Seagulls in My Soup (4 page)

I turned to inspect the man who was shaking hands with Rory. For a moment, as I took in his black suit, black fedora, and black armband, I didn't recognize him. Then he turned to me and flashed a wide smile as he stabbed a hard, calloused hand at me and crinkled his blue eyes. With a shock I realized that this was José, one of the fishermen who, in their blue denim pants and jackets, and straw sandals, waved cheery greetings to me out on the bay, and sometimes slapped my back in the bodega and
hola
'd and
Cómo está
'd me, grinning and joking, on normal, everyday Days of the Living. José and I had something in common—we had both served in the navies of our respective lands. For that reason José's Castilian was good and understandable.

“How are you,
Señor
Jones?” He pronounced my name “Honays.”

“I see you're all dressed up,” I observed stupidly. “Going to church today?”

“Si, Todos los Santos . . .
All Saints Day.” José gave O'Boggarty and me a weak, sad grin as the Irishman flashed a warning look my way.

José looked at O'Boggarty. “You're Irish,” he said.

Rory nodded, his wide-open, innocent eyes dead serious.

“Catholic?” asked José.

“Yes, of course!” said O'Boggarty, as if he'd never spent an hour in his life ridiculing his Jesuit teachers in Dublin.

José turned to me. “English,” he stated.

“No, Welsh,” I replied. I didn't wait for The Question. “But we have our own church—it's sort of like the Catholic church, only we don't have popes, we have poets.”

That went completely over José's head. O'Boggarty glowered darkly at me from under his brow and paid for José's glass of wine; wine so red it looked as if it had been collected from the drips of the bleeding-heart picture on the wall.

José beamed at me. “Good. Look, you don't have your ancestors here—your family dead—so why don't you come along with us? We will not be long in church, and then we are going to the cemetery for lunch.”

He did not bother to ask
Señora
José if it was in order. Instead he reached over to the eldest of his two silent little lads, who must have been about eight, and firmly pulled the boy to his side. “We have a whole piglet. Roasted. Manuelito here killed it last night on the kitchen table.” He squeezed his eldest son's shoulder proudly. “Cut its throat. It took the little whore at least a half-hour to lose its blood and die . . . and the noise,
señors,
you should have heard it! Yes, Manuelito did a good job. We're very proud of him, very proud indeed. He's going to be a big, strong man, just like his father, hey?” José turned and shot a beam at his wife, who duly fluttered her face as she gazed at her eldest.

José, glowing with pride, turned back to O'Boggarty and me. His face took on a crafty aspect. He looked as if he knew what would entice us for sure. “Wine, too—I've four whole carafes! And a chicken, and shrimp, and roasted potatoes, and fish . . . She cooks fish
muy bien,
the best in Ibiza!”

Rory O'Boggarty laughed. “Sure!” he cried in his best Limerick-Castilian, as he grasped the little pig-slaughterer's hand and shook it. “Sure, Josélito, Capitán Honays and I will be very happy to come with you!”

I nipped back to
Cresswell
and left a note for Sissie: “Gone to Hades, back at four.” Then I half-ran to catch up with the rotund little fisherman, his rotund little wife, the pig-sticker boy, the innocent younger-yet boy, their silent ladylike daughter, the rattle-waving, malicious baby, and the diminutive, red-headed Irish leprechaun, as they wended their way gravely to the church.

The mass was sung by a lavishly caparisoned priest, surprisingly young-looking. His Latin was good, even though he called out the words as if he were reading off a ship's manifest. The crowd—and it was a crowd—packed the church and, unemotionally, it seemed to me, chanted the responses and made the proper motions, presumably at the proper times. During the high point of the mass, however, while the host was raised by the priest, I was distracted by a small bird which had somehow strayed into the building and was now the cynosure of the eyes of everyone in the congregation under the age of fourteen. This pleased me greatly. After the mass was over I stepped outside jauntily, thinking about the little bird. It was as if God had sent us a lighthearted reminder that He was still alive and well and thinking of us—or at least of the children.

We reached the town cemetery, half as old as time and twice as old as space, after a walk of a mile or so. Rory O'Boggarty, who had emerged from the church as if his book had just been featured on a best-seller list, was something of an authority on the history of Ibiza. “Sure, this cemetery was originally a heathen burial site—that's before the Phoenicians arrived and built a temple here, dedicated to their chief female goddess, it was. Her name was Tannit.”

“Sounds like a sunburn lotion,” said I, trying to keep the party as lighthearted as I'd felt watching the bird flutter around in the gloomy church.

“Acch, it's a terrible man y'are at your lessons!” said the leprechaun, hurling a glower at me, but good-naturedly.

The whole Ibizan family was smiling at him, with the exception of the fat baby, who threw its rattle at him and pouted a deep frown. I immediately made up my mind to buy the baby a real rattle, a real
man's
rattle—like the ones they whirl at international soccer matches—as soon as I could, and to put the child at the very top of my Christmas list.

At a dignified pace, with O'Boggarty holding forth on the history of every clump of grass we passed, we all proceeded up a grassy knoll, which was bestrewn with tombs. Not your everyday, Calvinistic flat slabs, which look so definite and permanent, as if whoever is below them will never get out, under any circumstances; no, these were more like small cottages, but covered with carvings of angels and cherubs (some of which looked startlingly like the fat baby—I made up my mind to buy it a trumpet instead of a rattle). Some of the family vaults looked like little palaces, as if doting parents had ordered tiny models of Versailles to be built for their spoiled royal brats. I noted that the people who were gathered gravely around these stone wedding cakes were, in the main, wealthy-looking.

Other vaults were much simpler. They had rounded roofs, and were shaped something like beehives. They were generally discolored by dampness, which had caused green moss to grow on the stone roofs. These tombs looked like so many green-painted skulls, with their jaws buried in the ground, as if they were biting the earth.

Soon we came to a small version of these beehive tombs. It was about fifteen feet in diameter at its widest, at ground level. It was almost overgrown with moss and a kind of ivy, some of which had grown over the low black iron door. The door was rounded at the top to form an arch, and reminded me of a skull's eye socket.

While
la señora
unloaded the perambulator of the ladylike child, the picnic hamper, and the now-grinning baby, all of whom and which she dumped unceremoniously on the grass, we men (including the pig-sticking eldest son), being
men,
took charge of the situation and cleared the fronds of overgrowth from the little iron door. The fronds were dry and crackled as we cleared them, like snapping sinews.

On the door was a picture frame. Behind its glass, once José had cleaned it with a handkerchief (a clean one, courtesy of Sissie, which I had passed him) we saw a dozen photographic portraits, now yellow with age and exposure. They were all, it seemed to me, of the same small, dark man and the same small, dark woman. But José proudly pointed out who was who. We found that we were, in fact, looking at his mother and father, his father's mother and father, his father's father's mother and father . . . and so on, back to about the time when Disraeli (illegally and without permission) bought the Suez Canal on behalf of the Widow of Windsor.

Respectfully, José then stood back, delved in the pockets of his black trousers, and extracted an iron key so large that it looked as if it had been the key to the Bastille. Solemnly he inserted it into the keyhole in the tiny iron door, and forced the key around. The lock grated, then sprang with a clunk. I watched O'Boggarty's face as José placed Sissie's handkerchief over the shoulder of his black jacket and, screwing up his face, heaved.

O'Boggarty stood there, his red hair looking as if it were about to stand on end, his blue-green eyes wide open, staring, gaping in silence. He looked like a small child at a magic show, expecting a white rabbit to come popping out of José's sleeve.

The iron door creaked and squealed and cursed on its hinges, with José heaving away at it in jerks, until it stood wide open. Following José, at his beckoning, we went inside, me at the fisherman's heels, almost consumed with curiosity, feeling like Howard Carter must have felt when he reached the last door before Tutankhamen; and O'Boggarty, silent except for his heavy breathing, close behind me; then the eldest son behind him.

By the light of the butane lamp which José held out in front of him, we stepped down about six feet, down stone steps which seemed to be carved out of the actual hillside. At the bottom of the steps was a room about twelve feet square, with a stone floor. The room was surrounded on each wall by faded, heavy red velvet curtains.

As we looked on in silence José reached around one of the curtains and brought out a large card table, about four feet square. This he unfolded and set up in the center of the floor. Next he reached around and brought out five folding chairs, which he set up around the table. Then, rapidly, he told the little pig-sticker, his pride and joy, to bring down the men's food. I realized that the females and the unproved son and the fat baby were to remain outside. This was a job for
men
only.

Soon the tablecloth was laid—a lovely embroidered thing, all white and green and gold—and on it was laid a feast fit for a whole hierarchy, leave alone a king. The baby pig looked succulent (so did the eldest son's face as he gazed proudly at his handiwork). The chicken was half sliced already by
la señora,
who kept up a running barrage of chatter at her husband through the tomb door from the sunlight above.

O'Boggarty, who was a bit of a trencherman, looked now as if he had completely forgotten he was in a tomb, as his eyes wandered over the roast chicken and a dish of fresh green vegetables, and the bottles of wine—dark green, long-necked, slightly crusted, and obviously of a respectable vintage.

José yelled up through the tomb door. Something came clattering down the steps. José bent and picked it up, whistling in his teeth all the while. It was a bottle opener. José opened all four bottles and slowly, carefully, poured the dark red liquid, which seemed to have a life of its own, into the
twenty-two
crystal glasses which the pig-sticker had gently laid out on the table in a row.

That done, José stood back, his blue eyes gleaming in the light of the gas lamp. There was a dead silence, even from the sunlit land of the living outside the tomb door. O'Boggarty and I, fascinated, watched José as he stood, smiling at us. The pig-sticker stuck out his chest, proud to be a man among men. Suddenly, from somewhere came a wail. O'Boggarty's face blanched. Then he realized that the fat baby had decided to cry. His tenseness eased momentarily, and he grinned wanly at José.

José, savoring the holy moment, stood for a few seconds longer; then, just as suddenly as the fat baby had cried, he turned on his heel and pulled aside the curtain behind him. Even as we stared, all three of us—the pigsticker fascinated, me curious, and O'Boggarty in horror, José pulled aside the other curtains on the other three sides of the chamber. In a few seconds we were surrounded by glass coffins, and in each of them a desiccated body with a grinning skull and brown, leathery-looking remnants of skin and flesh hanging from the bones.

José grabbed a glass of wine and toasted loudly,
“A los muertos
! To the dead!”

I had, before I knew it, a glass in my hand, too. “To the living!” I saluted. José wouldn't understand anyway.

Just as the eldest son raised his glass there was a clatter. I stared around. O'Boggarty had fainted clean away, flat out on the floor. José flung a questioning look at me.

“He had a bit too much to drink last night,” I explained.

“Oh,” said José.

By the time O'Boggarty came around, José, the eldest son, and I (and presumably the unfit and females outside) had consumed as fine a cold picnic lunch as you could expect to find south of the French frontier. We, the men, the privileged-with-the-dead, down below, had quaffed between us the whole four bottles of very good wine. It had a fine bouquet and a nutty flavor (which I thought suitable for the occasion).

O'Boggarty stirred and groaned. I took him a glass of wine. He opened his eyes. He looked at me. He stared at the young pig-sticker. He gawped wildly at José. His head spun around to gaze again at the dear departed. His eyes widened, as if he were in absolute terror. Suddenly he was up. He shot off the ground. He wailed and slobbered. He tore himself away from my grasp and skittered up the steps and out into the sunlight as José, astounded, gazed after him. I wended my way, as steadily as I could, to the top of the vault steps, and squinted through the strong sunlight all around.

There was
la señora,
weeping softly, on all fours, gathering together all the pieces of the meal, which O'Boggarty had scattered in his mad flight. There was the baby, howling its fat face out. There was the small, ladylike female child, as silent as ever. There was the still-a-child boy. And there, away down the hill, haring through the graveyard, was the Irish terrier, the terror of Bloomsbury, his yellow shirt swathing a yellow streak across the green grass of the ground of the goddess of the Phoenicians. And there was José, puzzled, at my side.