262 292
262
per højholt
version, and so it was that
late one night two venerable
volumes tumbled down into
the wagon belonging to a
bibliophilic English colonel,
who only upon homecoming
could ascertain that he was in
possession of such precious
objects. What it must have
cost the ears to reach such
levels of tangibility, such that
the colonel on his next leave
could find a buyer and reap the
fruits of his good fortune and
the ears’ efforts for a fantastic
sum, can hardly be conceived.
The antiquarian in Malaga
who so happily disbursed the
cash immediately sold these
treasures to an astonished
prelate in charge of the
universitylibraryatAntequera.
The ears skedaddled a few
months later by forming a
priest’s collar on an unwitting
old geezer of a prefect, whom
they then strangled in an
archway’s striking shadow
by briefly drawing just a
little closer together. After
that they divided themselves
again according to the original
criteria,withQuixoteI.heading
for Cordoba to track down
some of their fellows, while the
Calderón group split up, the
antas sacramentales portion
electing to remain in Malaga,
while the comedies and
intrigues shifted their exile to
Arroyo west of Torremolinos,
a location so remote that they
quickly became garbled. In
the tunnel of Gibraltar there
remain only a few scattered
groups of communistic bent
and a collection of poems
from Romancero Gitano,
though the drama Yerma by
García Lorca has temporarily
surfaced. The appearance
of works dating from after
the ear flight of 1919-20 is
connected, naturally enough,
with the fact that the Spanish
Civil War, which began in