Complete Short Stories (33 page)

‘Juvenile high spirits,’ sighed Father Blas when I complained. ‘It would be virtually impossible to discover the names of the culprits, because in San Rococo we do not encourage tale-bearing. Besides, your son’s lack
of cooperation in our Christian devotions…’

So Juan’s bicycle was repaired at our expense, but it was stolen, early one Monday morning, from the school lockup inside the building while he was at his studies. I went to protest that same night. Father Blas beamed, and would not take the matter seriously. He had no doubt but that one of his sportive pupils was playing an innocent joke on my son.
The solution – please God! – would appear the next day, and I need hardly disquiet myself, since the lockup was under the charge of a reliable seminarist. ‘If
it does not turn up tomorrow,’ I said, ‘please report the matter to the Civil Guard without delay. My wife and I are flying to Madrid tonight and cannot attend to it ourselves. Juan’s is a distinctive bicycle, and even if it were repainted
–’

‘Not another word, my dear sir! What you say is perfectly logical,’ cried Father Blas.

Juan’s pillar-box-red bicycle was not returned by any sportive pupil. On the following Monday another bicycle was stolen, and on the Monday after that five more – all non-Protestant machines. On my return from Madrid, I went to see Father Blas again, and asked for news. Father Blas admitted to having taken
no practical steps in the matter as yet, since the school had been engaged in a severe course of spiritual exercises (this was a sideswipe at the uncooperative Juan), but tomorrow, without fail, the reliable seminarist would advise the Civil Guard of the mysterious disappearances.

I said firmly that unless Juan got back his legally imported British bicycle within the next ten days, I should expect
San Rococo College to repay me its value, which amounted to two thousand pesetas, including duty – or, say, fifty dollars. Father Blas shook hands warmly on my departure; he would write to me at once after a deliberation with his reverend colleagues. His answer came just before the end of term, enclosed with the school bill: a terse note to the effect that in the considered opinion of the lawyers
retained by San Rococo College, the said college incurred no responsibility for the disappearance of bicycles from its lockup, since no particular charge had been made to scholars for the privilege of keeping them there during school hours.

One soon learns in Majorca never to sue for anything so unimportant as a bicycle. An action, I knew, would cost far more than the bicycle’s value, and a year
or two must elapse before the case would come to court; besides, as my barber pointed out when I discussed the matter with him, the Church always wins – always has won, except during the iniquitous Liberal regimes of the early nineteenth century and under the equally iniquitous Republic. So I simply took Juan away, wrote Father Blas a courteous letter thanking him for the care he had lavished
on my son’s education, and omitted to pay the school fees. It cuts both ways: San Rococo would never sue me – an action would cost them far more than the value of the school fees, and my counterclaim for the bicycle would do the college no good, especially if our lawyer cited the six other thefts as evidence of negligence.

Since then, Juan has taken most of his lessons at home, but attends French
classes at the
Alliance Française.
And William, now being educated in England, has lent him his bicycle during term-time. ‘And if you ever forget to fasten it with a chain and padlock while I’m away, I’ll kill you!’

This brings us to February 1957, when I gave some lectures in the States. My Majorcan friends were anxious about my voyage to that land of gangsters, neurotics, Red Indians, and sheriffs’
posses, so familiar to them from the cinema; the more pious of them, I believe, burned candles on my behalf to their favourite saints. I had a clamorous welcome when I returned home bearing my sheaves with me – candy, nylons, rock-’n’-roll records, Polaroid film, ballet slippers, a Panamanian shrunken head – and a respectful salutation in the local press. To my relief, I found William’s bicycle
safely chained and padlocked to the newel post at the bottom of our staircase.

At eight o’clock next morning, as I dressed unhurriedly for breakfast (to be followed by a revision of Juan’s Latin exercises done in my absence), I was startled by a yell and a fearful crash. I assumed that Juan had been celebrating the shrunken head in a truly Indian orgy and had accidentally knocked over the crockery
cupboard. ‘Stop it!’ I shouted.

Juan appeared, looking scared. ‘It’s outside,’ he said. ‘I think they must be fighting again.’

Two years ago, the staircase of our apartment house had been the scene of a sanguinary battle. A respectable Majorcan couple living on the fourth floor had objected to the constant flamenco singing of a servant girl employed by a non-Majorcan woman living below them.
In Majorca, nobody sings or dances flamenco except gipsies and girls in the red-light district and occasional American lady tourists who buy castanets and attend (let us call it) Pascualita Pastís’s School of Spanish Dancing to justify the shawls, tortoise-shell combs, and earrings they have bought in Seville. The Majorcan couple called the flamenco-singing girl by a bad name. She flew at them, bit
the wife’s hand to the bone, and broke the husband’s ankle. Her employers, who hated the Majorcan couple – their old aunt’s venerable sewing machine shook the ceiling above them far into the night, and their young child played at ninepins all day – did nothing by way of dissuasion. The incident gave our street quite a bad name.

But this can hardly be another fight, I thought, as I hurriedly put
on my slippers. The flamenco singer and her mistress had moved away long ago, and the whole building was respectable again. We were the only non-Majorcans left, so far as I knew.

I ran out of the apartment and stood on the landing. As I touched the iron banisters, a drop of blood fell on my hand and I heard a gurgling noise overhead. I looked up. A young man with contorted features, glaring eyes,
and a bleeding forehead stood poised on the banisters one floor above me. He was about to leap down the well for the second time. I shouted in Spanish: ‘Get off from there, and behave in a Christian manner!’ – but he screamed and jumped. I made a grab at him as he flashed past. His weight was too much; down he went to the bottom of the well, struck the bicycle
with the same crashing noise that
had startled me only a minute before, rolled over, and lay still.

This second attempt at suicide looked pretty successful; all I know about first aid is how to apply a tourniquet above a gun shot wound in a limb – I learned that during World War I – and how to administer morphia if anything worse has happened. So I ran downstairs, then out of the front hall and around the corner to the Civil
Guard barracks. I reported, panting, to the Guard on duty: ‘A man has just tried to kill himself outside my apartment door. Please fetch a doctor.’

‘One moment, sir! Do you wish to make a charge? If so, you must wait until the office opens; the desk sergeant has not yet breakfasted.’

‘No, no, man! He may be dying, and though I regret disturbing the sergeant’s breakfast –’

‘Is the individual
personally known to you?’

‘No.’

‘Does he seem to be a foreigner?’

‘I could not say. The important thing is to fetch a doctor.’

‘I cannot take that upon myself. Who would pay him? Why not fetch a doctor yourself? Try the nursing home down the road. It would surely be quicker than waking the sergeant and asking him to wake the lieutenant.’

I saw the force of his argument, and hurried to the
nursing home. By chance, a car labelled ‘MEDICO’ had just drawn up there. I buttonholed the driver as he got out: ‘Please, Doctor, come at once to my house – no more than a hundred yards away. A man has jumped from the third floor and hit the paved floor.’

‘Let me alarm the nuns,’ he said. ‘Myself, I am only an analyst. My surgical training lies many years behind me.’

I thanked him for his kindness.
Well, I thought, we had better get the madman on a mattress and under a blanket, if he is still alive. Returning to the scene of the incident, I found a great crowd of jabbering neighbours – but no victim. It seems that he had recovered enough to crawl up two flights of stairs and start making a third gallant attempt at suicide from the landing, but that Juan had summoned the rest of my family,
who held him until help arrived. Then the midwife who lives in our building, and has had no lack of experience with excitable husbands, took charge.

When all had quieted down again, a couple of Civil Guards turned up. Since the would-be suicide proved to be a respectable Majorcan grocer, who blamed his fall on a sudden blackout caused by an anti-catarrhal injection given him by a French doctor
in Marseilles a few days previously, the sergeant was able to report the incident as a regrettable loss of balance overcoming Don Pedro Tal y Cual while he descended the stairs from a business visit to friends on the third floor. ‘Any important damage done to your machine,’ the sergeant said to me, ‘will be paid, naturally, by the unfortunate man himself – against whom, it is hoped, you will bring
no charge.’

‘No, no,’ I answered. ‘After all, he is our neighbour and a Palma man – not by any means to be suspected of criminal intent.’

‘They take a lot of punishment, these British bicycles,’ said the blacksmith admiringly as he straightened the fork. ‘If it had been one of ours, that grocer would not have bounced off the frame. By the way, how is the poor fellow?’

‘Suffering from a headache,
I am told, and a grazed elbow.’

‘A miracle!’

‘This is a very historic bike,’ Juan told the blacksmith. ‘It has sent one man to prison and saved another’s life.’

A week had not passed before the bicycle was stolen from the lockup at the
Alliance Française
during one of Juan’s evening classes. He went at once to the Civil Guard barracks and reported the loss. ‘Run away, boy, you are far too young
to make a proper charge,’ he was told. ‘Besides, the charge office is closed until tomorrow morning. Ask your professor to come here at about ten o’clock.’

Juan trailed miserably home, late for supper. ‘William’s bike is stolen,’ he managed to force out between sobs, ‘and William said he’d kill me…’

‘Wasn’t it chained?’

‘No, that’s the worst of it. On the way to class, I remembered that I’d
forgotten the chain and padlock, so I biked back, but then I couldn’t remember what it was I’d forgotten, so I whizzed down to the class again and hoped it would be all right. But it wasn’t!’

We gave Juan some sausage and coffee, and then hurried to the port. The night boat to Barcelona had not yet sailed. I asked the Civil Guard sergeant at the barrier whether an English-type bicycle had come
through, by any chance. ‘We have just had one stolen,’ I explained. ‘Sometimes, they say, thieves steal bicycles and hurry them aboard at the last minute, aware that official charges cannot be made at this late hour.’

‘No, sir. No such bicycle has passed through this barrier. But you are misinformed. This being an era of prosperity, the Barcelona fences are now interested only in stolen motor
bicycles.’

‘We shall never see that historic bike again,’ Juan mourned. ‘I can’t face William when he comes home at Easter.’

Since bicycles are occasionally borrowed for a joy ride and then abandoned, we went to the Lost Property Office at the Town Hall, where municipal policemen bring them in. No luck.

The man in charge advised us against reporting the loss to the Civil Guard. ‘If they do
find your bicycle, you may never get it back. It will be held in evidence until the case comes up in court.’

‘Better that than never, surely?’ I asked.

‘A distinction without a difference, I fear, sir,’ he answered gloomily.

I regret not taking his advice. Although by this time the Civil Guard had forgotten about the Minorcan prisoner, and associated the bicycle
only with an attempted suicide,
they made me put the loss on record. And the very next day Juan’s best friend at the
Alliance Française
happened to spot the bicycle in a disreputable alley, some distance away, propped unattended against a wall. We celebrated the discovery with a chicken dinner. But a Civil Guard called soon afterward to inquire whether the bicycle had been recovered. We reported that – God be praised! – it was
in our possession once more.

‘My friend Pepe found it in Oil Street,’ said Juan.

‘Who is this Pepe? What is his surname? Where does he live?’

Today I have been ordered to appear before the judge in the matter of ‘a summary which instructs itself concerning the ninety-sixth bicycle abstraction of the current year; on the penalty of the prescribed fine.’ It occurs to me that our new Captain-General
may have started tightening things up and demanding vengeance on bicycle thieves, and that the lieutenant of the Civil Guard may suspect Juan’s friend Pepe of abstracting the bicycle himself. I don’t know whether the difference between abstraction and robbery is the same in the States as in Spain. Here, if the lockup had been really locked, or if Juan had remembered to chain the bicycle, and
if the thief had then used force to possess himself of it, why, that would have been robbery, and worth several more years in jail.

I don’t see Pepe anywhere around, nor do I expect to see him marched up presently between a couple of Civil Guards. Though not a respectable Majorcan (which would exempt him from all suspicion), he happens to be even better placed: his father is the new Civil Guard
captain at the other barracks, a fire-eater from Estremadura.

I
F I DO
not know what degree of mutual confidence exists in the United States between income-tax official and private citizen, this is so because the question does not immediately concern me. I have never in my life been asked to fill out an American income-tax return; as a British non-resident I have all my American earnings painlessly taxed at source, and there the matter
ends. In Great Britain, of which by an ingenious legal quirk I am ‘deemed to be a resident, though permanently domiciled abroad’, my earnings are also taxed at source; but I am at least allowed to employ an income-tax consultant, or rather a pair of them – Messrs Ribbons & Winder of Aquarium Road, Rhyl – in my defence. Every year they send me a form to fill in (we British fill in, not out, I don’t
know why) and discreetly advise me how, by clever albeit legal devices, to get a chunk of my forfeited earnings refunded. This year, however, they took twelve months to conclude their business, because the Bank of England (‘Safe as the Bank of England!’) admitted that it had lost certain documents relevant to my case – the Government meanwhile enjoying an interest-free loan of my money. Unfair,
surely, to Graves, who left his country only for his country’s good?