Voices of the Old Sea Read online

  Francesca confirmed that the trees were ailing, about half those on her property being affected. She was worried about the possible loss of revenue from cork, but even more so by the fact that only about half the normal crop of mushrooms had come up the last autumn. Like the rabbits the mushrooms needed cover and shade. Sort was full of men who had spent their life with trees, and knew all that was to be known about cork oaks, and these men were of the opinion that Sort was facing a tragedy. In 1947 oaks all over southern Europe had suffered attack by the caterpillars of the winter moth due to their hatching on the precise day (a coincidence occurring roughly twice in every century) when the leaf buds first appeared. The majority of the oaks eventually recovered from this loss of foliage, but in the Pyrenean forests many trees weakened in this way contracted a virus disease from which they subsequently died. Juan and the rest of the fishermen withheld their sympathy. It was solidly believed that every peasant had a boxful of thousand-peseta notes buried under his floor. ‘They’ll never go short of anything. Let them live on their fat,’ was the general verdict.

  The first sign of hard times in Sort was that their dogs were clearly getting even less food than usual, and therefore becoming more venturesome in their forays into Farol territory, where they managed to catch and devour not only an occasional cat, which no one grudged them, but a chicken here and there, which was a grave and unpardonable offence.

  Whereas the cats of Farol needed no more than the presence and companionship of man, the dogs of Sort were not wholly independent in the matter of feeding themselves. Their function was to hunt game in the forest, and they were rewarded with the skins, the heads and the feet of the rabbits they caught. Apart from that they had to make do with the sparse offal to be picked up about the village, and rare cannibal feasts when one of their own kind perished through accident or disease.

  Unlike the people of Sort, who were individualists, those of Farol, accustomed to the communal enterprises of the sea, lost no opportunity to work as a team. In both villages women helped to make ends meet by keeping chickens. These, in Sort, would be shut up in cages at night, suspended from trees to keep them out of the reach of the dogs, or the rare fox that ventured into the village once in a while. In Farol although this kind of protection was less essential a communal coop had been built for the use largely of the aged and infirm, and a week after my arrival a pack of famished dogs from Sort managed to break into this and carry off many of the hens.

  This was a calamity for which there was no redress. Sort denied responsibility. A peasant from the dog village, who had driven a cartload of vegetables over to Farol to barter for fish, was tackled in the Alcalde’s bar about what was to be done. His reply was, ‘How do you know they were our dogs? You can’t tell one dog from another.’

  The fishermen, who were given to informal meetings, held one on the spot, after which they told the man he could take his vegetables back. At a second meeting reprisals were decided upon. The view was that if the Sort people were not prepared to cut down on their dog population, the fishermen would have to take their own measures to reduce their numbers. But how? It was impossible to conceive of anybody taking an axe or a club and killing a dog outright and the idea of using rat poison went against the grain. The final solution was to procure a number of dried sea-sponges, and fry these in olive oil to provide a flavour irresistible to dogs. When a few days later the animals had recovered from the surfeit of chickens the sponges were put out for them on the periphery of the village. It was a time-honoured method and as ever successful. The dogs gorged themselves on the dried sponges which swelled up as they absorbed the gastric juices until in the end their stomachs ruptured. A dog that had come too late on the scene to partake of the fatal meal was trapped, and then, as a traditional gesture of defiance and contempt, castrated and sent home with a black ribbon tied round its neck. The black ribbon symbolised cowardice.

  After that the Sort people kept their dogs under control by fastening them to heavy logs which they had to drag about wherever they went. From this time on, the relationship between Sort and Farol – never more than a watchful neutrality – fell into decline, and both communities suffered from the loss of a local market for their produce.

  Chapter Four

  THE DEEPENING RIFT between the cat and dog villages manifested itself in many ways. For the time being the villagers of Sort ceased to eat fish, and those of Farol – who grew no crops of any kind – went short of vegetables. A minority of affluent peasants in Sort still favoured a negotiated peace, and took it upon themselves to drive over to Farol on the Saturday night hoping to open up a dialogue with the fishermen, whom they expected to find in the Alcalde’s bar. The moment was ill-chosen, for they arrived in the middle of the final of a contest for the most telling blank-verse description of a dramatic episode in the fishing life. The mood in and around the bar was one of impassioned oblivion. No one was drinking, but a falling tear occasionally missed an empty glass, and the peasants, fidgeting uneasily in their corner, were overlooked. Their mood sobered from cautious optimism to well-tried patience, but by the time the boy the Alcalde employed arrived to take their order, the drift to belligerence had begun. They ordered palo – a murky local version of sherry, tasting more of liquorice than the solera – but the Alcalde, having judged the contest, and declared the winner, came full of apologies to say that his barrel was empty. The peasants got to their feet, clumped as if across ploughed land to the door, spat on the threshold and departed.

  Next day Sort’s reaction took the form of raising a barrier across a footpath through village land used by the fishermen as a short cut to the main road. A right of way had been established here, following a feud between two families when a funeral party taking the head of one household to his grave had suddenly switched direction to cross its enemies’ land, thus by irrevocable custom cutting the land in two. The ruling of the Alcalde of Sort was now that the right of way thus established had belonged only to those persons legally resident in Sort, and that outsiders such as the cat people had abused customary law by including themselves in the privilege. This was a blow indeed to the fishermen because it meant that heavy crates of fish would have to be trundled in future for an extra kilometre before they could be loaded into the truck carrying them to town.

  The people of Sort were nominally Christian, but those of Farol hardly that, since custom permitted no male member of the fishing community to attend Mass. When they stood in need of guidance, whether spiritual or mundane, both villages had recourse to the same clairvoyant, the Curandero of Ripoll. The Curandero settled disputes of all kinds, particularly, in the case of the peasants, those arising from inheritances. He fixed the women up with birth-control devices made up from sponges and, if his arrival happened to coincide with the all-important tunny-fishing season, he accompanied the boats to sea, ‘smelt out’ the shoals of fish, and showed the fishermen where to cast their lines.

  The view was gaining ground now in the cat village that if ever they were to eat onions, cucumber and vegetable marrows again, a conciliatory arrangement would have to be reached with Sort, and it occurred to them that since the Curandero was so successful in healing breaches between families he might prove equally valuable as a mediator between the two communities.

  A slight problem existed in that, although this man was spoken of as the Curandero of Ripoll, no one had ever been allowed to know his real name, much less any address where he might be reached – if he possessed such a thing. The tunny-fishing season was now about to begin, and it was believed that he might already have installed himself in one of the coastal villages, so the people of Farol clubbed together to provide funds for one of the men to go in search of him. A few days later he was back with the message that the Curandero was on his way.

  The fact that I should have been entrusted with confidential information passed on by Sebastian was an encouraging sign of my steadily improving status in the village. It remained a drawback to be a foreigner, but with every week
as my face became more familiar, it was less of one. I had to appear to share local prejudices. ‘Take your hat off when you pass the church,’ Sebastian said, ‘but don’t go inside. Stay away from the bar when the police are there. Don’t try to buy a fisherman a drink. Wait until they ask you to have one.’ There were so many social pitfalls, so many ways to be avoided of doing the wrong thing. Working cautiously, tentatively, towards what I hoped might some day be full acceptance by the community, I never made a move without taking Sebastian’s or the Grandmother’s advice.

  The Curandero arrived on what was known here as the Feast of the August Virgin, and elsewhere as the Feast of the Assumption, when peasants in interior villages and hamlets knocked off work for once, put on their stiff holiday clothing, made up picnics and came down to spend a few hours on the beach. A lonely shore became for a day an animated one, with children doing what they could to dig castles in the coarse unsuitable sand, their parents paddling a little uncertainly in a few inches of water, hoping thus to absorb benefits supposed to be conferred by the minerals it contained, and picnickers doing their best to enjoy themselves although continually molested by scrounging cats.

  In this lively scene comings and goings that would have drawn attention at other times passed unnoticed. When the Curandero arrived by rowing boat a small party of fishermen waited to welcome him. Every man wore a hat, although some hats had been borrowed for the occasion. As the Curandero stepped down from the boat all the hats came off. The Curandero smiled and nodded. He had a round, boyish face with pink cheeks and blue eyes. He wore a holidaymakers’s imitation suede jacket, a hairnet intended to conceal the scars in his scalp, and pads clasped like a telephonist’s headphones over his ears. A year or two before a priest of Llobregat had denounced him for smuggling condoms in from France, and was said actually to have assisted in the terrible beating given him by the police, who had broken both his eardrums and caused permanent damage to his kidneys.

  A strip of matting had been laid down across the sand leading from the boat to a roughly made shelter put up in an hour or so from bamboo poles and palm thatching. Here the Curandero met the various families who had claimed the privilege of putting him up in their houses. He was given a glass of the local vinegary wine with a gold half-sovereign in its bottom. This he held in his mouth for a moment before transferring it to his pocket. A chair and table were carried in and he was invited to sit down to a meal of saffron rice, while the principal males stood smiling self-consciously in the background, hats in hand. Children were brought to be patted on the head, but the women kept out of the way.

  After the reception the Curandero was led hobbling away to the first house where he would lodge. Little more was seen of him from that moment, as he felt obliged to keep out of sight of the police, who would have asked for nothing better than an excuse to give him a second beating. The fishermen explained the difficulties that had arisen in their relations with Sort, and the Curandero said he would do all he could to settle the matter in an amicable way. The three days he spent in Farol were devoted to dispensing herbal medicines, casting horoscopes – which the fishermen could not have enough of – but above all providing counsel on all matters relating to marital relations and family planning. In this way his authority superseded that of the Grandmother, who was forced to take a back seat for the duration of his visit.

  In many areas of Mediterranean poverty – a poverty I had become familiar with – large families are the thing, and it is a proud, although almost everyday accomplishment for a woman to have borne ten children by the time she is thirty-five. The economic facts are that children in a city offering endless opportunities for low-grade, low-paid employment are an insurance against economic disaster, and from the age of eight upwards many of them work to contribute small sums to the family budget.

  In an impoverished fishing village the sea is the only employer and the resources it provides are strictly finite. A family of fifteen children in Naples may be something to boast about. In Farol, where many families remained voluntarily childless, one-child families were common, and any number of children in excess of two was rare and to be deplored. The cat people kept their families down by postponing marriages until the late twenties, by sexual abstinence – many couples infrequently occupied the same bed – and by the devices furnished by the Curandero. Every time he arrived he took time off to go on a hunt for the small, densely textured local variety of sponge to be hooked out of fairly shallow water, thereafter cleaning, and shaping, and offering each specimen with a supply of prophylactic ointment made up from lard impregnated with crushed hemlock.

  The sponges were collected, prepared and delivered within a couple of days but before turning his attention to settling the dispute with Sort there was another small diplomatic mission for the Curandero to attend to.

  Farol had just been deprived of the presence and valuable services of Sa Cordovesa, whom I had so often seen seated by her door, eyes cast down, as demure and composed as a Madonna over her sewing. She had been snapped up by an admiral, whose name, as he said, meant stag and who was on a visit to the area while undertaking a coastal survey. The admiral spent a single night at the fonda, spotted Sa Cordovesa in the morning, proposed marriage by the early afternoon, and carried her off on the evening bus.

  By the happiest of chances another beautiful girl had come to live in the village shortly before Sa Cordovesa’s loss, and the fishermen asked the Curandero whether she should be encouraged to stay. This young lady was known as Maria Cabritas because she had herded goats in Sort where she had been bred and born. Maria was a beauty of film-star quality with the fairest of blonde hair framing her face in tender ringlets, and enormous innocent eyes. She had come by a French fashion magazine from which she copied the dresses worn as she trailed through the bushes and brambles after her goats. In Sort she had been brought before the Alcalde charged with immorality – an imprisonable offence – and the Alcalde, who had a soft spot for her, instead of handing her over to the police, had told her and her mother to go and live somewhere else. So they had moved in to Farol and been allowed to set up temporary home in one of the ruined houses belonging to the departed cork families Sebastian had been engaged in renovating for the past few years.

  The fishermen wanted the Curandero’s advice on the advisability of encouraging Maria Cabritas and her mother to take up residence on a permanent basis. At the back of their minds they clearly hoped that Maria might be persuaded to take over Sa Cordovesa’s role, but Sebastian reported that they were a little troubled over the extreme fairness of her hair and complexion – a rarity indeed in this part of the world, and taken by some to indicate the possession of the evil eye. The Curandero saw the girl, cast her horoscope and returned with an enthusiastic report. Thus the matter was settled and when Maria, dressed in the latest Paris style and clutching her French magazine, took her goats to pasture along the cliff tracks overlooking the village, she was usually followed at a discreet distance by one or more admirers, although so far no one had received the slightest encouragement that would have inspired an aspirant even to address a hopeful word to her.

  Having dispensed with the routine domestic problems of the cat village, the Curandero went to Sort where, as ever, a number of disputes awaited his arbitration. On the whole the richer the families the more bitter and prolonged were their quarrels, particularly when there were a number of children to squabble over inheritance. These feuds could be carried to absurd lengths, and the Curandero reported back to Farol an instance where a large farmhouse of the traditional kind had been divided up in such a way that one son was able to cut off access to the stairs, compelling the co-heirs, his brothers and sisters, to reach their bedrooms by ladders.

  The mortality of a year had left a number of inheritances to be settled. In each case the estate (after ceaseless bickering and recrimination) had been divided up into theoretically equal parts, and the Curandero sat under a tree, with the dogs straining at their logs to get at him, and held the st
raws to be drawn, after which each heir would be entitled to choose his or her part in order of the length of the straw. Nothing on the face of it could have been fairer or more democratic, but manoeuvring behind the scenes often made a farce of the procedure. Returning this year the Curandero faced the grievances of a small queue of heirs complaining that some way had been found to diddle them out of their fair share of the inheritance. Congratulating the cat people later on their delivery from the scourge of property, the Curandero mentioned that, on his observation, the brothers in any family always seemed to end up with the lion’s share of whatever had been left, and that however much land the sisters finally came by, it was usually found to be deficient in some way, or without access to water.

  The problem with the most pressing priority for the dog people was that of the cork oaks. In their most recent effort to arrest the course of whatever disease or malefic influence it was that looked like wiping out the forest, they had arranged for a full-scale open-air religious service of exorcism and intercession to be conducted by their own priest with the support of the priests of three other parishes, and everything in the way of such accessories as holy images and banners they could provide. A procession had been formed, led by the priests and escorted by acolytes chanting and swinging censers. It was considered dishonourable here, as in other parts of Spain,* to assist in carrying the banners in a religious procession, which could lead to broken-off engagements and, in the case of married men, suspicion of cuckoldry. In this case old men immune from such threats had to be employed, and two collapsed under the strain of carrying the standards up the mountainside, one of them suffering a heart attack.