Voices of the Old Sea Read online

  There was no market in Spain, but, as predicted, the French were eager to buy, and the skipper of a boat from Banyuls took one look at what we had to offer, and paid cash for them on the spot.

  After that we tried to repeat the trip but with poor success. The water was still cold and turbid as it had been before, but the escarmalans had become hard to find and were moving into deeper water. We caught some thirty-odd fish, and decided to get rid of them locally at whatever price we could get, then call it a day. We had each of us lost a half-stone in weight, and Sebastian was developing a cough. Our profit on the trip was 1,380 pesetas each, a sum equivalent to Sebastian’s earnings as a mason in nearly two and a half months. He would now return to Farol better prepared for the coming confrontation with the Grandmother.

  Chapter Two

  SEBASTIAN HAD A REQUEST to make that came as a surprise. He asked me if I had any objection to a short excursion to the town of Besalu in the foothills of the Pyrenees before moving on to Farol. The story was that an old friend was living there in a state of dire need, and several of the fishermen who had also known and admired this man had subscribed to raise 3,000 pesetas in the hope of being able to tide him over. Sebastian was carrying this money with him. He would quite understand if I didn’t feel like making the journey, he said, and would get there somehow or other by bus.

  What struck me as a little remarkable about this proposition was that no mention should have been made of it until this moment. The impression I had was that this was a matter that he had put off bringing up until it could be put off no longer. When I probed for further details about the friendship he said that he had served in the same infantry unit as this man in the defeated Republican Army. Later in the conversation it developed that he had served under him and that, while Sebastian had remained a private throughout his short army career, the friend had been a brilliant young officer who had commanded the devotion of all his men.

  This latter amplification began to arouse certain doubts. Officers by my experience rarely made lifelong friendships among the ranks. However, this mission was clearly of great importance to Sebastian, and it seemed ungenerous to object, so I agreed to make the trip. Besalu was quite close. The map showed some fifteen miles of winding and almost certainly diabolical road across country to the town of Figueras, and thereafter another fifteen miles of dead straight main road to Besalu. There was a shortage of petrol at that time, and all the pumps were empty, but we were able to beg enough from our fishermen friends in Port Bou to fill up the Simca’s tank, and after coaxing it once more into a semblance of life, we set off.

  The journey of thirty miles took rather more than three hours, and while we bumped and crashed over some of the worst roads in Europe more details of the life and personality of Sebastian’s friend began to come out. He had been a battalion commander, aged twenty-five when Sebastian had last seen him, had disappeared after the great Republican débâcle, been arrested and spent several years in prison. It was a story that had been repeated a thousand times in the history of those fateful days, but in the telling of it there were areas of silence and reserve and missing fragments from the mosaic of the picture as presented. Most of our friends in Farol – enlisted in the Republican Army purely as a result of the village being in government-controlled territory – had spent periods in prison camps, but there was a whiff of mystery about the man who awaited us at Besalu. Had he been among the tens of thousands finally released, or had he in fact escaped? In the latter case I was running some risk by associating myself with any act designed to give shelter or aid to an escaped prisoner. It was flattering in one sense to have been admitted – as far as I had been – into Sebastian’s confidence, but a little disturbing in another.

  Besalu was an unattractive town, built round a hundred yards of third-class highway, with strangely suburban houses reflecting a pretentious poverty, raw red bricks outlined in white paint like the interior of a butcher’s shop, barn-like double doors to admit carts, curtains of chains hanging over shop entrances, and groups of blue-jowled priests in black velours hats and black alpargatas. A cold wind whined round every corner, and this and the full-speed passage of buses with open exhausts down the dirt road kept the town full of swirling dust.

  Everything about this town was extraordinary and alien. It belonged to a frontier, full of restless furtive people, who had just arrived – illegally or otherwise – or were planning to escape to another country. Even the name, Besalu, was a strange one, belonging to Tartary or Turkey rather than Spain. Sebastian admitted, with a touch of caution, that it was the smuggler’s capital. Two or three miles down the road a side-turning branched off to follow the River Llierca north through the villages of Montagut and Sardenas, and where it ended tracks led to half a dozen mountain refuges that were virtually on the frontier, within two miles of the French road leading to Arles, Amélie and Céret.

  We found something to eat in the Bar Piat, at the back of the town by the church: a pig’s trotter stew of the kind they make in these Pyrenean towns, and the first fresh meat we had tasted for a week. The place was like a cave, and smelt, as the whole town did whenever the wind dropped, of leather and rope and sweat. There were three or four men sitting at different tables with their hats on, sucking at the trotters, and occasionally glancing sideways as a dog does in fear of a challenge arising as to its ownership of a bone.

  The impression Sebastian gave me was one of great nervousness. When replying to a question he seemed to find it hard to concentrate. I asked him how he proposed to find his friend, and he replied, ‘I don’t know. That’s something I have to go into.’ The view through the window’s grubby glass was of a small square with scraps of paper being blown about, men standing in little groups, face to face with their jacket collars turned up, and two stunted-looking soldiers patrolling with sub-machine-guns.

  We finished the stew. The men at the other tables had gone, leaving the place empty, and we could find nothing to say to each other. After a while Sebastian got up. He said he would be back in a moment, and asked me to wait. He went out of the door and I watched him through the window cross the square, go up to a taxi parked on the other side, talk to the driver, then get in. About an hour later, when I was beginning to be nervous myself, I saw him coming down the street with a man with a scarf like a bath towel wrapped round his head, and wearing a suit so thin I could see his knees and his elbows sticking through the cloth. They came in and sat down. ‘This is Enrique,’ Sebastian said. We shook hands and Enrique said something in a soft, practically inaudible voice, speaking like a ventriloquist, without moving his very thin lips. According to Sebastian he should have been in his early thirties, two or three years younger than Sebastian himself, but in so far as it was possible to put an age on this man at all I would have placed him as forty-five. The skin was drawn tightly in numerous shallow creases over the bones of his skull, and his forehead was covered with a rash which he sometimes rubbed with the back of his hand. Sebastian ordered a pig’s trotter and bread for him, and I noticed that when he chewed it was with the side of his jaw, the reason being that nothing was left of his front teeth but black stumps. He looked at neither us nor the food on his plate, which he put away with a kind of methodical thoroughness. He spoke a few words to Sebastian in a slurred undertone, but I understood nothing of what he said.

  Sebastian had placed himself and Enrique with their backs to the door, and when the bar owner came over and asked us if we wanted any more he stared down at his plate and waved him away. Enrique finished chewing at the bread and drained his glass, and we got up and Sebastian pushed me ahead and we went out into the street. The men were still there with their jacket collars turned up, letting the sun fall on their faces, but the soldiers had gone. We walked down the street, Enrique between us, and the little suburban houses with their painted fronts came to an end and Besalu turned into a shanty town on the river bank, backed by the great green landslides of the foothills of the Pyrenees. Here we stood together for a momen
t.

  I could feel that all Sebastian wanted to do was get away, but somehow we were all the prisoners of a kind of desperate politeness. ‘Pues … pues …’ (‘well then, well then …’) Enrique was hissing through his gums. My feeling was that he too was longing to be gone. ‘So make sure that we hear from you, eh?’ Sebastian said. ‘That’s understood, isn’t it? Don’t leave us in suspense.’

  Finally we brought ourselves to shake hands and the small ordeal was at an end. Enrique revealed a little blackness at the core of his parting smile, turned away and went shuffling off towards the shacks.

  Sebastian and I made for the car. We were almost running. Five minutes later we were on the road heading east.

  ‘In a bad way, isn’t he?’ I said.

  ‘He lived on oranges for two years.’

  ‘So he’s on the run?’

  ‘Well, I told you, didn’t I?’

  ‘Not in so many words,’ I said.

  It had been a depressing, and in a way disappointing experience. From Sebastian’s description the picture I had formed – faceless though it was – was of a hero in defeat stripped of all but defiance, but not wholly divested of tragic grandeur. Yet all the fire in Enrique had long since burned out and I was ashamed in his presence to feel nothing more than embarrassment, even revulsion, and then shame for being unable to experience anything but these feelings.

  ‘Happy with the money, was he?’

  ‘He must have been.’

  ‘But he didn’t show it?’

  ‘No, he didn’t show it.’

  Sebastian settled himself more comfortably as the last of the mean houses of Besalu fell away below the skyline behind us. ‘I feel better,’ he said. ‘Something that had to be done. It’s all over now and I can breathe again.’

  Now that the thing was finished with I could relax and enjoy the view, which seemed in every way more remarkable than when we had passed down this road only two hours before. This was Spain as I never thought of it, and had never seen it before, one of immense green prairies under the soft sun of spring. Hares were streaking in all directions, only their heads showing, leaving little comets’ tails of waving grass, and we passed a white horse, hooves out of sight, poised absolutely motionless, as if about to rock. Miles away these green pastures met an horizon of toy villages with windmills, each surmounted by a church.

  ‘Are you allowed to tell me what he’s doing in Besalu?’ I asked.

  ‘Waiting to cross over. As soon as the snows clear they go across. By the dozen. It’s a regular business. A guide will take you for 5,000 pesetas. No problem. They split with the police.’

  ‘Is he sure to get across?’

  ‘Most of them do. Once in a while someone doesn’t. Every so often the police have to pretend to clamp down. It’s a matter of luck.’

  Chapter Three

  RE-ESTABLISHED in the Grandmother’s house, I found little change. In a place remarkably devoid of green things the fig tree in Juan’s garden next door proclaimed the arrival of spring, putting on a spurt of growth and reaching with its webbed and perfumed hands towards me over the wall. The beach glistened all over with coloured glass turned up by the winter’s tides, Juan was fishing with the palangres, and the two remaining big boats had already made a modest catch of sardines. A woodpecker had arrived to nest in a hole in the ancient tree at the entrance to the village, the bird and its offspring being glutted with offerings of grubs and protected from cats by a fence made from the last of the Grandmother’s barbed wire, and from the peregrines by fishing nets hung in the trees’ branches. My cat had somehow survived the winter and continued to inhabit the shed, receiving me with indifference tinged with hostility. Following the Grandmother’s instructions I gave it a glass of milk (but no more) to re-cement the relationship. It then followed me into the house and was immediately seized upon by Carmela, scrubbing out my room with strong disinfectant, and thrown into the street. Within an hour I was at table. (‘This could be off-putting, sir. Take your courage in both hands and pitch in. You won’t object to the flavour.’)

  The Grandmother herself seemed depressed over besetting family problems, telling me of Sebastian’s refusal to beget a child that year, and of the way her elder daughter Maria and her husband continued to reward her for all she had done for them with nothing but neglect.

  The small windfall of sardines had put a few unexpected pesetas in people’s pockets, although they were certain to be empty again soon enough. Early spring beans were being sold at cut prices by the impoverished growers of Sort, and the villagers of Farol bought them while they could. Wine from Sort was cheap, too, although as sour as ever, and the bar’s trade revived with rarely less than a half-dozen fishermen seated under the mermaid talking to each other in blank verse. Simon described for the hundredth time his adventures lost at sea after the 1922 storm. The stupid boy who helped in the bar giggled over a comic paper, and the Alcalde, who had been good at maths at school, busied himself with the problems of perpetual motion.

  Maria Cabritas’ discreetly managed love-life now involved her with a dozen suitors, most of whom had presented her with umbrellas, the best of which she always carried when herding her goats, using it to prod the soft rear parts of any animal that lagged behind. Don Ignacio, as threatened, had turned the principal room of his gloomy house into a museum displaying numerous Roman nails, fragments of pottery and glass, a cracked rib or two, and the celebrated inkwell from his excavations. He was astonished and at first gratified when a number of fishermen turned up, but soon noticed that they were more interested in the flags covering the floor than the antiques. On making enquiries he found out that what attracted them was a rumour that a priest in the nineteenth century poisoned the husbands of women with whom he was having a liaison and disposed of their bodies down a hole in this very room.

  Outwardly, only one obvious change had taken place in Farol’s centre, which was to the fonda. The façade had been scrubbed up, the windows cleared of cobwebs, the dangerous step built across the wide doorway to prevent visitors driving in their carts removed. The old brothers were no longer to be seen, and two sackfuls of cats captured in the cellars had been duly carried away to be dumped in what remained of the forest.

  What perturbed the villagers was the possibility that a coat of bright paint might be applied to the fonda’s woodwork, and they were unhappy about a board that went up on the day of my return, on which a sign writer from Figueras had sketched in the outlines of the letters making up a notice that read, ‘Guests admitted. Salubrious accommodation, and meals served at all hours.’

  Within days of my return I had the satisfaction of being allowed to overhear a reference to myself in one of the fishermen’s blank-verse sessions in the bar. This was an accolade indeed. That morning a fisherman called Arturo had seemed mildly startled when I surfaced from a dive close to his boat while he was pulling in his net, and he described this episode in the usual form at the evening get-together before the general exodus to sea.

  De noche fuí a calar las redes,

  Pesqué delfines, campañas* ahogadas, luna gastada.

  Por la mañana el hambre daba voces,

  Y volví a la lucha … pa’ confrontar la suerte.

  Esta vez saben que pesqué?

  Pesqué el buzo nuestro,

  Hombre del rostro palido, socio de Neptuno, escarabajo del destino.

  El que busca en las entrañas del mar,

  Para descubrir qué? – quien sabe?

  By night I went to put down the nets,

  [Murmurs of ‘sigue, sigue’.]

  I caught dolphins, sound of drowned bells,* shred of a moon.

  By the morning hunger gave tongue,

  And I went back to the struggle … the battle with luck.

  This time can you imagine what I caught?

  None other than our diver,

  Pale-faced partner of Neptune, scarab of destiny.

  He who searches in the bowels of the sea,

  To discov
er who knows what?

  The speaker throws up his hands, ‘Basta! Tengo sed.’ Someone calls to the Alcalde for a glass of the good wine, and another voice adds:

  Que al leñador alienta y engaña al pordiosero.

  That refreshes the wood-cutter and deceives the beggar.

  I called on Don Alberto and found him busy with a pile of newspapers recently arrived from Barcelona and Madrid, cutting out a backlog of obituary notices which his old black crone, seated with her back to us in a corner of the vast, dank room, was pasting in a book. ‘We spent most of the winter in bed,’ he said. ‘There didn’t seem much point in getting up.’ He poked his finger into the flesh of the old woman’s forearm. ‘Look how flabby the poor thing is,’ he said. ‘I’ve put on weight myself, but I’ll soon sweat it away now the sun’s come out.’ I could see no difference at all in Don Alberto’s skeletal appearance.

  His report was a dismal one. The poorer families of Sort had been reduced to eating acorns during the winter. This was mentioned in passing. What really shocked him was that the Puig de Mont mansion had been sold to a man called Jaime Muga, one of the country’s most notorious and audacious black marketeers.

  Muga’s legendary coup, discussed with much admiration by the fishermen in the previous year, had been the buying-up of the whole of the police force of the sizeable port of Palamos, from their commanding officer down to the unimportant private who polished the horses’ harnesses, before unloading a cargo of contraband in broad daylight, and in the busiest area of the port. The only thing he left out, the fishermen said, was the police band.

  This was a feat to command even Don Alberto’s grudging admiration, but what horrified him was Muga’s treatment of the Catalan baroque Puig de Mont mansion, a part of the national heritage, as Don Alberto said, on which – as Sebastian had reported – a small army of workmen had been kept busy throughout the winter, modifying it to conform to his tastes. Muga, a local boy who had married the richest woman in Cuba, proposed to have thirty members of his family live with him, a fact which – bearing in mind the number of servants required to look after them – meant trebling the number of rooms. He therefore built on wings in Californian-Mexican style and, disliking the honey-coloured sandstone of the original structure, covered all the walls with white stucco with inserts of patterns of red brick to defeat any possibility of boredom. Having a taste for church architecture, he next added cloisters and a bell tower. Finally, as a tribute to the environment, as it had once been, he personally designed chimneys to resemble tree-trunks, with projecting stumps where branches had been lopped off, and cork-oak’s bark imitated in concrete. Sebastian mentioned that he had stripped a Pyrenean church of its statuary, and set up the neon-lit virgins and saints in niches in the interior walls, and that there was a Roman bust in the garden with a rather stupid smile.