Voices of the Old Sea Read online

  Muga’s appetite was a matter of local legend. The peasant and fishing communities of Catalonia prided themselves on their frugality, and status depended rather on an absence of conspicuous consumption than the reverse. The rich sat down to table five times a day, but Muga added a sixth meal, the resupón, an informal dip just before bedtime into a pot into which tasty leftovers from earlier repasts had been thrown to reheat. Although only thirty-five Muga was already fat, with a massive torso and pendulous stomach underpinned by insignificant hips and bowed legs. He had no neck to speak of and was balding in such a way as to leave a widow’s peak of dense black hair, plus a tuft over each ear. When I first saw him standing arms akimbo, a genial though potentially ferocious smile on his face, watching the decorators at work on the front of the fonda, he reminded me of a Japanese samurai on the lookout for someone to pick a fight with. The rumour was he had bought the place.

  * A reference to the bells of a submerged church, still to be faintly heard, the fishermen believed, in the solitude of the sea.

  Chapter Four

  IN LATE MARCH the sardines had returned after an absence of five years to the Bahia de Rosas and the waters of Farol, but the sardine nets could be carried only in the two remaining big boats, so that 65 cases fetching 73 pesetas a case were all that had been landed. Marriages provisionally fixed for the spring had been put off until the autumn.

  The economic situations of both Farol and Sort, interwoven as they were, continued together on their downhill slide. A dry summer plus the loss of cork revenue had brought the dog people, as reported by Don Alberto, to the point of eating acorns, but repercussions from the defunction of the trees were beginning to be felt in Farol in unexpected ways.

  As a second line of defence against the possibility of meagre catches, the cat people had done their best to lessen their dependence upon the sea by raising chickens. This was left to the women, who were supposed to retain whatever income was made from them, including the sale of the eggs. As no food was ever bought for them they lived by foraging, and it was quite extraordinary to see a fisherman’s wife or daughter steering a small flock of hens and chicks along the street and actually controlling them with high-pitched clucking cries on the way from one feeding ground to another. In the summer and autumn of the preceding year more eggs had been put under broody hens, and in the winter the villagers had roused themselves from their normal torpor to get down to the job of constructing pens to protect the chickens from the nocturnal attacks of the local cats or the occasional famished dog from Sort.

  Now the loss of the forest, viewed at first in Farol with utter impassiveness, gave rise to a new peril. Hundreds of peregrines nested on the cliffs all along the coast, preying on pigeons that flew too close to the spurs on which they awaited them, and on the cork forest rabbits. By this spring, food shortages had meant that there were fewer pigeons, and there were no rabbits left in the forest. For the first time the peregrines appeared circling on the watch over Farol itself, so emboldened by hunger that they would drop out of the sky and snatch up a chick or a pullet from a flock in the village street, with perhaps a half-dozen villagers in sight going about their business.

  The fishermen’s retaliation was based upon a principle found effective in dealing with their worst enemy, the dolphin. Whenever a dolphin was taken in their nets, saleable as it was for its flesh, it was not killed, but wounded and then let go, as an example to its fellows of what their fate would be if they continued to damage their nets. The keen-eyed, intelligent and suspicious falcons were almost impossible to trap, but once in a while one got itself tangled up in a hen coop, and when this happened the fishermen would wire up its beak and release it. They claimed that both the dolphins and the peregrines suspended their attacks when one of their number had been treated in this way. For all that, an increasing percentage of chickens were lost to predators of one kind or another which had lost their hunting grounds in the forest. Stoats and weasels were to be seen running about in a demented fashion in the lanes, great noiseless owls came flapping down the village street at dusk, and once the appearance in broad daylight of a fox with a cat in its mouth produced great alarm, as even to dream of a fox – most fateful and sinister of all animals – was considered a dangerous omen.

  There was a great increase of amateurs from Sort trying their hand at fishing. In the autumn the men had come down and fished with rods using the wrong bait, at the wrong time of day, in the wrong sea, and usually in places where everyone in Farol knew there were no fish to be caught anyway. Now the fashion was for family parties, and it was a little sad to see how the women tried to make a picnic of this desperate business, putting on flowered frocks to drench themselves in sea water and graze and cut themselves on the rocks, whereas the fishermen’s wives, when called upon in winter to drag in the big sonsera nets, took care never to wear anything but black. The amateur fishers had made up enormous nets, unsuitable in any number of ways. These they carried down to the sea, and there was a pretence at good-natured laughter and horseplay, as a half-dozen or more men and women clinging to the circumference of the net lowered it like an immense pocket handkerchief into the sea then pulled it up again. Once in a while they caught a finger-sized fish.

  Chapter Five

  SEBASTIAN HAD TIED UP HIS BOAT in a cove near the spot where we had seen the big fish, and we walked there together along a cliff path with changing vistas of the sea. After the furrowed grey wastes of water surrounding our islands the huge vivacity of the Mediterranean never ceased to astonish. Here it was splashed all over with plum-coloured stains of weed-beds among which bald rocks just beneath the surface were brilliant uncut emeralds. Light-scaled water thrashing about in the deep coves rose and fell, uncovering and submerging great shining boulders like wallowing buffaloes. Wherever there was a beach it was spread with the black membranes of drying nets, and here and there a small wedge of colour showed where a woman was at work closing up the holes left by the dolphins.

  All Sebastian’s expressions seemed accentuated by the thin pencilling of moustaches that rose or fell in sympathy with the elation or depression of a sensitive mouth, and on this occasion he was in low spirits. Open warfare had broken out between him and the Grandmother that morning and she had told him that she objected to his remaining under her roof while denying her daughter a child. The rumour was going round, she told him, that he was sterile. Sebastian knew fishermen feared the malefic contagion of sterility almost as much as they did cuckoldry, and men supposed to be suffering from either of these disabilities were not invited to join fishing crews or go on pilgrimages. The Grandmother went on to say that this rumour was bound to affect her trade if something was not done to scotch it. Sebastian had offered to move out, then, having gone from house to house in the village, had found no one with a couple of rooms to spare.

  In this subdued frame of mind we threw our gear into the boat, untied it, and rowed out to our chosen fishing ground. Sebastian was still using my old gun from the previous season, only effective with the smallest of fish, and he took the first turn in the water while I managed the boat, shooting a dozen or so wrasse in a matter of minutes, after which I loaded the more powerful gun and dropped into the water. I was beginning at last to appreciate the fact underlying all the fishermen’s lore that there are seas of many kinds, all of them having their special problems, and offering their different rewards. There were ‘old’ seas, rising and filling seas, full seas and swells and there were hybrid oceanic states in which two or more of these factors could be involved. There were also variables like currents, water temperatures, and above all the time of day that governed the presence or the absence of fish. One thing I could be certain about was that whatever awaited me as I swam out over the shelving seabed into deep water it would be quite different from what I had seen in my first visit to this place.

  I found hundreds of tiny black swallow-tailed wrasse, spaced in geometrical equidistance in the void, and these barely flinched as I passed through them. On
the bottom, thirty or forty feet down, I picked out the wavering track of grebias – these tasted of mud and weed, and the Grandmother would not so much as look at them through the soft new growths of marine grass. There was nothing here to test the quality of the new gun. The mullet – as I was later to learn – were away curing themselves of winter infections and infestations at the mouth of rivers still discharging a little fresh water into the sea. This water was too warm for escarmalans and crabs, and too cold for the magnificent dentols which would follow the warm currents in about a month’s time to renew their cautious exploration of their summer feeding grounds. The silver-striped saupas I had watched back in the autumn feeding on the close weed at the top of the rocks were elsewhere because the sun had not yet ripened the new season’s growth of weed. The water was too clear, too transparent here for sea bass, which would have to contain their hunger until they could swoop on their prey through the murk stirred up by a storm. I dawdled about in this near emptiness hoping that a family of ciervias might come drifting in from the open sea and be tempted to encircle me at close range to satisfy their curiosity. In this lay the excitement of spear-fishing. One could be taken by surprise. There was no way of knowing what lay in wait round the next corner in this wholly mysterious landscape.

  On our first visit to this spot I had seen huge meros with great goggling eyes and dejected mouths watching at the openings of the caves in which they spent their lives when not out foraging for food. What I did not yet realise was that the time to see and hunt meros was in the early hours of the morning – the time when we had made our first trip – or the evening, when they themselves came out to lurk and hunt among the shadows.

  To be a competent undersea fisherman the indispensable qualities are those of any other hunter: patience, powers of observation, and the ability to keep still, to merge into the background on the alert for the small irregularity of shape, colour, or movement that betrays the presence of the quarry. By chance it was this that I was suddenly aware of in the moment of giving up and turning back to make for the boat. There was something in the mouth of a cave in perhaps ten feet of water that was in some way not as it should have been. The sun slanted a solid mote-filled shaft across the opening, and behind it I could make out a misted profile that was too regular, too boldly curved for the haphazard patterns of the sea; a veiled shape, half imagined, half seen.

  I dived and found myself within a few feet of the largest escorvai I had so far seen. It had placed itself almost as though on guard across the entrance and perhaps a foot inside the cave, and behind it, against the dim architecture of the cave’s interior up to a dozen slightly smaller, but still large fish were arranged like so many overlapping metal plates. The big escorvai spread a dorsal fin like a junk’s sail, edged forward with a flexing of the body that released soft reflections of copper, pewter and pinchbeck, and the iridescent patch over the neck deepened from purple to violet, then faded again. I levelled the gun and pressed the trigger and with the harpoon’s impact the fish seemed to emit sparks of green and yellow light. It carried the harpoon with it in a series of flashing parabolas into the depths of the cave and the metallic wall of fish that had backed it shattered itself, hurling its shining parts into dim recesses out of view. I tugged on the harpoon and it came out with the impaled fish, and my first reaction was one of surprise that it had been unable to escape.

  I surfaced and swam to the boat, and lifted in the fish, still on the harpoon. Sebastian was tying his catch of wrasse on a line and when he saw it he swore.

  ‘Beautiful isn’t it?’ I said, but it was already smaller and duller than it had been less than five minutes before. The colour seemed to be draining away with the small trickle of blood from the hole just behind the head. Sebastian threw a sack over it and emptied a half-bucket of sea water on the sack.

  ‘Any more out there?’ Sebastian asked.

  ‘Quite a few in a cave.’

  ‘Going back again?’

  ‘I’m frozen. I’ve had enough for today.’

  Sebastian lifted back a corner of the sack and prodded at the hole left by the harpoon. ‘Wonder what they’re going to say about that?’

  We carried the fish with pride up the beach and several fishermen, generous in their praise and encouragement as in every other way, stopped to admire it. Escorvais, like meros, hardly ever emerged from their caves and were therefore in the main beyond the reach of line or net.

  The Grandmother was engaged in a business deal with the schoolmaster provided by the government this year to replace the nuns who had hitherto given some basic instruction in the converted slaughterhouse that served as a cinema at the weekends. In this community only the schoolmaster was paid less than Sebastian, receiving 18 pesetas for working a five-hour day. Being quite unable to live on this sum, he had turned his hand to fishing and had actually devised a system of his own that produced a tiny supplementary income. The schoolmaster had observed something that the fishermen chose to ignore – that mullet, which were scavengers by nature, congregated at the point where the village sewage was discharged through a pipe into the sea. He fitted a most ingenious trap to the end of this pipe which had no adverse effect on the disposal of the sewage, but actually caught the mullet. These he brought live to the Grandmother who, while expressing her abhorrence for the whole business, and uttering shocked cries at the indecency of fish frequenting sewers, was still prepared to pay an exceedingly small sum – in this case 9 pesetas – for the fish. The deal done, the mullet were then thrown into a tank of fresh water and left there for a day after which – since no one would have dreamed of eating them locally – they were passed on to a boy with a tricycle and carrier to be hawked round the farms.

  This, said the Grandmother, was what she proposed to do in the case of our escorvai. Fish for local sale commanded a price that varied to some extent according to the method of its catching, those taken by line being in less demand than fish of the same variety caught by net. The local belief was that the suffering experienced by a fish that might have spent several hours on a hook caused a detectable bitterness in its flesh. People, said the Grandmother, were reluctant also to pay the prevailing market price for fish speared by the fitora – the illegal trident in clandestine use – and she had no doubt at all that the principle would apply in the case of our escorvai. Her price for an unspoiled fish of this size would have been 70 pesetas, but as it was, 30 pesetas was the highest she was prepared to go to. Sebastian got 15 pesetas for his wrasse. Apart from our success with the escarmalan fishing in the north, it was the best day we had had.

  Chapter Six

  IT SOON BECAME evident that there were certain advantages to be derived from living within the zone of influence of a prince of the black market. Dearth left Muga untouched, but there were also small unstoppable leakages from his abundance, and all those across whom his shadow fell benefited to some degree, however slight.

  Meat, hardly to be seen in Farol for years, began to reappear. Somewhere in secret a steer was slaughtered, and although the best of it, for roasting and stewing purposes, would have been delivered to the Muga mansion by discreet men at the dead of night, not even the numerous members of the Muga family and their many hangers-on could eat a whole beast in a matter of days when refrigerators were not to be had, so large amounts of perfectly acceptable offal found its way into the butcher’s shop.

  When the news got round of this first windfall of tripe, liver, lights, brain, of knuckles, tail and hooves, of glandular sacs, arterial conduits and membraneous messes, there was a stampede to the shop, and Carmela soon returned with a grim smile of triumph and a prize in its bloody package. I was ordered from the kitchenette while the cooking got under way. ‘Don’t look, sir, whatever you do. Just leave it to me. Appearances don’t count. It’s all in the mind.’

  The meal, reflecting ingenuity and resource based on a great culinary tradition, was a memorable one. (‘Pardon me, but don’t stare at your food like that, sir. Everything is good. If the
re’s something you don’t fancy the look of, just pass it over to me.’) As usual Carmela shovelled the remains into a bag, hid it away in the party frock she had worn for so many years, and was off.

  Another benefit of Muga’s presence took the form of real coffee made from once-used grounds from a reserve Muga kept at the bar. Most nights the black marketeer would drop in to exchange frowns with the mermaid and drink a cup of coffee before going to bed, and what remained in the pot was carefully preserved, sometimes adulterated with a little substitute made from acorns, and rationed by the Alcalde to his friends.

  I strolled over to the bar, and seated myself at an outside table, being found a moment later by Don Alberto who came puttering up on his motorcycle. The Levis had been off the road for the best part of a week because petrol supplies in Farol had run out, and the fact that Don Alberto was mobile again lent substance to the rumour that Muga, who had five cars, had diverted petrol supplied as a priority to the lighthouse, and that a hundred-litre drum had found its way down to the village.