All of the Suredas remained loyal to the Spanish King, with the exception of Pedro, who was too much of an artist to wish to serve any other master. Besides, he was unwilling to crawl in the dust. That is why all of the Suredas looked upon the two-armed General as the man to reinstate the Old King or to bestow a New King on the country. That is exactly what Franco promised the Mallorcan monarchists during a visit to the island several years previous. History knows of no instance of a general going back on his word. It knows only of instances when he didn’t keep his word — but that is just a matter of time.
The reception took place at the home of Pedro’s sister Celerina, in a large salon with stable chairs. Not a single chair leg was missing or rotting with age. The door to the secret chamber was not a secret. There were plates and cups for each guest, and whoever wished to stay overnight, or was forced to by the curfew, could choose a bed without sinning against some famous personage. In a word, Celerina had a rich husband.
The large cemeteries under the island moon were getting larger. The Holy War continued planting its crosses. So the mood was morose as we, who clung illegally to what was left of our little lives, joined the circle of visitors invited and arranged in accordance with Mallorquin custom. There were several relatives in the group, but also friends of the family who had come to wish us well on our departure. All these people liked us; many of them had taken us to their hearts. Moreover, the ones who knew about our adventures, the members of the nobility in particular, were impressed that we hadn’t done any stealing in the process of scrambling out of our misery.
Each and every face reflected the mixture of terror, pity, eschatological expectation, and the peculiar glow that we later discerned in Portugal in similarly decadent noble families. It expressed a certain anticipation: just a few more shots, just a few more heads, and all will be accomplished. Behold, the King has arrived!
“Why flee at this late phase of the war?” they asked. “Ridiculous! What for?” The grand deluxe train was already under steam, they said. “But what’s with you? Why are you leaving?”
Thus I had to relate the same story all over again, now for the twelfth time, as in a mortuary when you spell it all out in detail for the benefit of the aunts, the neighbors, and the milkman.
The ballad of our fishy heroism evoked a great deal of interest among the aunts with lorgnette and reticule, and among their fawning young heirs; among elderly gentlemen with sideburns and medals; among officers with pomade in their hair, pomade on their fingernails, and swagger sticks in their tunic pockets; and with the unassuming Princess, who was seated on a stool as if she were working at her easel. It is no wonder, then, that I soon started stretching the boundaries of my historical account, striding through our 24-hour life-and-death grace period not with wobbly knees, but with a firm gait. Don Juan’s ear trumpet was constantly at my mouth, even when I had to change places and explain to a hard-of-hearing lady some detail of our uniquely perpetual execution. The grandee followed me around all bent over, a vassal of his own deafness, which over the years worsened at the same rate as the tufts of hair grew out of his ears. As a courtesy to him, I shouted a few words into his trumpet, then quickly resumed speaking to normal ears. Deaf people are grateful for any little particle of language that gets tossed to them. They chew on it until it turns to poison inside. That’s why deaf people are malicious; they’re always thinking that people are putting the wrong morsels of speech into their trumpets.
Everybody felt that Papá’s constant trumpet-waggling was disturbing the leave-taking festivities. But didn’t he, too, have a right to hear our story? Alas, later on we found out that he wasn’t at all interested. Nor was Don Juan Sureda eager to learn what his friend, the Catholic German, or the other crusaders, thought about the Holy War. Pedro told me that Papá had breathed a sigh of relief when he heard that Vigoleis hadn’t been shot, that he was still alive, but that no one knew where he was — presumably at some hideaway in the mountains. Search for him, Don Juan immediately said. He mustn’t leave the island or be sentenced before he could speak with him. If Vigoleis was put in the slammer prior to getting drilled, he, Juan Sureda Bimet, would arrange for his release on the basis of his personal connections, which included the King and his Generalissimus. He needed Vigoleis, he said. But what for? For some Catholic mission or other? No one in the family knew. Papá had kept silent.
As soon as I entered the salon, Don Juan came right up to me, stuck his horn under my nose, and started nudging me with it, much as lambs nudge the udder to make the milk start flowing. He sputtered a few words; I thought I heard the word diferencia, and then the name “Goethe.” But by then I was already in conversation with some of the others present, with Don Juan in my wake. I related the German Consul’s winged words to us, which earned me generous applause. Don Juan nudged me with his horn. “Well, old fellow,” I said to a friend of the family who had always boasted of his anarchistic ideas, “not yet in your coffin? You have only Don Juan to thank for that, the man who has permeated your whole clan with his monarchistic notions”—again a nudge of the ear trumpet under my nose, and again the words “difference” and “Goethe.” I bent down to kiss the feeble hand belonging to an elderly lady, and the elderly lady blessed my scalp, telling me that I was not meant to be a martyr of the revolution. Someone interjected, “Well now, he really ought to have been shot! No tourist guide has ever told as many lies as he has. He gave the foreigners a completely false image of our island. The officials have received dozens of complaints. Not one date was correct, not one name, not one anecdote. So — shoot him!”
Finally Don Juan grabbed a chair next to mine, tore me away from a chat with the Princess, and held his trumpet in front of my mouth so threateningly that, for the first time since the outbreak of the insurrection, I thought my final hour had arrived.
Don Juan urgently wanted his Catholic German to tell him the semantic difference between the word übersetzen with the accent on setzen, and the word übersetzen with the accent on über. And what about the word überwinden, or the word…? There were loud protests. Don Juan heard them, or rather he overheard them. Speaking half in Spanish and half in German, he expressed the opinion that the classic German writers — among them, unfortunately, Goethe — constantly misused these compound verbs. Would I be willing, he asked, to clear this matter up, here and now and once and for all? If so, then whoever felt he had a right to end my life was welcome to shoot me forthwith. Revolutions, he explained, have a way of taking their own course, but literary study takes hard work, even while the bombs are going off.