The Life and Death of a Spanish Town

Elliot Paul

• Publisher: Muriwai Books
• Year: 2018
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789120912
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

At the time of its first publication in 1937, The Life and Death of a Spanish Town was the first book to interpret to Americans the struggle of a people whose idyllic life was shattered by Fascist terror; it foreshadowed, with burning indignation against aggressors and outspoken sympathy for the obscure and simple men and women of Santa Eulalia, the alignment of forces all over the world today. Popular American author Elliot Paul, Elliot Paul's reputation rests securely on this book and his 1942 national bestseller, the Last Time I Saw Paris.

PART ONE—4000 B.C. to 1936 A.D.

1. Dawn and Moonlight

THERE is so much revolution and class war going on in all parts of the world that I believe it will be of interest to American readers to know how fascist conquest, communist and anarchist invasion, and the bloodiest war yet on record affect a peaceful town. By a town, I mean its people. I knew all of them, their means and aspirations, their politics and philosophy, their ways of life, their ties of blood, their friendships, their deep-seated hatreds and inconsequential animosities. Because Santa Eulalia is on an island, the inhabitants were unable to scatter and flee, and therefore I was able better to observe them and to know what happened to them as I shared their experience.

The town was very much like any American seaboard town except that the various races there had had six thousand years in which to be blended, and consequently the population was more homogeneous. Also the young men did not, as a rule, leave the island to seek their fortune elsewhere. Enough generalities! I feel self-conscious in writing about my dear friends with such objectivity. I loved them and their animals and the shadows of the trees that fell upon their houses. They divided their last pesetas and red wine and beans and gay spirit with me. I got away, and they did not. Their land is dying. Mine is not. This book is a debt I owe them.

Just before sunrise, the main street of Santa Eulalia and the countryside, spread fanlike behind it, began to awake. There was nothing reluctant or violent in the awakening, merely a few familiar sounds which seemed to accompany the heightening of the colors of the dawn. In front was the sea on which a few fishing boats were moving, too, in a leisurely fashion, leaving geometric wakes. The shutters scraped as Antonio raised them in the act of opening the café at Cosmi’s hotel, Ferrer’s donkey brayed, and because of the rumble of an iron-wheeled cart or the footsteps of an approaching fisherman the village dogs who had been sleeping in the dust of the roadway cocked their ears, stood up, stretched and walked in a dignified way to the sidewalk. Capitan, the oldest, bravest and most battered, was a sort of mastiff who belonged to Sindik, a village carpenter, one of the hardest-working men in Santa Eulalia and comparatively poor. Sindik had a gift for bonesetting and healing which kept him constantly in demand in all parts of the island, but because he understood only dimly the miracles he seemed to perform he considered that he had no right to accept money on account of an ability he possessed through no effort or merit of his own. Carpentry he had learned by painful apprenticeship, so he was willing to be paid for that, but he liked best to make large cartwheels and the huge devices by which mules, walking blindfolded in circles, pulled up water from wells to irrigate the fields. The men who needed cartwheels and waterwheels were not over-prosperous but they were not in a perpetual hurry, like the builders, so Sindik preferred to work for them and never got rich or even well-to-do. Later I shall have to tell you how his older son, as hard-working as his father but not very bright, was shot by a firing squad and fell back dead against a haystack, the base of which was soaked with blood. Not now. Let’s not think of it now, for if my friends in Santa Eulalia have had misfortunes and have been ruined and destroyed, before that for many years they had a wonderful life. I have never seen a better life anywhere, a life more suited to human limitations and capacities, a rhythm more in accord with beneficent natural surroundings, a verdant sub-tropical landscape and the sea.

The carpenter’s old dog Capitan had his morning meal in the rear of Cosmi’s, just after Antonio had opened the front shutters, built a wood fire in the range in the kitchen, put on the coffee urn, and set out the scraps from the previous night’s meal at the hotel. Antonio was hard of hearing and undemonstrative. He never petted the dogs and seldom spoke to them, neither did he ever forget that they liked to eat. Franco and Fanny, both males, strange to say, were the hotel dogs and the only ones Capitan, the fighter, would allow to be near him while he was eating.

This is not a dog story, and still the fate of the men and women is inextricably interwoven with that of their dogs and there are strays skulking fearfully in deserted alleys all over Spain who once got regular meals and had a name and a master.

In the happy days of Santa Eulalia, the moon shone over the land without the chill in the air that elsewhere makes the night inhospitable, and from May until November the men sat long hours after dinner in front of the cafés, drinking anis, cognac, cazalla or beer or the strong red wine of the country. They talked, argued, sang songs from Valencia or Aragon or native to Ibiza, ranging in mood from nostalgia to ribaldry. I can hear now, as I write (and I wish I could not), their voices in a favorite refrain.

There is much in that song evocative of the character of Santa Eulalia and of Spain, the wistful attitude toward that which has contributed to pleasure, the acknowledgment of temporary material insufficiency with hope expressed immediately afterward, a joy in speculative patterns which expand and contract so effortlessly. The same feelings, translated into terms of national finance, defense or self-government, have chaotic results. They make for agreeable citizens but not zealous ones, brave soldiers who are born to lose a fight bravely.

Sindik, bonesetter and carpenter, was not to be found in front of cafés on moonlit nights. He worked with an application that vibrated in his little shop, from six in the morning until noon and from two-thirty until seven, and he slept hard at night. It was his nature to work, actually to toil without remission, and there were several others in the village whose inner forces impelled them to constant exertion, as if they were afraid to stop. Pedro, a jovial mason’s helper, had an uncontrollable energy. It was gospel in Santa Eulalia that if one drop of rain fell, work was off until the next day. Pedro was the first on every job and the last to quit. Other terrific workers were Ferrer, Pep Salvador (brother of Cosmi and Antonio), José of Can Josepi, Guarapiñada the P. T. Barnum plus Patrick Henry of the town. You shall hear much more of all of these, but just now I am trying to convey that a lot of hard work, just like American hard work, went on in Santa Eulalia coincidentally with the most artistic and successful near-idleness ever achieved by pleasure-loving and lucky folk. It was the blend of everything that was charming and inspiring.

Cosmi’s hotel was closed by Cosmi himself between two and three in the morning and was opened by Antonio, his older brother, an hour later. The hard-working men were friendly with the easy-going ones, and neither envied the other. The most indolent, my dear friend Guillermo, the blacksmith, or Toniet Pardal, the fisherman, was expressing himself in indolence as Ferrer or Pedro in work. Nature furnished labor for those who needed it and food for those who did not. The poorest man in town was Jaume, another carpenter, who was poor because his wife had been ill all their married life and had a child every year and he could never get money enough ahead to buy a lathe. Jaume did not starve, but he did not eat well and his children were dirty and ragged but otherwise pretty good kids. I am unlucky at dice, and the only times I wanted to lose in Santa Eulalia was when Jaume was in the game. (The stakes were drinks for the crowd, total cost about four cents, U.S.) Instead, Jaume almost always got stuck. I don’t mean that Jaume gambled extensively, or drank as much as his more prosperous neighbors. He came into Xumeu’s place, the nearest cafe, about twice a day in good weather. Still, Jaume asked me one of the hardest questions I have ever been confronted with. Five minutes before a gunboat was about to shell the town he said to me, in a bewildered but not hysterical tone:

“What shall I do? My wife can hardly walk. And anyway, where should we go?”

I was very tired and his question set in motion an almost forgotten verse of T. S. Eliot. “What shall we do? What shall we ever do?” I knew that it ended up with something about a quiet game of chess, and as I walked away and Jaume stayed, my absurd brain was trying to fill in the intervening lines, over and over, as I stumbled along a rocky road and heard the whine of shells behind me.

Jaume was not hit, neither was his wife, nor any of his ragged children. Be reassured. No sad parts are coming for a long time in this story. The severest damage done by that particular bombardment was to the roof of the house of a wealthy retired Swiss whose last house had been destroyed in Russia and who had come to Santa Eulalia, as I had, to find tranquillity.

Most of the Ibicenca women were healthy and strong, with eyes alive and a ready smile, and because long centuries of custom had defined their lines of conduct they were able to be quickly friendly without being sexually sly. Their native costume, which occasional stray painters have made hideous, was becoming to them as good healthy women and was worn by nearly all of them who worked out-of-doors because it covered them from head to foot, several thicknesses, and kept their skin pure white in spite of Ibiza’s strong sun. Catalina, who worked at Cosmi’s, was one of the whitest and prettiest, a blue-eyed daughter of the Phoenicians who had once inhabited the island. The loveliest brunette, I think, was the daughter of Pere des Puig (pronounced Pooch) a dry farmer on a rocky terraced hill who played the accordion for dances in order to earn an extra duro each week. As he played he wore an unchanging expression of deep melancholy on his face but I think it was not because he had to work so hard to support his large family. He was lonely. He lived too far back on the hillside to see or talk with men on week days and on Sunday he had to sit apart from them, up on the stage of the local theatre, and play tunes which everybody had heard until they were tired of them. His slow smile indicated a broad sense of humor which he seldom had a chance to exercise. Pere des Puig was not driven to work by any inner necessity. He would have liked better being idle but he was fond of his seven daughters and he managed to dress them well and a little quaintly when they went to school. It was a beautiful family because, although Pere did not know it, his strong nimble hands were as beautiful as his oldest daughter’s remarkable face.

In the very early morning Pere des Puig would feed his animals, hobble his sheep, stake out his goat, smear a large slab of home-made dark bread with olive oil, hitch up his mule and drive to the seashore, a mile distant all down hill, for a load of seaweed to use as fertilizer. As he bumped over the stony road, perched on his iron-rimmed two-wheel cart, he would eat the bread and oil and look out over the dawn colored sea with about the same expression of melancholy that he wore Sunday evenings in the dance hall. At the same time, in the backyard of Cosmi’s hotel the three dogs, Capitan, Franco and Fanny, would be eating the scraps Antonio had set out for them.

This was a time of day when the town belonged to those who later might have seemed the most unfortunate, the old women who had to work outside their homes and the young girls whose prospects were so poor that they had to make them poorer by working as servants. In Santa Eulalia the women were glad to work in the fields. They loved the fragrance of alfalfa, their backs were supple enough to bend for hours over sweet-potato vines. Wheat, corn and melons they understood, and nearly every family had some land of its own. Working in other folks’ kitchens was the last resort.

Catalina, who worked at Cosmi’s, was, as I have mentioned, one of the loveliest girls in town. She had slate-blue eyes and honey-colored hair, perfect wrists and ankles, rarer still in Spain a pleasing voice, and a complete ignorance of everything that a woman does not need to know. About five o’clock she would come in through the back gate which was never locked or even closed and say good morning to old Antonia Masear, her companion in drudgery.

The Royalty Hotel, on the north-west corner of the public square, was intended for the aristocracy and transient foreigners, and had an atmosphere entirely different from Cosmi’s. In its backyard stood the most beautiful palm tree on the island, and in order that the ugly structure which served for a hotel might be built, the best small specimen of Moorish architecture on the island had been torn down.

Far along the shore, among the worn and pocketed ledges, could be seen, before sunrise, a strange figure of a man, Platé, nicknamed the Admiral. He would have a short fishing rod or a staff in his hand and he knew where the fish and the small octopi would be lurking and feeding. No one knew the shores or the hills as Platé did. Each mushroom, plant or herb was his familiar friend. He had long shaggy hair and a long unkempt beard, both of which he had shaved clean once a year, in midsummer. His legs and arms were thin, his voice a resonant bass, his face was tanned and wrinkled, except for his large dark blue eyes almost hidden by his shock of hair. He laughed, grinned and talked to himself when he was alone. In company he was silent until the wine began to work on him. Then he sang, wild Moorish songs (he knew Spanish, French, Catalan, Italian and Arabic well) and accompanied himself on the table or bar with the heel of his hand in imitation of African drums. I have heard him walking home drunk in the brightest moonlight, carrying on a reproachful and defensive conversation aloud, one voice in Spanish, the other in French, sometimes softly and persuasively, often reaching an angry crescendo so that two of his selves would be bellowing at each other.

At dawn with his trousers legs rolled up above his diminutive knees, he would be walking along the rocks at the water’s edge, around the point which sheltered the harbor to the north, or the other way from town, by the mouth of the small river, looking for his breakfast. He did not catch all the fish or poulpes that he saw, but chose them as if the Mediterranean were his market, and its produce were laid out for him. Fish, mushrooms, wild strawberries, wild leeks, wild asparagus formed his steady diet. He did odd jobs just often enough to keep himself in wine, and tended a few flower and vegetable gardens because he was the best gardener in the Balearic Islands and was proud of his skill. Because of him, the backyards of Cosmi’s and the Royalty were not like other backyards but were luxuriant with flowers—dahlias, golden glow, phlox, petunias, asters, small orange and lemon trees, all planted by Platé. They would grow for him almost like performing animals. There were many gardens in town, nearly every house had flowers growing near it, but Platé had absorbed all the arts of the Moors in his long stay in Africa and had learned from the French how to trim and take care of trees.

When I first went to Santa Eulalia, I hired a house for a friend who was coming and asked Platé if he would make a garden in front of it. He refused, politely but firmly, and later that day Cosmi told me why. The land had formerly been Platé’s own. In fact, Platé had been one of the largest landowners in the town, years back. It seemed that he had had a wife of whom he was very fond, and the wife had developed some ailment that baffled not only the island doctors (of whom the least said the better) but doctors on the mainland as well. Platé had worried until he was ill, too, and had spent a fortune trying to cure her. After she died, Platé started drinking and gambling until he had lost everything he had left. He was unhappy and morose to the point of madness until the remains of his property and money were gone. Then suddenly he became aloof and merry. He moved into a little shack not larger than eight feet by four, on the top of the hill beside the church, slept on straw, fished for his meals and worked only when he needed wine, maybe six hours a week. One of the jobs he would consent to do now and then was to fetch bundles of rosemary for kindling fires, and each morning the fragrant smoke of rosemary would pervade the town.

Old friends! Beloved island of Ibiza! My chosen town! How can I believe that you are of the past, cut off from me as irrevocably as the legendary days of the Moors, the camps of the Romans, the settlements of Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Iberians, all lost in the mirrors of history? You are not all dead, my former comrades. There are dawns in unending series to come, and the rising moon will lift the identical shape of Ibiza from the darkened sea. Shall I ever find your equal or your equivalent? Can I survive another transplantation? Shall I be always saying, “Those were the good days. They have been destroyed.” Or can I keep those scenes a while by re-enacting them, with a pin on the discs of my brain, until they are worn and emit false tones and eventually are discarded?

2. Of Fish and Fishermen

FROM the depths of the sea and the hidden ledges and alternating patches of seaweed and sand came daily the evidence of seasons more mysterious than those familiar ones of the verdant slopes of hills. In approaching Ibiza from the sea, at night, after pitching and swaying in the rough cross currents which had menaced the Phoenicians and the Greeks, one would see in the distance a constellation of low lights, rising and falling with the swell, sometimes obscured, then reappearing. It was the fishing fleet. And later, when the passenger ship passed between them, just as the starlight was thinning, one would stand at the rail and try to guess which boat was Captain Juan’s, which was manned by Mateo Rosa and his cousins, which by the curly-headed man whose child was sick in the alley leading to Jaume’s carpenter shop, and in which of the dories was Edmundo, peering through steel-rimmed glasses, or Toniet Pardal, who had borrowed fifty pesetas from me to buy his skiff and was repaying me, through all eternity, with presents of lobsters, ink-fish, daggers forbidden by the Guardia Civil, rare shells, old coins and his unending conversation.

I think there are no better fishing grounds than those lying north and east of Ibiza, and let no one imagine that the tales of hardship and death and perpetual danger (such as those of Hugo or Melville or the chroniclers of the Newfoundland Banks) apply to the happy-go-lucky crews who set out from Santa Eulalia. There was no ice in the rigging, no bullying skipper, no waiting women wringing their hands on the shore. On the contrary, if the weather was the least bit rough they stayed in town, strolling from café to café, and by nightfall would be roaring but never belligerent. There was no reason for them to risk their necks. For thousands of years, the sea which lay within convenient rowing distance had yielded richly whenever the waters were calm and if the people who remained on land, either in Ibiza or Valencia or Barcelona,...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• THE MEN AND WOMEN OF SANTA EULALIA
• PART ONE-4000 B.C. to 1936 A.D.
• PART TWO-July 14 to September 15, 1936
• POSTSCRIPT
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER