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Valldemossa Revisited.
In the yard, a girl with black hair was playing the guitar; both she and the young man singing had a café-au-lait complexion; maybe they were real Gitanos. The three of them made up their minds quickly; only the woman was to go and see that monk´s cell, where the composer and his lover had once lodged for some weeks of an unhappy, rainy Hiver Majorquin, during which something they used to share seemed to be getting lost. The man and the boy would wait in the garden.
"Will Mum come back soon?" the boy asked.
The man did not respond, blinked at the sun, put his right arm on the boy´s shoulders.
They went strolling along the narrow path down to the fence, turned and went back.
"I mean, not today, but ... later ... "
"I don´t know," the man said, "sooner or later, I don´t know; but the two of us ... "
They sat down on the very last bench before the yard, where the couple were still making music.
No one else was in the garden.
The did not speak.
The boy took out a notebook and scribbled something on one of the tiny pages, which he then tore off, rolled it up, and stuck it with the help of a broken twig deep into one of the gaps in the wall behind them. "Do you think it will last that way?"
"Forever," the man said, "forever and a day; what have you written?"
"Family secret: once we come back, we will pull it out again and read it together, the three of us, okay?" The man swallowed, then nodded.
When the woman returned, she reported enthusiastically on the interior of the cell.
Weeks later, the man read in a travel magazine that someone claimed to have found out that for ages they had obviously shown the tourists into the wrong chamber. He was not surprised, and he did not care.
He believed to know by then they would go back some day and find the hidden message; and although he seemed to be pretty sure about what it would be like, he already looked forward to reading it aloud to the three of them.
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