El Planeta Meets Comodín in Marseille (1842) is a family legend in which the flamenco singer El Planeta encounters Comodín, a fugitive jester, on the docks of Marseille. Told by José as an uncertain oral tradition rather than documented history, the episode binds a shipwreck and an unexplained flight to a deck of 52 cards, planting a pattern of transmission and recurrence that returns to the Maya family decades later.

A Legend with Many Versions

José introduces the episode as a story about an experience attributed to El Planeta in France. He says he heard it soon after meeting Ana and her family, but emphasizes that the Maya family’s versions differ considerably. The story belongs to an Andalusian oral tradition—or, as he puts it, a circuit of myths—and he has found no written record of it, even from more recent times. He also mentions a Swiss tradition said to be entirely independent of the Andalusian one and just as old. Rather than claim certainty, José concentrates on the elements shared by the versions.

That framing makes the Marseille encounter both a plot episode and a story about how stories survive. Its details reach the listener through successive tellings, with qualifications such as “according to the legend” and “one version.” The uncertainty is part of the account: a stable sequence emerges, but its origins and the identity of its central figure remain unresolved.

The Schooner and the Fugitive

In the spring of 1842, according to the legend, El Planeta set out from Cádiz for the sanctuary of Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue, between the Rhône delta’s two principal branches. He reportedly reached Marseille on May 26 and worked for a time as a dockworker to earn money for his return journey. Several weeks later, on an evening in early June, he was at the port, ready to unload a schooner battered by a storm. The vessel is said to have been Norwegian.

Before anyone lowered the gangway, a small man climbed over the rail, jumped ashore, and ran between the port warehouses. The legend identifies him as a dwarf dressed as a jester: he wore a violet costume and a green-and-red cap with upturned points, with bells attached to both that rang as he fled. The people on the dock saw him, and the schooner’s sailors speculated about who he was. Their account traced him to a small boat somewhere south of Bermuda, where the schooner, returning from the Gulf of Mexico, had picked him up alongside a taciturn German sailor. Both were said to have come from the María, wrecked only days earlier, and to be its sole survivors.

The German sailor offered little explanation. Because he spoke neither French nor Spanish, communication on the Marseille dock was difficult; after a while, he too disappeared. One version says he later settled in a Swiss village and became a baker. The tale thus gives the two survivors sharply different afterlives: the sailor recedes into an uncertain account of migration, while the jester reappears to El Planeta in the very port where he first escaped the crowd.

A Meeting Among the Wine Barrels

El Planeta had no lodging in Marseille and slept among the dock warehouses while waiting to earn enough to return to Cádiz. After the schooner had been unloaded, he went to sleep and found the dwarf hidden among empty wine barrels, weeping inconsolably. The encounter shifts the figure from a spectacle witnessed by a crowd to a distressed, concealed person met alone. His bells and bright costume had marked his flight; now he was trying to hide the very clothing that had made him recognizable.

The two men could not converse: the dwarf spoke only German, as unfamiliar to the Cádiz Roma singer as Spanish was to the dwarf. One account says the jester tried to cover his costume, which he needed to conceal as urgently as an escaped prisoner would conceal prison clothes. El Planeta reportedly lent him a jacket. After that, the surviving trail of the dwarf in Marseille ends. The legend does not establish where he went, what had happened aboard the wrecked María, or why he feared being recognized as a jester.

Some versions extend the encounter: El Planeta and the dwarf supposedly lived together for several days among the port warehouses. One night the dwarf attempted to tell his story through gestures and drawings. He drew a French deck of cards, its suits hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades, and then recited a short verse for each of its 52 cards, in German. El Planeta is said to have remembered some of these verses despite not understanding the language. The episode’s central act of communication is therefore not a spoken explanation but a sequence of images and recitations whose meaning remains inaccessible.

The Story Travels to Seville

The legend’s Marseille traces stop, but its story does not. El Planeta reportedly carried the account of the enigmatic dwarf back to Seville, where it was well known by June 1894, when something strange is said to have happened to Ana’s great-grandfather, Manuel. The interval is exactly 52 years, matching the number of cards in the deck. José marks the arithmetic in conversation: the 1894 event is 104 years before the present of his telling, and he confirms the figure. The Marseille episode thus becomes the first link in a family chronology that turns recurrence into a clue.

Manuel was himself a respected cantaor who lived in Triana, identified in the account as the Gypsy quarter. He belonged to flamenco’s so-called golden age, when the cafés cantantes appeared in Seville. Known in the family as El Solitario, he was remembered as a larger-than-life figure, perhaps an eccentric, an outcast, a thinker, or simply a solitary man; some of his songs concerned human loneliness. He was also said to be a skilled card player who enjoyed patience games and a versatile artist, as well as a master of reading cards. José suggests that the playing cards may explain something about what followed, but the episode ends before he completes that thought.

A Pattern of Transmission and Return

The event’s significance lies in the way it moves between disappearance and inheritance. Comodín vanishes from the Marseille record after El Planeta lends him a jacket, yet the story of his flight survives in Seville. Its transmission is bound to a concrete object—the French deck—and to the recited verses that El Planeta only partly remembers. The card count then connects the encounter to Manuel’s reported experience 52 years later, while José’s mention of the independent Swiss tradition widens the legend beyond a single family’s account without resolving its truth.

The tale also withholds the explanation that its images seem to promise. The shipwreck supplies two survivors but no account of their ordeal; the jester’s costume identifies him but is exactly what he wants to conceal; the drawings and verses communicate a story that El Planeta cannot understand; and the reported recurrence points forward without yet revealing what happened to Manuel. Marseille is consequently not a closed adventure but the beginning of a family mystery, one whose meaning depends on the later episode in Seville.