organ builder in San Sebastián. Somewhere on the island, my personal burro was rearing up on his bed of fermenting straw, waiting to be pushed into his stall at the Archduke’s fly-free stables.
This is where my book should stop, with Orion holding his glistening pilgrim staff over our heroes’ slumber. Peace all across the island, peace in our hearts, peace in each and every cricket’s burrow. You, dear reader, already know from my countless hints that much blood has yet to be shed, especially the blood of Vigoleis, who after precisely five nights was slated to be one of the bullet-riddled corpses. By replying to the German Consul’s hesitant query, “What? You haven’t been shot?” with the touchingly foolish counter-query, “Am I supposed to be?” he has earned the right to postpone his Finis operis by the length of one more Book, although it’s going to be a Book with only one chapter — meaning, of course, with no chapter at all. A book of extended leave-taking. I myself am no longer frightened. I was supposed to be bumped off, and yet I was still standing. Any reader can shoot me now by slamming the book shut. If he does so, he will be spared the sight of other people’s fright — Angelita’s, for example, who didn’t believe her eyes when she saw us still alive. Every one of our not yet gunned down, drowned, hanged, or crucified friends got the cold shivers when we knocked at their sealed front doors to say goodbye. Some of them slammed their doors shut in a faint. In most cases, I was able to shove one foot inside and, using the password, let them see my true face. These people let us in and bolted the lock behind us, whereupon we, the Resurrected Ones, started giving report after report.
For a certain length of time back then on the island, anyone who hadn’t been killed was considered to have risen from the dead. I’ll be brief about this, although I could fill chapter after chapter with descriptions of encounters during the first, second, and third months of the insurrection: my encounter with the limping Don Matías, with Don Gracias a Dios, who was now redeeming himself by composing patriotic verse hailing the Spanish pronunciamiento—like so many other foreign conspirators.
In Jaume’s bakery, the Hondurans had already held a little memorial ceremony for the murdered Don Vigoleis. But now here he was, out on the street, stretching out a hand that at first no one dared to touch. The amazing thing in those days was that nobody had the courage to say to us, “How did you escape getting killed? You’re both supposed to have been shot!” In Don Matías I still saw the old Krausite and Decipherer of the World, my flour-sack buddy. But now this pseudo-Honduran was holding back his feelings. He had become as stiff as the little vest he was again wearing. I inquired as to the welfare of the one-armed general Don Patuco, explaining that I was being guided by this man’s inspired warnings against priests with forked tongues and generals with two arms. I was on my guard, since General Franco still had both of his arms. Don Matías suddenly went pale. “Be quiet,” he whispered. “If anybody hears you, you’ll be shot. They’ll think we’re in a conspiracy.” As for himself, he was now for Franco, and his daughter Encarnación was for Franco. After all, a man could have two arms and still be a swell guy and a successful revolutionary… “What about Ulua the cobbler?” He got thrown down a well. They put a stone on top. His wife was thrown down another well. Stone on top. Their son got away with false papers to Uruguay.
In this way, I could fill many pages of this final, chapter-less Book. By doing so, I could easily lose sight of the two of us — not a bad ending, perhaps, for a pair of heroes who entered my story namelessly, plagued by fleas and bad dreams on board a ship taking them to the island — just two out of hundreds of people. That was years ago.
They left the island as two out of thousands, unmolested by dreams, since they were kept wide awake by the reality around them. But they weren’t able to sleep, either — certainly not the kind of peaceful slumber enjoyed by Vigoleis and Beatrice in the celestial bed owned by Doña Inés, who like a girl in a fairy tale could call a king “Uncle,” and who greeted her polyglot house tenants with a strip of embroidery on our pillow saying Godnatt!
Vigoleis turned the pillow over; he didn’t want any pearly greeting pressing into his cheek. Besides, the same idea sounds better in Mallorquin: Bona-nit! Bona-nit contains everything: the mouse rustling around in the palms, the bat’s shadow on the window pane, the octopus’ play of shadow beneath the seaside cliffs, the sea itself, the moon in the sea, the millions of stars, the Queen of the Night opening her chalice, and the red star at Orion’s shoulder, Bed-el-shauza, who with his very name proclaims the glory of the night.
Bona-nit!
EPILOGUE
Over and over again while setting down these island recollections of mine, whose origins were anything but arbitrary but whose future is anything but secure, I have noticed that the overture to any given chapter has determined that chapter’s structure and length. Since it has taken me so long to realize that mysterious tectonic forces are at work here — as in writing poetry — I might do well to exploit this insight into my work habits when shaping my Epilogue, the only section of my memoir that I am writing with an eye toward its length and toward the way it will come to an end — as both I and my reader so eagerly anticipate.
If, for example, I were to begin with a factual account of how Beatrice, performing her first domestic chores in the Casa Inés, prepared the small guest room for Frederico García Lorca, then I would have to get lost in all the details of Lorca’s planned trip to Mallorca, and how his failure to make it became so fateful for him — and right there I would have transgressed the limits of space. It would be even more dangerous, albeit more tempting, to begin in this fashion: “Beatrice, look over there, to the right. Yes, directly above the seventh cactus from the left, that’s it, down below Son Maroix, that white speck. That’s the terrace at the house I was going to rent, the one I should have rented, for Henny Marsman.” The result would be more than a single chapter, it would be an entire book about my friendship with Marsman, Holland’s great poet and the editor for my Dutch editions of Pascoaes. I would relate our picaresque encounter on Mallorca and our re-encounter in Basel; the way-stations Dornach, Arlesheim, Locarno, and Auressio; the haunted Casa Peverada; Schulenburg’s “Monda”; our weeks together in the ski lodge in Bogève in the Haute Savoie; our flight to Portugal, where Marsman intended to rejoin us and where, at Pascoaes’ country estate, the mystic’s aged little mother prepared the royal guest room for Holland’s King of Poetry with the same loving care as Beatrice gave to the room for Lorca at the Casa Inés. Neither poet ever reached his destination. Lorca was executed on the Spanish mainland. Marsman drowned in the Channel as he fled to Portugal, his ship torpedoed.