As he went about dispensing justice in such casual fashion, our Spanish chieftain squirted red wine down his gullet from a very special kind of squeeze bottle, the porrón—about which more in a moment. Suddenly a young male offspring, clearly demonstrating little respect for the older generation and hence hardly destined for a long life, shoved the pater familias from behind, in the process diverting the stream of wine in its trajectory. With exemplary aplomb the paternal gorge parried the thrust, catching a portion of the flow as a toad tongues a fly. The remainder sprayed out into the audience, precisely to my standing-room location. Vociferous huzzahs greeted the foreigner’s crimson baptism. Having observed the patriarch’s astounding agility in the handling of discoloring liquids, it was mysterious to me how his shiny black suit had received all of its thousand disfiguring stains. I was of course as yet unfamiliar with the Spaniards’ maxim about not letting oneself be the victim of one’s own wardrobe (no hay que ser víctima de su traje), though I was later to observe its appropriateness with respect to the jacket, vest, and trousers worn by a limping character to be encountered soon enough in this chronicle of mine.
Just imagine the heights of achievement I might have attained had I been coddled and spoiled by a mother like the one who now confronted the despotic father with the chastised youngster. She too flailed about with whacks to the cheeks, hitting seldom but drawing forth yowls of pain nonetheless. Her swats had different emotional origins — perhaps they came from the heart — and were the practical application of some rather different principles of child-rearing. Parental division of authority is apparently an international phenomenon, and this could make it seem almost humane. In any case, compared to the dynamics of tonality and coloration in this Spanish family, my own had been totally wrong. That is why I have become what you are confronting here in these pages: not a conquistador, not a cathedral-steps beggar with the trappings of a Spanish grandee, not an open-air cobbler with more wisdom in the tip of his awl than Vigoleis has inside his skull. This is not intended as a gripe against destiny, much less against Our Beloved Creator, who surely knew what He was about when He failed to set me into His quotidian world as this Spanish brat from the maritime wagon train who, I now notice, is pissing demonstratively against the mast.
The eating that went on in this improvised settler’s camp was prodigious. Items I didn’t even know the names for emerged from baskets and suitcases. Oil got poured on dark bread, onions and a green vegetable were diced on top. Olives, chickpeas, and small crabs were handed around, a chicken was torn apart and distributed among famished relatives. The rest of the menu was to me anonymous, at least at the time, for then I had scarcely peered beyond my mother’s saucepan — whose contents were not all that bad, though emphatically echt deutsch, and based patriotically on a certain ubiquitous tuber about which the nutritionist Moleschott, to this day unjustly maligned as a materialist, once wrote that a person fed for two weeks on nothing but the item in question would no longer be physically capable of affording its purchase. That is precisely my opinion, for I dislike intensely this mindless root-plant that has succeeded in undermining all of Western civilization. Perhaps the beetle named after it can now terminate its hegemony once and for all. “Without phosphorus there can be no thought”—I cite Moleschott once more. And without the potato? At the very least it has been able to divert my attention momentarily from an Iberian picnic based on a cuisine far beyond my ken.
People ate differently here, talked differently, scolded differently. I would have to adapt. I realized this within the hour during which I was the wide-eyed observer of this nation’s domestic mores, as the Ciudad de Barcelona rounded the northwest coast of the island, passed the Cape of Calafiguera, and entered the Bay of Palma. Meanwhile Beatrice lent our British travel companion her ear, an ear well practiced in convenient deafness through experience with dowagers. But she didn’t pass up the sight of the island darting ever more rapidly toward us.
With the charming, resigned pride spinsters often show in the presence of young couples, a behavior often tinged with an arrogance born of pity, our English companion departed as I stepped over to Beatrice to invite her to my al fresco theater. This would offer her better diversion, for I could read in her stern expression what was happening to her within. The farther we voyaged from her dying mother, the closer we came to her brother’s deathbed. Was he still alive? We had requested telegraphic word to Basel, or poste restante to Barcelona. But all these many days they had left us completely in the dark concerning his fate.
By “they” I mean the officialdom at the Hotel Príncipe Alfonso in Palma de Mallorca, whose renovator, manager, and Swiss-born panjandrum Zwingli had recently become. The hotel was thus our destination, although it was clear to us that our dying relative could no longer be living there. No doubt he was in a hospital somewhere. No hotel in the world can afford to shelter a morbid case under its roof, not even if it’s the boss himself. In such instances the guests, otherwise extremely conscious of their social standing, immediately defy the rules and demand their unwritten rights: the terminal case is transported downstairs and out the delivery entrance like garbage or dirty linen, so as not to sully the people who come and go amid bowings and scrapings at the main door. Shortly before embarking at Barcelona I had wired the hotel to reserve a double room. We would find out more once we arrived.
Our open-air circus reached the end of its program. The tents were lowered, equipment got packed, and everyone pressed to the rail so as not to miss a single episode of the exciting adventure of our harbor entry.
For about an hour the Cathedral of Palma dominated the background, at first merely as a grandiose block of stone, golden-brown and radiant in the sunlight, the structure of its various sections still concealed by the equalizing profusion of solar brilliance. The closer we came, the more clearly we saw each architectural segment. The mathematical orderliness of the building’s profile became visible. Its Gothic heavenward thrust — I remember well this first impression — discernable as one approaches the edifice, gradually turns earthward to bind itself to the stone, indeed inside the stone, just as the verse of an Iberian mystic is seldom capable of emancipating itself fully from the word. Confined to the earthly plane, this Spanish spirit is more receptive to heaven than in the less sunny climes of Northern Europe where God is invisible, where mists drift about, and where eye and heart perceive and imagine things that lie beyond the limits of knowledge and love. Imagined as a member of our picnicking Spanish clan, Immanuel Kant would have turned out as a philosophizing tanner’s apprentice. Conversely, Saint John of the Cross, under a Teutonic sky, could never have made it past a barefoot existence as a chanting Minorite Brother. Happily for both of these gentlemen, such speculative transplantations can take root only in my world of fantasy—“And there only as withered stalks!” my reader says to himself, as he nurses his abhorrence of wild goose chases.
The crowding on the quay side of our steamer was getting unpleasant. We too had gathered our belongings. The ship slowed down, but now the almost touchable coastline produced the optical illusion that we were gliding closer with increasing speed. The gulls now swarmed in greater numbers. Those at home on the island flew greedily towards the ship, piloting us securely into port. It was six in the morning — seven, according to my own reckoning, putting me ahead of the Spaniards in at least one respect, though only by virtue of my grandmother’s First Communion timepiece. The landing maneuver was already proceeding apace, our engines jolted at each shift of the propeller’s gears. Shouts, probably professional commands, flew back and forth; chains rattled, winches screamed in their effort; we seemed to be in the midst of burgeoning chaos. Here, as before, it struck me as odd that a habitual procedure, one that requires no close analysis of its component events and is repeated day after day, at the very same hour and with the same motions and shifting of levers — that such a procedure should confront the entire topside and below-decks crew with totally unfamiliar tasks. Our fear of a completely mechanized world will be groundless so long as man can make mistakes at his most regular daily chores. And if he swears while performing them, all is most definitely not lost. A defeated man no longer curses, for who will hear his stevedore’s prayers?