I believe it would be appropriate to describe the scene of the tragedy. Maybe you would be surprised by the estate’s combination of peasant house and palace typical of a time when the nobleman’s residence and the buildings corresponding to all the different functions of the farm were clustered together. I will not describe the oil press, the sheds, the haylofts and the barns. The truth is that my benefactor neglected these matters to such a degree that he ruined his properties and in turn damaged the good people of those lands. He was aware of his poor administration. ‘Noblemen are a thing of the past,’ he used to tell me. In that respect he agreed with his enemy, J.-J. Rousseau, but only in that respect, given that he was fundamentally aristocratic and, like Seneca, appeared to place intellectual prestige above the brotherhood of man. I do not mean to claim that he did not love the peasants, but rather that he did not treat them as equals. He once defined himself by saying that he avoided ‘unnecessary human contact.’ I believe this somewhat sibylline statement referred to physical contact when it is not a source of pleasure. Love can make a young shepherdess step up to the throne, but as soon as her sensuous charm—by nature ephemeral—dissipates, she will be abandoned to her miserable fate with the coldest selfishness. The years will go by and perhaps someday the victim and her seducer will encounter one another on some secluded path. The woman, well past her prime, will greet him humbly, calling him ‘Senyor’, and her old lover will reply with distant joviality. His conscience will not bother him in the least. The woman may fall ill and he will send her five duros with the priest. He may seek to help the child who was born in sin, and spare no expense on its schooling and food, but without granting it that which is more precious than all the earth’s riches: a legitimate name, a proof of honour. Such is often the nature of the powerful in the world, even those who consider themselves just: they are cold and hard as stone. Miquel, please excuse this inappropriate digression. In the case of my benefactor, I must admit that he never claimed to be virtuous. He was never a hypocrite, but when we see him recognizing his mistakes and yet persisting in them, how can we judge it as anything other than the sin of obstinacy?
The setting of interest to us is the main building of the estate. You enter through a courtyard facing south called a clasta (from the Latin claustrum) in Mallorca, where the stables and the steward’s and farmhands’ quarters are. At the end, an archway leads to a smaller courtyard and then to a hall with a wide staircase leading to the upper floor. In this hall there is a rustic fireplace surrounded with stone benches covered in sheepskins. Long ago it was probably used as a kitchen, but when customs became more refined and called for more luxury, the kitchen was moved to a more secluded area. This does not mean the fireplace may not still be used on occasion to roast a kid or heat a cauldron of water. In the winter it is warm there, even though the door through which one can see both courtyards is not shut until the evening. Above the fireplace there is a small window looking out of an enclosed room. I mention this because it is important to my story. On your left as you enter there is a room with a piano that leads to the dining room.
Upstairs are the drawing rooms and the bedrooms. The staircase leads to a hallway with three large doors, one at either side and a third in the centre, framed with columns supporting classical pediments. This part of the building was renovated some seventy years ago. The central door connects with a sparsely furnished oval room, decorated with Pompeian motifs and lit by a skylight. This room leads to the main drawing room with a marble fireplace set between two balconies overlooking the garden. To the left of the main drawing room is the master bedroom, and to the right another door leads to two other rooms where the Senyor had set up his bedroom and his workroom: these rooms have direct access to the garden down a spiral staircase.
The main drawing room is truly magnificent, lined with light blue silk, full of mirrors and fine china. At one time it was always kept closed, since a series of small rooms and a corridor with a small hidden staircase connected the master bedroom with the ground floor drawing room next to the dining room; however, since their return from Rome in January of 1884, this elegant drawing room was the last to be inhabited by the Senyors. There they died in my arms; with the Senyora went her serene kindness, not always expressed to me, and with the Senyor his mind and his disconcerting enigmas. Before 1884, the room had been a sanctuary, as it is again now. I would give the entire fortune of the Baron de Rothschild to rescue it from the creditors who will soon profane it, unaware of all that has come to pass here, of the meaning of these walls and this Empire-style fireplace, next to which he pretended so often to sleep while mulling over his theories. He lived in the future and in the past. ‘The present,’ he told me, ‘doesn’t exist; it’s just a point between hope and nostalgia.’ It would thus appear that somewhere in his exceedingly pagan soul there was a certain yearning for eternity.
The doors that open at either end of the gallery connect on the one hand with a small room that serves as an antechamber to the archives and on the other with several rooms, one of which is a small oratory so the Senyora would not have to walk down to the chapel and cross the courtyard on rainy days. From this oratory, which had previously been a hallway, another secret stairwell led to the ‘dolls’ room’, which I will refer to later on.
This is, briefly described, the setting for the action. Now add to it the forests and mountains, the poor lands, the rocky hillsides with their meagre, aromatic shrubs; fill it with thrushes in autumn, nightingales in spring; do not forget the forces of nature, the sun, clouds and rain, nor the moonlit nights and the magnificent storms which, in the poet’s words, prove the greatness of God:
‘Coelo tonante credidimus lovem regnare.’