Leaving the Man working at a water-colour of the old Carthusian monastery from rising ground above a covered well, we set off with the intention of augmenting our little stock of provisions from the shops of the town.
The store we chanced upon sold every likely and unlikely commodity, from green and orange boots to radishes. When we inquired where we might find a butcher, the shop-mistress, with a majestic wave of her hand, signed to us to follow her. And, walking in her footsteps, we threaded our way through an apartment, which was partly kitchen and partly an overflow stock chamber, into an inner room, where hung garlands of black and yellow sausages and the carcasses of two lambs.
This was the butcher's shop, she announced, and there was no beef, only lamb. So perforce we added yet more cutlets to our diet, and humbly craved bread. But the only loaves she had were so large that, rejecting them, we went in search of a baker.
In the less important Majorcan towns, shops are difficult to find. The fact that a tax is levied upon signs keeps all but the most prominent vendors from exhibiting one. The room of an ordinary house that opens directly to the street usually acts as the place of business; and a cabbage, or a basket of striped haricot beans, set casually on the doorstep, often serves to indicate the existence of a general shop.
After a little searching we succeeded in finding a panaderia, but the loaves of the baker, in place of being smaller than those of the grocer (which sounds Ollendorffian), were so huge that they resembled cartwheels, or, to be more exact, perambulator wheels, baked of rye.
For a moment the choice lay between possible starvation and the prospect of trundling the mammoth rye loaf up and down the three miles of highway that lay between us and the Hospederia.
While we hesitated, the baker lady, and the half dozen or so of her intimate friends who had followed us into the shop to see what the foreigners would buy, regarded us interestedly. Then a compromise suggested itself.
"Would it be possible to ask the señora to divide the loaf?"
"Yes—without doubt."
The complacent señora already had the large knife in her hand. So, clutching the half of the still steaming rye loaf, we returned to the Man, with whom we had arranged to share an open-air luncheon.