Voices of the Old Sea Read online

  Letrell then said that he wanted to talk to me on a highly confidential matter. He was making enquiries, he said, on behalf of certain friends into the fate of Mariano Oliver, who had disappeared from Farol in 1939, at the end of the Civil War.

  I told him that a police captain had been here investigating the case in the previous year, beginning to wonder if Letrell could have been one of the innumerable plain-clothes agents one saw so much of in those years.

  Letrell said that his interest in the case was a purely humanitarian one. Mariano Oliver’s family wanted to know if he was still alive. That, and no more.

  Oliver, he told me, was not the missing man’s real name. He was the son of a noble family, immature, irresponsible and spoiled, who in the early Thirties had been found guilty of an apparently motiveless impulse murder, inspired by a highly publicised killing for thrills that had taken place in the US. In this case publicity had been suppressed by the family, who had ‘mucha influencia’. Oliver spent a nominal two years in a criminal lunatic asylum looked after by his own servant, thereafter being sent to Farol to be kept out of the public eye. Nothing whatever could be learned, as I knew, of his life in the village, except that he had built a strange folly of a house set in a complicated garden of his own design. All trace of the house except the visible foundations had long since been removed, and only the outlines of the garden, the raised beds and the little irrigation channels showed under the weeds. The villagers seemed determined to do their best to forget that this man, known to them only as Mariano des Horts (Mariano the Gardener), had ever existed.

  This, said Letrell, was a classic mystery, and the more he had heard from his friends of the facts of the case, the more intrigued he had become. Throughout the war Mariano Oliver’s family had heard from their son with fair regularity and they had found ways of getting money to him despite the fact that he had been cut off from them in territory held by the Republicans until the final stages of the conflict. After the débâcle of the first week of February 1939 they had heard no more for several months until a series of letters began to arrive from France. There was no reason to suppose that these letters could be in any way suspect. They were signed, as ever, ‘Pep’ – a pet name only used among members of the family. Pep told his parents that he had joined the flow of refugees crossing the frontier into France where he suspected he would be obliged to stay for some time. The inference was that he had compromised himself with the Republican régime.

  The letters continued to arrive for two years, but very slowly doubt took hold. Mariano Oliver’s family were sufficiently powerful to obtain a pardon for their son, whatever he might have done, and they assured him of this, but he continued to show himself averse to the idea of returning. In France he kept on the move, constantly changing accommodation addresses, to which mail and money were sent. His father wanted to go to France to meet him, but he made weak and unconvincing excuses to avoid the meeting.

  The family then went to a private investigator who studied all the letters from Mariano – those dating from the Farol period, and those sent them from France. His conclusion was that the latter series was probably fake. He based this not on comparison of the handwriting and signatures – which a handwriting expert had pronounced identical – but upon telltale differences in the style of the writing. Pep writing from Farol had shown a liking for jokes, and clearly enjoyed puns and plays on words. The letters from France were spiritless and flat. Whoever wrote them, said the expert, had no sense of humour.

  By this time, with the advent of the Vichy régime in France, relations were settling down between the two countries, and the assistance of the French Sûreté could be sought. A trap was set for the letter-writer, but it caught nothing, although the letters came to an abrupt end. The private investigator’s theory was that Mariano Oliver had been kidnapped, and forced by the kidnapper to write the letters. Some news of the affair leaked into the Spanish press, since when the family had been victimised, Letrell said, by hoaxers. Purported sightings of the lost Mariano were eagerly and unquestioningly accepted by the mother who, like so many mothers in the aftermath of the great Spanish tragedy, refused to believe that a missing son would not one day reappear.

  The years had passed, the hoaxers had ceased to trouble, and slowly the maternal obsession calmed down and the wounds began to heal. Then, in the previous year, a mysterious telephone call to the father had opened up the whole issue again. The caller, impelled, he claimed, by motives of conscience, said that Mariano had been murdered in Farol on the day before the Nationalists had occupied the village. From the evidence the man had offered, both the father and Letrell had come to the conclusion that this was what really had happened. The police had been called in, but had got nowhere with their investigation. Hence, said Letrell, his presence in Farol, where, he had to admit, after a week of talking to anyone he could find to say a word to him on the subject of Mariano Oliver, he was no wiser than on the day he arrived.

  Was there, he asked of me, any point in going on? To which my reply was, there was no way of saying, but I doubted it. The people of such villages, who hardly believed in the existence of justice, and who had inherited an unshakeable ancestral belief in the corruption of all rulers, defended themselves traditionally by silence and forgetfulness. Whatever had happened here that might be seen as damaging to the community was in the process of being forgotten, and the memory of it would eventually be as wholly and utterly consumed as a corpse committed to the worms.

  On second thoughts, I told Letrell, it was truer perhaps to say that they destroyed memory, when it became necessary to do so, stripping it of its malefic power by transmuting it into poetry and myth. In the years to come these fishermen’s grandsons might recall in their blank verse the tragic events of these years, but they would by then have slipped into legend, depersonified in the human epic, mingled with all the other ancient tragedies the Spanish peninsula had suffered.

  Yet within days of Letrell’s return to Barcelona mention of Mariano Oliver was made in my presence. It was in illustration of the inexplicable power that certain human beings have over animals.

  ‘There was a man who used to live here,’ Juan my neighbour said, ‘who could whistle in a way he had and bring the birds down out of the trees. He had them flying in and out of his house. There was even a jackdaw he taught to talk – in a fundamental fashion, understand me, but still understandable, using a bit of imagination. He was good with dogs, too. He built a little water-wheel in his garden, and a couple of dogs used to take turns to work it.’

  ‘Would that have been Mariano des Horts?’

  ‘That’s right. The Gardener.’

  ‘What did you think of him?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, put it this way, I admired him. You have to admire anyone who can train animals by kindness the way he did. But I was never quite sure that he was right in the head.’

  The people of Farol showed little interest in the goings-on of the outside world, but lively commentaries on village happenings relieved the monotony of net-mending to which many women were obliged to devote the major part of the daylight hours. Net-mending was a wholly mechanical procedure, leaving the brain free to create its own fancies, and to work on the raw material of speculation and known fact from which the tissue of gossip was woven. The men, absorbed in more creative and demanding labours, had little to say to one another outside workaday topics. They talked to their wives, who passed on whatever was regarded as newsworthy, picked up while patching up the rents left by the dolphins in the nets. This was not quite a closed circuit of information, due to marriages contracted by village people with outsiders such as Sebastian, who remained alien to village traditions, including that of silence. About a year was to pass before the facts of the Oliver case, as passed on to Sebastian by his wife, were leaked to me.

  A fisherman called Vicente Ferrer had just been drowned. Ferrer was casting his raï from a foothold on a not quite submerged rock when he slipped and drowned in six feet of water. He
was forty-five years of age, having thus precisely completed the life expectancy of a Farol male, roughly matching that of the English labouring classes in the early nineteenth century. Ferrer dominated one of the big boats, for which he was held in great respect, and had been an anarchist in his youth, a member of the FAI, consequently serving two years in prison at the war’s end. He left an only son, and a widow who could be expected to survive him for about eighteen years. Don Ignacio made an excellent impression on this occasion by agreeing that he should be buried in hallowed ground, although his family refused to allow the burial service to be read.

  Passing on this information Sebastian said that Ferrer was the last of a trio involved in the Oliver case. Of these, one had disappeared in France and another had been drowned some years before in practically identical circumstances to those in which Ferrer had met his death.

  Sebastian had only seen Oliver once, briefly, and remembered little of him; he had been away caught up in the aftermath of defeat in some other part of the country when the Nationalists occupied Barcelona and began their final drive to the French border. Oliver had been conscripted into the Republican army, and then discharged on health grounds, after which he had been in trouble with the FAI and suffered the kind of harassment that anyone with his family connections had to expect. The opinion in Farol was that he had taken these experiences to heart and become, at least passively, a Nationalist supporter.

  In war as in peace not a great deal had happened in Farol. Soldiers marching to battle had on the whole stayed on the main roads, and the only fighting in that part of the country had been between discordant factions of the Left who did as much damage to each other as they did to the Fascists. In November 1938, with the long-foreseen collapse of the Ebro front, several fishermen from Farol joined the number of those who found the excuse and the means of making their way home, where, as soon as they arrived, they got rid of their uniforms and started fishing again. And with this unobtrusive communal surrender Farol returned to a kind of normality, although most people preferred not to think too much about the future.

  The bar was still functioning, and after netting a few bogas, which was all that was to be expected at that time of the year, the fishermen used to go down there and drink the last of the wine and wonder when whatever was about to happen would finally happen.

  On the evening of 27 January 1939, Mariano Oliver came into the bar. It seemed to have become part of the mythology of those last few days of waiting that Oliver went everywhere with the famous jackdaw perched on his shoulder, and that on this particular occasion it had croaked something that sounded like an oath in the direction of the fishermen huddled at their tables. Oliver stood in the centre of the bar and announced in his high-pitched voice, ‘Barcelona has fallen.’ He then went up to Vicente Ferrer, smiled at him, according to the tenth-hand account given by Sebastian’s wife, and said, ‘I have my little list all ready.’

  He then went out again, without drinking, and the first thing everybody wanted to know was, was this terrible piece of news true, and, if so, how did Oliver came to be the first person in the village to hear of it? Within the hour, Barcelona radio, which had gone off the air, came through again, and it was playing the Nationalist hymn. Since at the present rate of their advance the Fascists could confidently be expected in Farol within the week, the question now was what to do about Oliver, who seemed to have made it clear that he was preparing to avenge himself on anyone regarded – for real or fancied reasons – as an enemy, as soon as they arrived.

  Despite the traditional aversion of the fishermen for any but pacific solutions, the belief was that he was jeopardising the safety of the whole village, and that the only remedy was to kill him without delay. At that time a curandero was living in the neighbourhood, keeping out of sight of left-wing fanatics who would have shot him at the drop of a hat. The fishermen went to this man for his advice but he poured cold water on the idea of killing Oliver unless absolutely necessary, and to decide whether or not this was so he proposed to enter Oliver’s house at night and go over his personal papers for any evidence to show he was a Fascist spy.

  This he did, but next day, after the nocturnal visit, he had changed his mind and said that Oliver would have to be put out of the way. He had consulted the Book of St Cyprian – the illicit witches’ bible used by most curanderos – and set the date of the execution for three days ahead.

  By this time, with Nationalist patrols only thirty miles away, panic had begun to set in and the roads were overflowing with refugees on their way to France. In some mysterious fashion the Curandero had established his influence over Oliver, appearing to have robbed him of his willpower, to produce a kind of drugged acquiescence to whatever lay in store for him. One of the women had told Sebastian’s wife that she personally had seen the two men walking together, and that Oliver’s jackdaw had sworn at the Curandero, who had snatched it from Oliver’s shoulder and twisted its neck. How much truth there was in this story is anyone’s guess. Even an eyewitness finds it difficult to describe a happening without some slight variation of the story with each retelling, and the transformation of hearsay into fable is rapid. Did the Curandero really wring the jackdaw’s neck? Did Oliver even own a jackdaw that he had taught to say ‘I shit on God’? Was there even a curandero involved in the events of 1 February in Farol – or could he have been invented in an attempt to rid the fishermen of the spectre of guilt? But if it is accepted that Oliver was murdered without leaving the village, only a competent forger – as the Curandero might have been – who had had access to Oliver’s personal papers can explain the letters from France.

  It was shortly after dark when the Curandero called on two fishermen called Julian and Pals, told them to wash, put on clean shirts, and go with him. The three then went to Ferrer’s house, and the Curandero told him to clean himself up because everything was ready. Julian was the man who had died in the first drowning accident, and his wife, Carmen, described this meeting to Sebastian’s Elvira. Ferrer showed himself highly agitated, and said he wanted to drop the whole thing, and the Curandero laughed, clapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Let’s go.’ Oliver was waiting at his door when they got there and they all shook hands with him. The Curandero lit a cigarette and put it in Oliver’s mouth, and he took two or three puffs. The Curandero said, ‘We’ve come to take you for a little walk by the sea.’ Oliver showed no surprise or objection, and they walked through the village, which was quite empty at the time, and went up along the cliffs.

  The Curandero made Oliver walk close to the cliff’s edge, and told Ferrer to walk next to him. Ferrer shook his head and said, ‘No,’ but he did as he was told, and the others followed close behind. When they reached a certain point the Curandero said to Ferrer, ‘Push him over.’ Ferrer said, ‘I can’t do that,’ and he turned round and began to walk back to the village and the others followed him. Carmen told Elvira that what had so much surprised her husband was the fact that Oliver seemed quite unable to understand that he was in any danger, and that he took the incident on the cliff top as a joke. By this time Julian too was getting cold feet about the whole operation, and was hoping that the Curandero had given up any idea of killing Oliver. He felt very relieved when they returned to the village, and the atmosphere was a friendly one. Somebody suggested they might as well have a drink, so they went to the bar, which they found shut. The Curandero picked the lock and let them in.

  They went down to the cellar and found a barrel with some wine in it. There was a table and chairs down there and they sat down and began to drink the wine, then the Curandero excused himself to go to the toilet which was at the back. Julian noticed that he took a glass with him, and when he came back he put it in front of Oliver. He also noticed that Ferrer, who had calmed down again by this time, started shaking and sweating. He got up and said he was going and ran up the steps, but then he found he couldn’t get the door open so he came down again, and the Curandero told him to sit down. He asked Ferrer what he was afraid
of and Ferrer told him he was afraid of what was in the glass. The Curandero laughed at this. He took out a box of matches, struck one and held his finger in the flame, showing no sign of pain. Julian told his wife that the sight of it made his hair stand on end. After he’d held his finger in the flame, the Curandero said that any of us could do the same thing, and he passed the matches to Ferrer and told him to try and Ferrer scorched himself. The Curandero then put the matches away, picked up Oliver’s glass, gulped down half the wine in it and put his own glass in front of Oliver. They all drank a number of toasts including one to the death of all traitors, informers and spies.

  Julian said that despite the fact that everybody’s nerves were on edge, there was a lot of laughter and foolery going on. Someone switched on the radio in the cellar and they listened to a Fascist general in Barcelona telling them about the blood-curdling fate in store for them all. The Curandero ordered Oliver to get up and give the Fascist salute, which he did, and they all found this very funny. Then Oliver suddenly decided to go home and invited them all to his house. He made the excuse that he had to go back to feed all his animals. Ferrer and Julian agreed to go with him but the Curandero said that nobody would leave the bar, because it was too late and what had been done couldn’t be undone.

  Oliver was then very sick, and Julian realised that the Curandero must have been able to distract their attention with his trick with the matches so as to switch glasses and ensure that Oliver got the almost certainly poisoned wine. Julian recognised the symptoms of acute ergot poisoning, for Oliver was vomiting repeatedly, weeping and clutching at his stomach. He and Ferrer decided to make a run for it and they went up the steps with the Curandero, a strong man, after them, grabbing at their legs and hanging on to them until they were able to kick themselves free. The lock on the street door had jammed in some way, and while they were wrestling with it Oliver began to scream. Going back to the top of the steps they saw Oliver lying on his back on the floor, and the Curandero and Pals bending over him. Julian thought that the Curandero was trying to strangle Oliver with a belt. At that point Pals ran to turn out the cellar lamp, and the shrieking stopped. A moment later the two men came up from the cellar to say that Oliver was dead. Julian’s story was that someone went for a spade and they took up the flagstones in the cellar and buried him on the spot.