Miss Moore came back twice, but after the scandal regarding her painting, she was no longer welcome as far as Dona Maria Antònia was concerned, and the Senyor simply had no interest in her.
‘She’s batty,’ he said. ‘Dostoevski or Ibsen would make one of those fashionable heroines out of her. If she comes back, tell her I’m out.’
His request was not easy to fulfil because in a place like this the Senyors could be nowhere else but at home. There was no need to do so, however, because Miss Moore did not return. She led a truly eccentric life, writing letters all the time and only going out for walks at night. I learned from the village priest that she tried to go into the church with her head uncovered and the sacristan had to send her out.
‘I don’t understand your language,’ she said in English.
‘Well, you ought to learn it,’ the sacristan replied in Mallorcan, with sense enough to take her by the arm and lead her to the door.
On the other hand, she also showed humanitarian feelings. When she heard that Madò Coloma had fallen ill, she went to see her and took care of her like a Sister of Charity. During a few days she edified the village with her conduct. Then rumours started about her motives not being charitable but rather aimed at a grand-nephew of Madò Coloma’s whom the foreigner wished to paint. It finally transpired that she had hit the ailing old woman. When they heard the news, the Senyors sent Madò Francina to see the old lady, and the servant came back in a state of shock.
‘It was a scene straight out of the classical theatre,’ the Senyor told me. ‘We were in the piano room and the Senyora was trying to play Il re pastore, which she can no longer remember, when the housekeeper came in screaming like the trumpets in Aida, asking where we were. All that was missing was for her to say in verse:
Pine and sigh, dear women,
the whirlwind is here.
The Senyora stopped playing and looked up at me. “What’s that, Tonet?”, “The whirlwind is here.” She closed the piano and crossed her hands on her skirt, as if she were posing for a picture. Madò Francina entered in a state of distress and shouted at us from the doorway demanding justice like Inès de Vargas in Zorrilla’s legend: “Senyor, you must have that foreigner leave at once! It’s your Honour’s fault for letting her stay in the village! I only demand justice!” I didn’t respond so as not to ruin her speech. Dona Maria Antònia, who has no interest in psychology, turned to the woman. “Well, well!” she said in the soft tone she uses when she’s angry. “What on earth is this screaming about? You are being impertinent, talking like that in front of the Senyor. Go to the kitchen and make yourself a cup of orange-blossom tea.” “Let’s hear what it’s all about,” I added, fearing that Madò Francina would obey and we would never hear her story.’
The Senyor found such things amusing. The fact was that the foreign lady had hit Madò Coloma. Her grand-nephew, who tried to interfere, also got a beating.
‘She broke the kettle,’ Madò Francina continued, ‘and on her way out she kicked the goat, which will never give milk again. That woman will be the end of Bearn, and it will all be your Honour’s fault.’
They managed to send her down to drink her orange-blossom tea, and the Senyor, who knew about these things, sprinkled something into it. From what I learned later, it was bromide.
The cause of the scandal had indeed been a portrait the foreigner intended to paint of Madò Coloma’s grand-nephew. The old woman, having heard the story about Tomeu’s portrait, tried to stop her. The village priest went to the City hoping to see the Governor in order to have the foreign woman thrown out of the country; but the Governor, who was a liberal and who had apparently sold himself to the Masonic lodges and to English gold, viewed the matter in a very different light. He believed art was above all and that in her country, if not in ours, Miss Moore was a woman of importance.
It is lamentable that with a king as good as Alfonso XII on the Spanish throne, public morals depended on the whim of a few politicians with no scruples whatsoever. I hope Mr Sagasta will forgive me, but if he is indeed loyal to the crown and a true monarchist he never should have played the sovereign the dirty trick of presenting him with a Masonic governor. At the time I write these lines, after King Alfonso’s death and during the reign of a lady who is exemplary in every sense, his efforts to keep up with the times seem very dangerous to me. Cuban separatism is already rearing its ugly head and no one can foresee how the sensitive problem of our sovereignty overseas will end.
If the Senyor had lived to read these lines, he would say that the final outcome will be the loss of the colonies, and, in addition, that it will be within the natural order and the logical evolution of time. He was a rationalist to such a degree that everything that could be included in a general system seemed to him, in principle, acceptable and fair. Based on this philosophy, he did not perceive the ruin of his household or his lack of progeny as a tragedy. He was convinced that the nobility would have no place in the next century; that although there would be rich men and scientists, people would cease to think of them as archetypes and that Marxism, perhaps under a different name, would be the system of the century to come, at least in Europe. But needless to say, for him Europe was the World. That was an unquestionable dogma.
‘Don’t you understand,’ he once said when I told him about my curiosity concerning Oriental cultures, ‘that only here will you find all possible ways of life? If you’re interested in primitivism, in Castile and certain villages in Italy you’ll see fakirs and religious charlatans. Even in Paris, the author of Hernani and novels as absurd as Les Misérables is a real charlatan. He even dares to prophesy in prose and verse. Whereas you will never find an Abbé Prévost or an Anatole France in Africa or India.’
Even though his disdain for what he called ‘Orientalism’ seemed unfair to me (the Old and New Testament came from the East, after all) I cannot deny that his words, as on so many other occasions, had a strong impact on me. In all countries, even in the most civilized cultures, one finds individuals as primitive as the Negroes from the heart of Africa. Despite all the education my benefactor tried to give me, I was one of those people. Jaume’s tragedy, or murder, one could say, would prove my point. I now realize that I acted on some unclear impulse, worthy not even of a primitive man, but of a beast. The case of Miss Moore, educated and upright until the age of forty-five, would also show us to what a degree nature can impose itself upon culture and that a single human being can present the same evolutionary variations one would find in two lands as different as Great Britain and the island of Madagascar. Man reproduces in himself the entire history of the universe.
Miss Moore did not leave the village, although no one was very pleased by her presence, and she stayed as long as she wished, with the approval of the Governor imposed by Sagasta and perhaps by other less obvious powers. Defying the hostility she inspired in the villagers, Miss Moore impassively continued to take her solitary walks in the company of a most peculiar dog, eating her meals and sleeping at the strangest hours, making sketches, writing down observations in a notebook, peering into people’s doorways and generally behaving as if she lived in a conquered land.