Complete Short Stories (38 page)

A photographer suddenly let off a flash-bulb at us, and Ava flashed back at him almost as startlingly in the fiercest language. But when he
apologized at once, she half forgave him. The rest of our talk was punctuated by the waiter’s handing a succession of autograph-books to Ava for signature;
she obliged automatically with a fixed, sunny smile, not losing the thread of our conversation until one autograph-hunter, an overstuffed sofa of a woman, plumped herself down next to me, leant across me, and said: ‘Oh, dear Miss Gardner, I have seen
every single one
of your films! Now I wonder whether you would be so good as to give me your
personal
autograph for my seven-year-old grandchild.
Her name is Wendy Solgotch Wallinger.’

Ava frowned. ‘Is the Solgotch Wallinger strictly necessary?’ she asked. ‘And what am I supposed to write on?’

‘Oh, I thought film stars always supply the paper!’

Ava frowned more deeply. Her comments on that paper shortage had better stay off record. They were quite enough to account for her sultry reputation. Nevertheless, loth to infringe the code further,
she tore a corner off the menu, scribbled ‘Wendy, with best wishes from Ava Gardner,’ and waved Mrs Wallinger away with it.

Having found my
Collected Poems
at our apartment, Ava asked which of them to read first. This question embarrassed me, after what I had already told her. However, there was one, I said, which she might perhaps like to take personally; though it had been written long before
we met. I marked the page for study when she went to bed that night – if she ever did.

and:

That was Ava to the life.

Meanwhile, at the furniture factory, Aníbal had been consistently difficult. He accused Wifredo to Don Hilario of stirring up the workmen and alleging
that the timber he supplied was so green, warped and knotted that it would serve only for making rustic seats and the like. Confronted with this charge, Wifredo informed Don Hilario that he had made a factual statement, not a complaint: indeed, far from stirring the workmen up, he had encouraged them to hope that something at least could be made from the eccentric lumps of raw tree which were all
that his partner could now buy.

When Don Hilario looked at him quizzically, Wifredo went to the workshop and returned with a particularly unattractive section of local pine, consisting almost wholly of large knots. He asked: ‘Am I seriously expected to fulfil a municipal order for eighty class-room desks with timber of this quality? And what about my saw-blades?’

Don Hilario eyed the exhibit
and ventured cautiously: ‘Well, you might hammer out these knots and use the holes for securing the scholars’ ink-wells; but I shall make it plain to Don Aníbal that if you were to take this course, there would undoubtedly be many times more ink-wells than scholars.’

Seven o’clock struck, and Wifredo exclaimed: ‘Pardon me, Don Hilario! The workmen have gone off, and so has my partner. I must
lock up without delay. Since I am aware that any invitation to ride home in my battered car will be declined, let me wish you a respectful good night. There is a certain haste; my English friends, the intellectual Graves family, are honouring my house with a visit, and hope to bring Miss Ava Gardner.’

Don Hilario caught his breath and clutched at Wifredo’s sleeve. ‘Do you mean the veritable Ava
Gardner?’ he asked slowly. ‘She… is here, in Majorca?’

‘Yes, the one inimitable Ava,’ Wifredo answered easily. ‘The Señores Graves assure me that she is as gracious and intelligent as she is beautiful.’

‘“Gracious and intelligent” indeed! “Gracious and intelligent” is petty praise! For me, Ava Gardner is the greatest artist alive!’

Ava did not, as it happened, come to Wifredo’s with us that
evening. She had made a trip to the fine sandy beach of Camp de Mar; but, the weather being bitterly cold – it was just before the fearful February freeze-up of 1956 – she alone was hardy enough to swim. Several carloads of admirers stood watching, and a roar of admiration rose as she tripped down the hotel steps in her bright Italian bathing costume and dived into the tempestuous waves. Yet no would-be
life-saver, we were told, jumped in after her; if only because Spaniards, though incurably romantic, are not altogether Quixotic. Later, Ava was whisked on to the Binisalem vineyards, where she spent so agreeable a time sampling our sole Majorcan vintage wine that we did not catch up with her again until midnight.

The next morning, Don Hilario drew Wifredo aside and said urgently: ‘Friend, tell
me about her!’

Hating to disappoint the Colonel, Wifredo answered: ‘A phenomenon! So gentle, so beautiful, so humorous.’

Don Hilario sighed. ‘Ah, Don Wifredo, your experience fills me with the greenest envy!’ He added in a sudden rush: ‘I have never, you know, accepted a gift or a favour from you, ever since I came to this factory. Not a cigarette, not a match, not a ride in your crazy automobile!
However, I will say that, unlike your boorish partner, you always show the utmost consideration for my feelings in this respect, never making any move which might be open to malicious misinterpretation; and for that I honour you. Indeed, I honour you so highly, and so commend your correctness,
that I feel emboldened to make a surprising request: one that you will, I am sure, recognize as being
on a quite different level from the mundane round of industry in the ambience of which we daily meet. Don Wifredo, I am a lonely old man; all winter long my wounds ache; I have few pleasures. Well… to be short, if you could, by any plea, prevail on your distinguished English friends to approach Miss Gardner…’

Wifredo answered: ‘Not another word, Don Hilario! And if anyone else in all Palma were
to ask this of me – even the Director of the Central Bank, upon whose good will my livelihood depends – I should say: “Impossible!” But when the most courageous soldier of our race makes such a request, how dare I rebuff him? I trust that the matter can be arranged before Miss Gardner leaves the island early this afternoon.’

A few minutes later our phone rang. ‘Robert,’ Wifredo said excitedly,
‘will you meet me at noon in the Café Mecca on a matter of the gravest importance? I cannot explain over the telephone.’

To my relief, Ava had read the marked poem and decided to accept it as a personal tribute; in fact, begged me to copy it out in long-hand and sign it for her.

‘With great pleasure,’ I said, ‘if you’ll do a trade. Ava, I want a print of your most supremely glamorous photograph,
inscribed: “To the heroic Colonel Don Hilario Tortugas y Postres, with the heartfelt admiration of Ava Gardner.” Let me write it down for you.’

‘Is “heartfelt admiration” strictly necessary?’

‘It’s essential!’

I wrote out the poem for Ava in a fair hand, and soon after she had flown back to Madrid (with four crates of Binisalem wine among her luggage) a splendidly large signed photograph arrived,
duly inscribed for the Colonel: a portrait, I was half-glad to see, of her exotic legend rather than of herself.

Rosa and Wifredo invited us to the most English dinner we had eaten in years: mulligatawny soup; roast beef with roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, a boiled cabbage; apple dumplings with cream; and (as Edward Lear has put it) ‘no end of Stilton cheese’. Wifredo even produced a bottle
of vintage port – how he got hold of either the Stilton or the port, beats me – and solemnly toasted Ava Gardner.

We all drank.

Then, in a voice thick with emotion, he announced: ‘Dear friends, in consequence of Don Hilario’s report to the Bank, delivered two days ago, I now have sole charge of the factory, being answerable to the Bank Director alone. Aníbal has been bought out and dismissed;
and I am empowered not only to arrange my own timber supplies, but to choose a new sales manager!’

We congratulated him riotously.

‘That is not all,’ he went on. ‘The “Nanniparkér” Nursery Towel-horse now goes into immediate production, as well as a similar contrivance, suggested by dear Rosa, for hoisting wet linen to the kitchen ceiling by means of a cord and pulley. It will equally serve,
in better weather, for hams, sausages, strings of red peppers, and ropes of onions. How original, and how very useful! I propose to name it “The Ava Gardner Drying Rack”. Each example will bear a beautiful coloured miniature of my benefactress, taken from the authentic photograph of her plunge into the sea at Camp de Mar. Do you consider that I need write to ask her permission?’

‘She would consider
it strictly unnecessary,’ I answered, sipping my port, cracking my walnuts, and thinking: ‘Dear Ava!’

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS
ago, Master Toni, the squat, bald, dark-eyed, muscular, smiling proprietor of our village garage, invited me to dinner on his Saint’s Day. The fiesta of San Antonio, which falls on January 17th, is always marked in Majorcan villages by the priest’s rather hilarious aspersion with holy water of as many asses, mules, sheep-dogs and motor-cars
as his parishioners may care to bring along to the Church door; and by a bonfire, lighted on the previous evening, which around midnight has usually died down low enough for
buñuelos
– a sort of doughnut – to be fried over the embers. On this occasion, the fire being still alive after morning mass, Master Toni’s wife Doña Isabel sent her children with shovels to salvage lumps of glowing charcoal
for the brazier under our dinner table. The main dish was missel-thrushes stewed in cabbage-leaves, with snails, octopus and saffron rice. We also ate smoked ham; slices of out-sized radish; the first pickled black olives of the season; Minorcan sheep-cheese; fig-bread; ordinary bread; and plenty of Binisalem red wine. I remember the missel-thrushes, because a German lady had been enraged to see
a pile of them heaped on the garage floor that morning. ‘How dare you massacre our beautiful German songbirds?’ she screamed.

‘Señora,’ Master Toni answered, ‘your German songbirds are ill-educated; they come to steal the olives. Olives are our main source of wealth: olives, and figs – figs such as I often watched you steal from my trees as you went down the path by our house this last September.’

Missel-thrushes are caught by a method once known as ‘bat-fowling’ in England, but now, I believe, extinct there. Two men station themselves a few paces apart, in one of the broad alleys down which the thrushes fly from their roosts among evergreen oaks near the mountain top. The bat-fowlers stretch across the alley a length of fishing-net lashed to two very long canes, held upright. At dawn,
the first coveys of thrushes, known as
tords d’auba,
descend on the olive groves and find themselves entangled in the net. Both canes are simultaneously flung forward and downward, after which the bat-fowlers wring the necks of whatever birds have been caught underneath. At about eight o’clock down flies a smaller wave of thrushes,
known as
tords de gran dia;
then no more can be expected until
the
tords de vespre,
or evening thrushes. Bat-fowling is one of the few sports in which the villagers engage. A mountain terraced steeply all the way up from the sea provides no level space large enough for a football field, or even a tennis court; and since 1906, when a passing traveller had his eye knocked out by a sling-stone flung by young Mateo of the Painted House – he had mischievously
aimed at the man’s pipe – the ancient Balearic sling has been officially banned even for rabbit-hunting.

Anyhow, Master Toni, having made merry on the Eve of San Antonio, and eaten quantities of
buñuelos
, had returned home for a couple of hours’ sleep, then started off at five o’clock to catch
tords d’auba
for our dinner. But along came the sexton, in overcoat and slippers, to say that his sister,
María the Spaghetti-maker, was desperately ill again and that the Doctor must be fetched at once from Sóller. So Master Toni climbed into his antiquated Studebaker; and by the time the Doctor had attended to María (on her death-bed these past fifteen years) and been driven back to Sóller, only the despised
tords de gran dia
were left to hunt. Nevertheless, Master Toni and a certain Sentiá Dog-beadle,
the village odd-job man, managed between them to bag two dozen – a remarkable catch that year. And very good they tasted.

Perhaps I should explain that María Spaghetti-maker had never made any spaghetti; it was her great-grandmother who plied the trade, but the nickname persisted in the female line. There is now a grown-up granddaughter who holds it, though she only sews gloves. Similarly, the
timorous and greedy Sentiá Dog-beadle inherited his nickname from an ancestor whose task had been to keep stray dogs from taking sanctuary on hot days in the cool of Palma Cathedral. ‘Sentiá’ is short for Sebastián. There are almost too many things which need explanation, once one begins to tell stories about our village.

After dinner, over the coffee and brandy, I found it easy to swear that
I had never eaten so well, or so much, in all my life.

‘Not even in Piccadilly, Don Roberto?’ asked Master Toni shrewdly.

‘Certainly not, I assure you!’

‘Well, Damián the Coachman, Sentiá Dog-beadle and I ate pretty well there, during our famous stay at the Regent
Palacio
Hotel.’

‘Why have you never told me of this visit to London?’

‘I am a busy man, you are a busy man. I have saved up the
long history of the Viscountess and the Short-haired Girl for this fiesta.’

Here then is Master Toni’s story, as I wrote it down that same evening. Respecting his inability to manage an initial
St, Sc, Sp
or
Sm
without an anticipatory
e,
I prefixed one to all the proper names which demanded it. Let that
e
stay as a convenient reminder of the estory-teller’s Espanishness.

THE VISCOUNTESS AND
THE SHORT-HAIRED GIRL

It all began one day in August when two gentlemen, both wearing black coats and striped trousers – hardly suitable clothes for the weather, which was of a barbarous heat – drove up in a very fine taxi from Palma and stopped at my garage. The chauffeur, who knew me, asked whether they might have a private word in my ear. ‘At the gentlemen’s service,’ I answered, ‘unless they
are trying to sell me something. I am excessively short of money this month.’