Voices of the Old Sea Page 18

  All the crossings were successful and, with the basic requirements of the ritual completed, several visitors agreed to be carried piggyback by the fire-walkers through the embers. Don Alberto declined an offer of the experience, saying that he found it frivolous.

  At a quarter to twelve they doused the fire and we walked back to the inn where a traditional Verbena de San Juan meal was to be served immediately after midnight to the celebrants, some of whom had kept fast throughout the day. We were invited to inspect the mess bubbling in an appropriate cauldron in the kitchen, and trapped by our respect for custom we allowed ourselves to be served a ladleful of dark anonymous gobbets.

  The food, followed by a flagon of wine, seemed to possess extraordinary restorative virtues. Don Alberto cheered up and told me that he had come to the conclusion that the young fire-walkers he had questioned had not wished to disclose their true feelings to him. It was a sign of the times that the young were afraid to admit that they believed in anything. They were no more atheists than he was, but they were nervous of being laughed at. What did I think of it all?

  I told him that I had been unable to share the emotions of the distinguished anthropologist Mariano Iñiguez, quoted in the Alcalde’s paper as saying that the sight of a man walking on fire had provoked ‘a holy shudder, an instant of veneration, as if a solemn ancestral memory had stirred deep in my subconscious’. On the other hand I was inclined to the belief that self-hypnotism had been added to the knowledge of the right way to place the feet, and that had Don Alberto or I followed the fire-walkers for a single pace into the fire we should have spent Midsummer’s Day in Tudela hospital.

  Don Alberto agreed. ‘For me,’ he said, ‘our pilgrimage to San Pedro has been a great spiritual experience.’ He leaned against the hard back of the bench. The cavernous room, lit by a single lamp, was draped in shadows, and from all round came the soft drone of voices of men who had experienced the fulfilment of a successful fiesta. Don Alberto’s eyes began to close. ‘It has affected me,’ he said. ‘I feel more hopeful than I did.’ A moment later he was asleep.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘SIR, I WARN YOU TO LOOK AWAY and not turn your head. Better to breathe through the mouth. Of course, it’s pure prejudice, but why have doubts? As Barros puts it, “Only the cook needs to know what’s in the pot.”’

  It was the beginning of August, Carmela was back, and she had returned from her first shopping expedition for my midday meal. She had appeared as unexpectedly as ever with a rasp of rope-soled shoes on the tiles and a whiff of green soap, like a genie summoned from the bottle. Her gaze, as ever, held criticism and, inspecting my quarters, she emitted a flinty chattering of disgust at the disorder uncovered wherever she looked. The cat that had slipped in behind her was kicked expertly through the narrow door-opening into the street, and she grabbed up a broom. I was told that Muga had kitted her out with a bottle-green jumper and skirt, a handbag and leather shoes for Barcelona, but now she was back in her workaday party dress bulging at the midriff as the result of some quick piratical adventure on her way from her new dwelling to the Grandmother’s house.

  To Muga’s huge irritation she had turned down, as the Grandmother reported, his offer to refurbish for her an old log-cutter’s cabin outside the village’s limits, seizing for herself, instead, a disused boathouse built into the base of a low cliff within yards of the end of the smartened-up seafront that Muga was in the process of imposing upon the village. From this she let it be known that nothing would ever shift her, and when the Civil Guard, hearing of Muga’s displeasure, offered to throw her out, Muga told them that he preferred to handle the thing in his own way.

  She put away the broom, clicking her tongue in disgust, sloshed water over the floor, and went down on her knees with a scrubbing brush.

  ‘What news of Rosa?’ I asked her.

  It was Carmela’s habit to ignore two questions out of three as unworthy of reply. She got up, her face twisted at first with habitual scepticism, as if to say, do you care one way or another? ‘They performed a miracle,’ she said. ‘She still limps, as is to be expected, but you’d never recognise her.’

  ‘I’d like to see her.’

  ‘What’s to stop you? There’ll be a party for her saint’s day next week. Come along if you like.’

  I remembered then that Sa Cordovesa had accompanied Carmela and Rosa to Barcelona, and there was news of her, too.

  ‘We saw quite a bit of her,’ Carmela said. ‘She got work carrying trays up and down to a first-floor restaurant in the Barrio Chino. It took five kilos off in the first week.’

  ‘A relief for her,’ I said. ‘I imagine we’ll be seeing her back here before long.’

  ‘That’s not likely to happen, sir. She didn’t move fast enough for them, so they put her downstairs in the delicatessen. The sight of the food must have been too much for her. She was fatter than ever when we left.’

  Carmela had moved into the boathouse only the day before. It was in full view of the Grandmother’s house, and watching later from the roof I could see her at work putting the place in order. It had been built in impeccable local taste, a dry-stone construction fitted into a natural cave, with a wooden runway down to a scallop of beach which Carmela had calmly incorporated into her domain. Scuttling frantically hither and thither, like a worker ant, she gathered up all palings and suitable pieces of driftwood to make a fence, almost completed by the end of the day. The boathouse walls were of honey-coloured sandstone from the same quarry as the stone taken to build the cork mansions. Carmela decided to make the place more homelike by slapping her yellow paint over this. She put a row of geraniums in old oilcans on the wonderfully tiled roof that projected from the cliff, and on the third day the goat, which had taken to self-cannabilisation in addition to being hideously afflicted by some sort of skin disease, came into view tied to a stake in the centre of what had become Carmela’s private yard. Of Rosa, so far, there was nothing to be seen, and the word went round that she was being kept out of sight with the intention of enhancing the drama of her presentation to the village on the occasion of her fiesta.

  Despite the fact that on the whole the villagers disapproved of Carmela, many of them were sorry for her and were happy to do anything they could to create a little interlude of happiness in Rosa’s barren and isolated life. The Grandmother was making the little girl a skirt. Juan’s wife Francesca had bought her a shell necklace in Figueras, and there was a general rummage round for items of cast-off children’s clothing and discarded toys that might make acceptable gifts. Sebastian had a few calamares on ice for the meal, to which a number of us were invited, and I hoped to be able to make a substantial contribution of damaged fish.

  At that time I was fishing with a man called Pujols whose brother, who normally worked with him, had had to take to his bed with a poisoned foot. The Pujols brothers used an enormous net 4,000 metres long and 8 metres and a half in depth. This net, set in about 100 metres of water, took about two hours to put down and the same to pick up, the real work being to extricate the fish, most of them very small, from the meshes in which they were sometimes so entangled as to look like cocoons. This process took up to four hours, at the end of which our hands bled freely from many small lacerations inflicted by sharp fins and spines. Through long practice Pujols worked at at least double my speed. He was a thin man suffering from a chest complaint who was credited with extraordinary sexual stamina, generally attributed to the fact that he ate practically nothing but raw crabs. They were taken from the nets in abundance on such excursions, and Pujols, never without a crab’s leg hanging from his mouth, coughed, chewed and sucked continually as we struggled to extricate the fish from the net. When the fishing was over at least a quarter of the fish were found to be so damaged in the process of disentangling them as to have no commercial value. Of these I took what I wanted, and they went into the Grandmother’s icebox along with Sebastian’s calamares.

  The fortnight spent with the nets was not withou
t its risk. It was a period when the Civil Guards had decided to renew their harassment. All the boats had been checked to ensure that their old atheistic names were not showing through the purposely thin coating of paint with which they had been covered, and the occasional stubborn heretic who had repainted eyes or even stars on the bows of his boat was called to the casa cuartel for official rebuke. Although I had taken out a fishing licence, the law prohibiting boats from carrying any person apart from their registered crews was still in force. The Pujols boat, owing to its size, was a borderline case, but to be on the safe side Pujols gave the guards a kilo of fish apiece, and from that time on they looked in the other direction.

  A half-dozen fishermen and their families attended Rosa’s party. They had been hand-picked by the Grandmother. Only those able to bring children with them had been invited, and I suspected that several were there purely because they dared not refuse a request that was in reality a command. Led by the Grandmother, who had put aside her black for the occasion in favour of a curious hooded garment rather resembling the San Benito worn by an Inquisitional victim, we filed into the little enclosure. Nervous glances were exchanged. Some doubts had arisen in people’s minds about Rosa’s condition, and we were not sure what to expect, but all were determined to do what was possible to make the party a success. Carmela waited to welcome us dressed in her bottle-green jumper and skirt and carrying her handbag, which she immediately flung aside. She had twisted her face into a smile of kinds which made her hardly recognisable.

  The trestle table, which, with its complement of dwarf’s chairs, was a village prop, had been set up. We sat down uncomfortably and Carmela went round handing out mugs of palo. An odour of superb cooking leaked from the boathouse and the sweet liverish liquor began to take effect. The men, ill-equipped to talk of other things, were on the subject of fishing. Their wives sipped their palo, patting their lips delicately between each sip, and chatting in excited high-pitched voices about the incidents of their confined lives. The children, recovering their confidence, gradually separated themselves from the parents and went off to inspect the collection of oddments – empty bottles, odd slippers, cans of paint, drying corncobs, tortoise shells and peacock’s feathers – that Carmela had left lying about. They were careful to keep out of reach of the goat tethered at the back of the enclosure and watching them with inflamed eyes as it chewed over the matted detritus shed from its coat.

  The stage was now set for Rosa’s entrance. Carmela had slipped quietly back into the smoke and fug of the boathouse, from which she and Rosa now made their dramatic appearance. Carmela held Rosa in a kind of arm-lock as they came down the runway. Rosa was staggering dreadfully, her body contorted and writhing under the shapeless cut-down dress. She brandished a free arm, not, as the nervous onlooker might have thought, in a gesture of fury, but simply to help keep her balance. She seemed worse in every way than when I had last seen her and, catching sight of the children, she began to scream with excitement. Threatened by the approach of this apparition, the children dropped whatever they were doing and rushed for the protection of their parents.

  Rosa broke free, cavorted and tottered, then crashed down. Carmela pulled her to her feet, and two fishermen went to her. For a moment Rosa faced us, babbling anguish through the lipless mouth while tears splashed from the great, serene eyes. ‘She wants to play with the children,’ Carmela pleaded. ‘Tell them to come and play with her. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  The children edged away, ready to dash for safety, while Rosa was soothed and calmed and finally half-led, half-carried to a contraption like a makeshift invalid chair, in which she was fastened by a single strand of home-twisted hemp. Carmela flustered round the guests. ‘Put it down to over-excitement. When she’s on her own you wouldn’t believe the difference. She can speak as well as I can. It’s nothing short of a miracle.’

  She served up the food which, although much of it was unrecognisable, was exquisite. After a brief guttural outcry Rosa was silent. The guests ate, drank, and relaxed, and the children recovered enough courage to leave the table and start their favourite ring-a-ring-of-roses game.

  This, for Rosa, was the final straw. She watched in sullen silence for several minutes then, with a sudden shriek, she broke free, lunged out with her arms and began her struggle to reach the game. The most direct route brought her across the path of the goat. Carmela, at the far end of the table, was too far away to reach her in time, and the goat’s charge lifted her clean off her feet.

  The women carried her into the boathouse where the sound of blubbering soon ceased. Shortly afterwards they came back to say she was asleep. The guests finished their wine, and went, and Carmela untied the goat and took it to graze on the ledges of the cliff.

  Next day she was full of gratitude for my contributions, thanking me for the first time for anything she had been given. Rosa, she assured me, would not stop talking about the party, which she had enjoyed more than anything in her life.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ON THE EIGHTEENTH OF AUGUST the Civil Guards, full of their usual sinister buffoonery, came to the house to ask if I had bought any meat within the last two days. I assured them that I had not tasted meat for at least a week. After sniffing round the kitchen in a desultory fashion they went off. This performance was repeated at a number of village houses, and when it was reported that they had spent some time poking about in the village shop rumours began to fly.

  Next day Don Alberto had a strange story to relate. The butcher, Mayans, an intelligent, scheming illiterate, had turned to him for counsel over a somewhat murky business in which he had been involved. Mayans told him that a man living on a remote farm had offered him a bull for slaughter. All animals were in theory registered and could only be slaughtered by licence, but as Don Alberto well understood, such black-market transactions were commonplace, and he had agreed with Mayans that any other butcher would have done what he did, which was to go and see the bull with the intention, unless it happened to be spectacularly diseased, of offering a price. Mayans was surprised that his offer should have been accepted without haggling. The farmer then imposed a curious condition, which was that he himself would slaughter the animal, after which Mayans could come in his van to collect the carcase on 16 August, at any time he liked in the afternoon.

  Mayans found this a mysterious business. In addition, the short notice he had been given raised problems as to the disposal of the meat. He therefore dropped his price by 600 pesetas, but, a little suspiciously, the man quite cheerfully agreed. Mayans then paid over in advance one-third of the purchase price, stipulating that the carcase should be intact and undamaged, and that no offal should be removed. The farmer assured him that as he proposed to kill the bull with a knife-thrust in the vertebrae of the neck, there was no possibility of any meat being spoilt.

  On 16 August at four in the afternoon Mayans went to collect the bull and found it lying in the farmyard, tied to a stake. The carcase was still warm, but on examining it he found severe burning of the head; indeed the eyes had been burned out. At this point his two men showed signs of disgust and alarm, and he told them to go back to the van while he questioned the farmer as to what had happened.

  The farmer’s story was that a stranger had come to the farm and offered him an enormous sum for the privilege of slaughtering his bull, the meat to remain the farmer’s to dispose of in any way he thought fit. It was left that if an immediate outlet for the sale of the meat could be found, the slaughtering would be done next day, and precisely at midday on the sixteenth, after the farmer had spoken to Mayans, the man returned, accompanied by a second stranger who was carrying a large, flat object wrapped up in paper. The farmer told them that everything had been fixed up. He then tied the bull to a stake, and the man handed over the promised sum of money, and told him to go for a walk and come back in an hour.

  He walked off, but as soon as the men turned their backs, he hid in an irrigation ditch to watch what was going on. A clump of b
amboos obstructed his vision, but he could see the bull capering about and smoke was going up, as if a fire had been lit. The bull was bellowing a good deal. When he thought an hour was up he went back, and found the animal on the ground, and one of the men unfastening what looked like an iron mask from its head. There was a smell of burnt hide and hair. He asked the men what they’d done, and the first man said, ‘That’s the way we kill bulls in my country.’ The men gave him some brandy. The impression he got was that they’d both been drinking heavily.

  The more Mayans thought about this business, the less he liked it, and he told Don Alberto that his first impulse had been to drop the thing there and then and go away. On second thoughts, he decided that he was already heavily committed. He’d recently quarrelled with one of his men, who he believed would damage him if he could. So he called them both back, and told them to skin the carcase and cut it up and load it into the van. They delivered the meat to a middle man who would take anything if the price was right, and Mayans threw the head into a ravine. He bribed his two men to keep their mouths shut with gifts of meat but it was clear now, Mayans told Don Alberto, that for all that one or both had gone to the police.

  But why should there be any problem with the police? Don Alberto asked. Illegal slaughtering, as everyone knew, went on all the time, and nobody benefited more from it than the police themselves.

  Mayans agreed that the local guards had been too often round to his back door for prime cuts on the side to make things difficult for him in that direction.