Voices of the Old Sea Read online

  I was invited by the Grandmother to discuss with her the medical aspects of the problem. Sort and Farol shared a doctor, a brisk and cheerful mannikin of four feet ten inches or so, whose real name was Churrimina, meaning ‘Bonfire’ in the Basque tongue, but who had earned the nickname of Dr Seduction following allegations that he had had unlawful intercourse with a fisherman’s statuesque wife after administering a whiff of ether to remove a splinter from her toe. For this reason, and the fact that he was not properly qualified but allowed to practise after three years’ experience as a medical orderly purely as a result of the national shortage of medical men, he was rarely consulted; and anyone like myself from the outside world was constantly approached to give an opinion on minor problems of health.

  The interview, with Sa Cordovesa present, took place in the Grandmother’s kitchen, after the Grandmother had scrutinised the contents of two ‘Pride of the Onion’ pickle jars that Sa Cordovesa had been asked to bring with her, and clearly remained baffled. The patient was seated with some difficulty in a chair of the kind favoured in Farol, having nine-inch legs and therefore more suited to the use of dwarfs than people of normal proportions.

  Sa Cordovesa came as a pleasant surprise. She was uncomplaining, full of humour and grace. Her corpulence was uneven, adipose tissue having taken over here and been resisted there; a great benign spread of breast, a rosebud mouth compressed by softly cushioned cheeks, trim ankles, and small feet thrust into the new over-showy shoes. One sensed the reality of finely chiselled Andalusian bone under the puffy amiability of her face. She was ready, almost eager to discuss her misadventures, doing so in a voice full of self-mockery lilting up and down the scale to the accompaniment of the soft bass rumblings of the Grandmother’s counsels and consolations.

  The thing was, what was to be done about this mountain of fat she had suddenly been encumbered with? Could it be massaged away? Could it be charmed away? Was it a fact that pills existed to remedy the situation? How long, if all else failed, would she have to live on a diet of bread and water before the nimble girl she had once been could step forth from this prison of flesh?

  The Grandmother could not answer any of these questions because Sa Cordovesa’s problem was one that had not arisen in Farol before, where, with her own exception, and that of the butcher’s wife, the tendency was to be slender. It was inevitable that the talk should be of the Curandero, who had a cure for almost all ills, but the Curandero would not return until the end of the summer, heralding the arrival of the tunny. I was sorry to disappoint, but there was nothing I could do, for although I had heard of slimming pills, I thought it unlikely that they were available in Spain. All I could promise was to bring back a supply from England in the following year.

  They went off together, and I watched them go down the street into the sallow evening with all the light and colour drained away into the sunflowers flagging over the grey walls. A last sliver of moon was encircled by black, screaming swifts. Cats and a pig called Mercedes that lived on seaweed were racing across the beach to meet an incoming boga boat, and the man with the pack-mule who had finished work in Farol for the day was on his way back to Sort to pay for his glass of wine in the usual way. As he passed the slow-moving and stately ladies he swept off his hat. I heard Don Alberto’s motorcycle come puttering into the village from the opposite direction making for the bar and his evening rancio, and I went to join him, planning on the way a fishing trip for the next day.

  The responsibility of looking after Sa Cordovesa in her hour of need was shared among the fishing community, and she stayed two days with one family and three days with the next while people looked round with solicitude for a place she could call home. I brought up the problem with Carmela, who said, ‘Send her to me. I may be able to fix her up.’

  Carmela remained a mystery. She kept apart from the life of the village, and after her morning stint spent in washing out my room and cooking the midday meal, I hardly ever set eyes on her. At eight o’clock she would be suddenly there, to announce in her flinty voice, as if reading out a legal sentence, what the shop or the butcher’s offered in the way of food for that day. At about one, after the completion of the daily miracle of the transmutation of whatever repellent raw materials she had come by into a delectable dish, she would suddenly and soundlessly be gone. On the rare occasions when I had sighted her outside these morning hours she had been slipping through the shadows in the uncertain light just before nightfall.

  She was imbued with the aroma of clandestinity, of small-scale secrecies and unobtrusive operations concerned with survival. Her shape under the party frock was bulky at one moment and inexplicably deflated the next, as if divested of mysterious contraband. Once, taking a short cut at twilight through the edge of the cork-oak forest, I had glimpsed her flitting from tree trunk to tree trunk on her way homewards, and I asked myself if this obvious desire to escape attention did not suggest an illicit adventure among the hen-houses of Sort. Sometimes after her morning arrival I noticed a large bag in my cupboard, and opening it one day I found it to be crammed with a kind of chickweed the dog people grew to feed their animals, from which I gathered that Carmela’s rabbits were fattened for market at Sort’s expense. In a way I was reminded of Muga, prince of the black market. They were both of them professionals, practising the arts of self-defence and self-advancement on different scales but – since scandal was largely avoided, and their victims hardly realised what was happening to them – with equal skill.

  Carmela’s old father had dropped dead during the winter and, reporting this, Sebastian told me more of her story. This, when I tackled her, she neither confirmed nor denied, warning me off the subject with an unwelcoming glance of a misted, basilisk eye. The story was that she had been saddled with the care and upbringing of a grossly handicapped child, a girl left in infancy with her by a prostitute who had paid the regular sums agreed upon for a year or so, and then suddenly gone off to South America to be heard from no more. Few people in Farol had seen this little girl, Rosa, now believed to be about twelve years of age, and there were wild rumours about her, one being that she was exceptionally beautiful, and another that she was covered with hair like a monkey.

  When I saw her for myself, it was by accident on the day after Sa Cordovesa went to live in the shack Carmela had put up on the village’s outskirts. On the afternoon of this day the Civil Guards called on the Grandmother with a stern rebuke for having failed to comply with regulations by not reporting to them Sa Cordovesa’s presence in her house. There was no other male about so the Grandmother asked me to go to the shack and warn Sa Cordovesa and Carmela of what had happened, and let them know that a routine visit by the police was to be expected.

  The fishermen liked to be soothed when on shore by a calm environment, with grey stone, whitewashed walls, and clear, uncluttered spaces. No fishermen lived at Carmela’s end of the village and there was a great deal of unpremeditated colour in the scene. The shack had been carpentered together by Carmela and her old father from an assortment of wreckage collected along the shore, braced and smartened up with partitions and doors filched – as I had heard – from the old cork mansions. Nobody in Farol liked the colour yellow – possibly because it was associated with magic practices, this being the colour of the eyes painted on the boats. But the shopkeeper had had a can of yellow paint on his shelves for years, so Carmela bought this for next to nothing, and painted the sea-bleached wood to protect it from the weather. The shack had been put up on the deepest of red earth, and a violent rain storm on the morning of my visit had splashed the soil with dramatic, even sanguinary effect over the lower parts of the canary-yellow wood. Finally, this was a neglected area where rampant convolvulus had taken hold, and although the villagers regarded it as a stubborn weed and rooted it out wherever they could it poured like an irresistible vegetable flood over Carmela’s shack, covering much of the paintwork with its great shallow trumpets of the most intense blue.

  Carmela had made do without wind
ows. A door hung askew on a single hinge, but the view of the interior was screened off by a curtain of sacking. Bantam chickens scampered in and out of the building and dashed about in all directions in the open, chasing after ants. I rattled at the door and called out, but there were no signs of either Carmela or Sa Cordovesa and I was going away when I heard the sound of a child blubbering. I lifted back the sack and went in, finding myself in a dim little cell of a room with an earth floor, a chair and a bed and a chest of the kind into which such as Carmela are obliged to stuff the often strange miscellany of their worldly goods.

  Beyond a second aperture, also screened with sacking, was a yard, and it was from this that the sound of blubbering, now subsided, had been coming. I went out to investigate, knowing that this would involve me in a single-handed encounter with Carmela’s subnormal child, and when for the first time I saw Rosa I was not shocked because I had been prepared for worse (there had been rumours of hereditary syphilis and blindness).

  I understood at first glance that she was a spastic who could not straighten one leg, held from the knee down almost at right angles to the thigh. Despite this extreme disability, and the fact that she appeared to be on the point of toppling over sideways through one leg being in effect shorter than the other, she was able to move – as she did now – in a grotesque, bounding fashion, flailing her arms in helicopter fashion in order to keep her balance. At the moment of my appearance she had burst again into shrieking, babbling incoherence, and was advancing in a series of leaps and bounds on a goat, tied to a stake, that was doing its desperate best to avoid her. The goat raced round and round the stake, backed away straining on its rope and scuttering with its hooves and Rosa went after it, howling and hooting and brandishing her arms. The possibility occurred to me at that moment that this could be the sort of desperate game to appeal to the imagination of a totally isolated child – perhaps her only game.

  She bore down on the goat like a tiny grey witch, and now perhaps the game – if game it was – had reached its normal climax, because the goat, having retreated as far as its rope would allow, put down its head and charged.

  I rushed to pick the child up, do what I could to console her, wipe the grimed tears from under the fine, sensitive eyes. The top half of her face was that of an angel, and the bottom half that of a monkey. She gave me what I later came to know was a smile of gratitude and affection, but which the monkey mouth had translated into a simian leer.

  At that moment Carmela arrived, put the girl on her feet and sent her hobbling and flopping away. ‘Don’t bother yourself, sir. It’s absolutely nothing to worry about. This is the kind of thing she gets up to as soon as my back is turned. She likes to tease the goat, but really they’re the best of friends.’

  Chapter Nine

  THE RUMOUR THAT MUGA had bought the fonda proved true. In a matter of weeks, while the villagers hardly noticed what was going on, the builders from Figueras had torn out the labyrinth of odd-shaped rooms and replaced them with fourteen bedrooms built to a standardised low-priced hotel design. Three bathrooms were incorporated, an exotic extravagance in local eyes, where De Barros’ counsel, ‘De las cuarenta pa’ arriba, no te mojas la barriga’ (‘From forty on, don’t wet your guts’), was scrupulously observed.

  Muga built a large verandah at the back of the fonda – now upgraded officially to the status of an hotel. Dances would be held on this, he let it be known, later in the year when the tourists came. The view from the verandah would have been a romantic one had it not been spoiled by an L-shaped wall in the corner of which horses were taken to be castrated, and an exceedingly ugly building which an expatriate from Sort had put up brick by brick, working single-handed, in exactly twenty-nine years.

  Hardly anyone outside Farol and Sort had ever heard of the old fonda, and the few casual travellers who had stayed there had done their best to forget the experience, but the energetic Muga was determined to put the Hotel Brisas del Mar, as the fonda had been renamed, on the tourist map. He therefore joined the hoteliers’ association and, by guaranteeing to provide a few basic facilities, was accorded C Category registration on their list. The all-in price of 8 pesetas charged by the two silent brothers for a gloomy and malodorous cell, and hard-boiled eggs and sardines twice a day, was summarily increased to 50 pesetas a day, causing the locals to burst into peals of disbelieving laughter.

  Muga called on Don Ignacio, eased his belly into as comfortable a position as the low chair he was offered would permit and outlined his plans for the village’s development and eventual prosperity. Don Ignacio repeated to me what he could remember of his remarks on the subject of religious observance, which the priest had found funny.

  Muga mentioned that he had already been to the shop and given them a list of the things they ought to stock, such as souvenir fans, Sevillian dolls, and carvings of Don Quixote, if they wanted to derive any benefit from the tourist trade, and he had had a word with the Alcalde about the terrible quality of the wine sold in his bar. Now he turned his attention to church arrangements. ‘Who goes to Mass in a place like this?’ he had asked. ‘The grocer, the town clerk, and the police?’

  ‘That about sums it up,’ Don Ignacio said. ‘No one would call our people devout.’

  ‘I notice that there was no Mass at all last Sunday. Don’t think that it matters to me one way or the other, but I’m running an hotel and the law obliges me to put up a notice for the benefit of visitors, giving the hours of Mass.’

  ‘Choose your own time,’ Don Ignacio said. ‘Would 8 a.m. on Sunday be convenient?’

  ‘As long as we can depend upon it.’

  ‘You may put up your notice,’ Don Ignacio said. ‘Mass will be celebrated at the time announced.’

  So, he told me, his archaeological researches at Ampurias had come to an end, because there was no public transport to take him to the dig in the middle of the week.

  The first guests at the Brisas del Mar arrived in some style in a chauffeur-driven Isotta-Fraschini at the end of May, providing instant and final confirmation of the villagers’ belief that all outsiders were basically irrational, when not actually mad. Apart from the chauffeur, the party consisted of an absolutely genuine forty-six-year-old Marquesa with enormous estates in the impoverished south, and her lover, a bullfighter aged twenty-three who appeared in fights at such places as Medina del Campo, the Spanish equivalent of Stockton-on-Tees, where the best ringside seats cost 18 pesetas. The bullfighter, who was much smaller than the Marquesa and who only wanted to go for long walks, did so to local amazement holding an iron bar in his outstretched arm to strengthen the muscles employed in his profession. When he became tired the Marquesa picked him up and carried him on her shoulders, passing him over to the chauffeur when she herself weakened. Like many of the very rich and powerful, she cared little for the good opinion of others, and was quite ready to discuss the details, mostly scabrous, of her private life with the chambermaid, who duly passed them on. She had just been hauled before the court in Madrid for ‘public scandal’. As she told the chambermaid, she was crazy about footballers, and had entertained three forwards and two half-backs of Real Madrid at a party in her flat where they had been induced to remove their clothes to give a demonstration of dribbling, passing, and shooting, just before the police broke in. She appeared before the judge in her widow’s weeds, wearing the many medals won by her defunct husband fighting in the Nationalist cause, and was fined 5 pesetas. She blamed two unsuccessful facelifts for the fact that she was unable to close her mouth, and travelled, as the chambermaid reported, with her own black bed-sheets, which she had personally had edged with exceptionally fine lace.

  After aristocratic dissolution, bourgeois sobriety. Within a few days the Marquesa and entourage were replaced by Julio Letrell, a member of the City Council of Barcelona, and his wife, and the second or third day after his arrival Letrell came up and introduced himself while I was sipping a glass from the barrel of wine the Alcalde had felt obliged to import from Alicante.
Letrell said he had chosen Farol for a holiday because, from the map, it looked like the most off-the-beaten-track place within a hundred miles of his office. He said he couldn’t get the sound of tramcars out of his ears, and to see our shopkeeper take a couple of minutes to walk from one end of his counter to the other and up to a half-hour to serve a customer induced in him a profound sensation of peace.

  Letrell said that he was keen on fishing, but had found the local fishermen hard to approach. He had been led to believe that I did a good deal of fishing myself, and wondered if I could put him in touch with anyone who had a boat who could be persuaded to take him out on a trip.

  He seemed a pleasant enough man, so I mentioned this to my neighbour Juan, who agreed to take a couple of hours off next day from his afternoon stint of preparing his palangres to be put down in the evening, and take Letrell out. It was an excursion that we both understood could be nothing more than a complete waste of time. We warned Letrell that for a number of reasons he would almost certainly catch nothing, our only hope being the slight possibility of running into mackerel. But there were no mackerel and Letrell sat there quite contentedly dangling his line in the watery wastes, and trying to involve Juan, who resisted all such overtures, in conversational topics about village affairs. After two hours we gave up and went back, having caught nothing. I formed the opinion that Letrell knew nothing whatever about sea fishing, and that he hardly knew one fish from another. Juan, sorry to see any man lose his time in this way, offered by way of compensation to take him out at night with the palangres, or at dawn to put down the boga nets, both of which offers he declined.

  Letrell seemed to want to talk to people, and frustration in this direction was inevitable, given the inbred suspicion with which the people of Farol viewed outsiders of all kinds. Next day I found him at my table outside the bar again. I asked him if he planned any more fishing trips, and he said he did not. He wanted to know how long I’d lived in Farol, and I told him. Did I find the people reserved, difficult to reach? Yes, very. They were also non-materialistic, generous, poetic and superstitious in the extreme. But I’d got to know them? he asked, and I told him that I had not, but that I had made progress in that direction.