Voices of the Old Sea Page 6

  Following the captain’s warning I applied for a fishing licence, kept out of the big, registered boats, but went fishing as before with Sebastian and Juan, as their boats did not come under the ban. I also made some progress with the difficult and demanding art of sea-fishing with rod and line, in this way occasionally catching a fish that fulfilled the high standards the Grandmother set.

  My standing in the village continued to improve, until one day the Alcalde set aside a fine ruin of a chair outside his bar for my personal use, in this way denoting the conferment of native status. It had helped to follow the rules closely, and to make myself useful when I could, and not only to the fishermen, but unexpectedly to their wives and the shopkeepers in the matter of keeping accounts. Although Geoffrey of Ipswich may have introduced arithmetic into England after his thirteenth-century visit to Barcelona, few rural Catalans could now even add up, let alone multiply or divide. This meant that I was constantly in demand, particularly in the general shop, where a woman might have bought five or six articles – each likely to involve centavos as well as pesetas – and the shopkeeper went very slowly up and down his counter, scratching his ears and shaking his head disconsolately before addressing himself to the huge problem of totting up the account.

  In the meanwhile I made investigatory sorties outside the limits of Farol. One was to visit a settlement of charcoal burners, who live their own mysterious and isolated lives in the cork forest. For the first time I began to understand the real nature, the drama, the calamity that had overtaken the oaks. We climbed into the foothills through a landscape once robust, now turned fragile and delicate. So many thousands of trees, once almost solidly massed against the slopes, seemed now to be fading away, the once dense greens replaced by the smoky browns and the lavender-greys of death.

  Sebastian and I found a group of charcoal burners squatting near a huge pile of turfs used to cover the wood with the fire smouldering beneath, their wine bottles close to hand. So great was the community’s dependence upon them for its fuel that they could make their own rules in the matter of payment for their services. Any landowner who contracted charcoal burners was obliged to provide each man with two litres of wine and one and a half kilograms of bread a day. The charcoal burners, once their fire had been lit, had little more to do for twelve hours or so until the charcoal was ready, and for most of this time they stayed drunk. They glanced up at us a little nervously then looked away, a most mysterious people, mongoloid in appearance, with little hair on their bodies and speaking a language among themselves of which no one understood a word. The tree-owners’ loss was their gain and great times were in store for them, as it was clear that from now on there would be little shortage of wood.

  We paid visits to one or two of the bigger peasants in the Sort area, and I learned from them a little more about the peasant attitude to life. Unlike the much poorer fishermen who lived in hope of huge catches, if not next week, then the week after that, the peasants were imbued with pessimism, so deeply rooted – so cultivated, almost – that they insisted on going to fairs and buying china ornaments with cynical proverbs on them, and sticking them all round their houses to remind them of the unpleasant facts of their lives which, since there was no escaping them, they might as well learn to live with. At the back of this attitude may have been the fact that in cultivating the earth there were never windfalls to be hoped for. Bad weather could ruin a man, but good weather never more than slightly and predictably increased his income. The peasants, therefore, unlike the fishermen, were addicted to gambling and games of chance. They were also subject to boredom that frequently degenerated into melancholia. Sebastian and I called on a man who had suddenly announced to his friends that he had had enough of life. He had done as well as a peasant of his standing could do, and was highly thought of and went short of nothing, but all he could say was ‘life bores me’. He got up to shake hands with us, offered us a drink, then sat down, smiling a little vacantly. We asked a few polite questions and he answered them intelligently enough, but he had nothing to say to us. When we were outside Sebastian said, ‘There are plenty like him. Soon he’ll stop eating, and that will be the end.’

  Chapter Seven

  MOST OF THE LAND surrounding the village was owned by a reactionary aristocrat known as Don Alberto. Don Alberto was a lover of all things of the past and to get into his house one had to go through an extraordinary farce. There was no bell or knocker on the door, and visitors were forced to stand there and call out in a loud voice ‘ave Maria purisima’, this being an ancient custom of this part of the country observed by no one but Don Alberto. At this, a crone in black would shoot the bolts and open the door. This woman had been Don Alberto’s beautiful mistress in the days of both their youth, when they had lived in Madrid and she had been presented at court and painted by a court painter.

  We sat in an enormous sepulchral room on three chairs which were its only furniture and sipped Don Alberto’s stale rancio – palo aged in the cask, and thicker, sicklier and more liverish than the young version of the wine. Don Alberto got on to his favourite subject – the glories of things gone by. He was a tall, incredibly thin man who creaked a little when he moved, bald-headed with a tuft of grey hair behind each ear, and strangely enthusiastic eyes. In indication of a life of leisure he normally went about in pyjamas having extreme broad stripes, like those of a Devil’s Island convict, worn with a large and floppy beret. His English, learned from a Scotch nanny, was excellent and he read nothing but the Latin classics and obituary notices. Even the climate had radically changed, he said. He remembered a childhood refreshed with the soft rains of spring and autumn that rarely ceased to fall, and the scent of dampness, he said, was still in his nostrils. Now the tyranny of the sun was harsher than that of politicians. ‘The loss of rainfall is the cause of half our troubles,’ Don Alberto said. ‘This country will never be the same again.’

  Don Alberto was a Spaniard cast in the mould of Don Quixote, austere and romantic, full of fancies and living on air. The peasants, in their estimation of human character, never applied that nebulous word ‘good’ to a man. A big-bodied, tough, successful peasant who set the standard was concreto – solid. Don Alberto they would have categorised as noble, if he had not been a bit of a figure of fun. Anyone could get the better of him in financial matters, and this diminished him a little in their eyes. In local share-cropping arrangements, for example, the tenant expected to get a third of the produce, and the landlord two-thirds, but in Don Alberto’s case the situation was reversed, not out of generosity on his part, but because it was beneath him to argue.

  My first meeting with Don Alberto was at the house of the priest of Farol, Don Ignacio, who invited me because Don Alberto was an authority on local folk customs, in which he knew I was interested. Don Ignacio, too, was an educated man who spoke English very well and as resolutely as Don Alberto he had turned his back on the present. It was his habit to slip away whenever he could to an archaeological dig on a Roman site near Ampurias. When this happened he posted a notice on the church door to say that he was suffering from an attack of tonsillitis, and had gone to bed.

  Don Ignacio’s house was bare and claustrophobic as Don Alberto’s, and he lived uncomfortably attended by an old woman virtually interchangeable in appearance with the one who looked after the old landowner, who fed him on gruel made from the disgusting-looking araña fish that none of the fishermen or their families would touch. This grey-haired, slatternly old creature was generally accepted – as in the case of Don Alberto’s housekeeper – to have been his mistress, and in so far as the priest enjoyed any prestige it was based on this legend, or historic fact.

  There were cats everywhere about Don Ignacio’s house when I arrived, their eyes gleaming in the gloom. Some of them were staggering about the place, clearly drunk, for, in accordance with custom, although the priest gave them no food, he put down a saucerful of rancio for them at frequent intervals. To help them to endure their condition, as he said. ‘It
must be terrible to be without a soul.’

  Inevitably the two men were on their favourite topic – the decadence of modern times. Don Alberto blamed the cinema, which displayed the godlessness and luxury of the rich to the poor, and the widespread consumption of tomatoes – recently introduced into local agriculture – which reduced fertility and lowered the birthrate. He wondered if this were not part of a conspiracy to reduce families and ultimately destroy the influence of feudal landowners like himself by depriving them of their workforce.

  Don Ignacio took a liberal standpoint in this argument, pointing out that he knew of twenty couples in Farol who had been waiting years to get married and could not do so because they could not save up the 10,000 pesetas regarded as the minimum capital required to embark on marriage.

  Don Alberto didn’t see that money came into it. He remembered when people had been far worse off than now, when landowners had lessened their day labourers’ appetites by baking earth with their bread. If he himself still had a pine-branch put in the dough it was because they had got used to the flavour. Marriages in the old days in villages like Farol were on the basis of total poverty. And what was wrong with that? Wasn’t it obvious that the poor were purer in heart than the rich? Weren’t Jesus and his disciples poor men?

  The priest seemed embarrassed at the direction the argument was taking, but agreed that the rich these days were a pretty immoral lot. Black marketeers all of them, Don Alberto said, and the priest agreed. It had become a nation of black marketeers.

  Don Ignacio appealed to Don Alberto for his advice as a specialist, as to what to do to liven up the Farol annual fiesta due to be held in some two weeks’ time. Both men agreed that this was a thoroughly spiritless affair, and that if the people of Sort were to be invited to join in they ought to feel convinced that they were going to enjoy themselves.

  Don Alberto’s attempt to revamp the fiesta of Midsummer’s Eve, the Verbena of San Juan, at Sort had not been an entire success. He had learned from his researches that as recently as fifty years before the custom had been for the village boys to chase after the girls, slashing at their legs with bundles of lighted brushwood. Just as in the case of rites held elsewhere at the same time when youths and maidens trudged barefoot through glowing embers, it was a mysterious fact that no one was ever hurt. The revived festival in Sort was less remarkable in this way, because the magic failed to work, and a number of girls were slightly scorched. ‘Something went wrong,’ Don Alberto admitted. ‘We’ve lost faith. We don’t believe in ourselves the way we did.’ Profoundly boring as both men found the Farol fiesta in its present form they were both convinced that there was no reason why it could not be turned into a success. They were full of ideas.

  ‘Fireworks,’ Don Alberto said. ‘Now that’s something to draw the crowds.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. If we can get hold of any, and get a permit in time,’ Don Ignacio agreed.

  ‘A procession with floats, fancy dress, with prizes to be won for the best costumes, a magic lantern show, free wine, dancing in the street.’

  ‘A circus would be the thing. Clowns, a fat lady. A wall of death. Admission free for children. A small one’s just opened up near Ampurias where I’m investigating a third-century villa. I could speak to them about it.’

  ‘I wish you would,’ Don Alberto said. ‘They’ll never have had a fiesta like it in this village before.’

  When I mentioned these plans to Sebastian later in the day, he laughed. ‘They’re crazy, the pair of them. Just wait and see what happens when the time comes.’

  Chapter Eight

  ENQUIRIES INTO THE HISTORIES of the cat and dog villages revealed extraordinary facts. They were dramatically different in atmosphere and character from each other in every way, but they were also quite alien in their customs from the body of Spain that enclosed them, of which they seemed to know so little. The people of both villages were conscious of this separateness, but the only explanation they could offer was their long physical isolation at the end of a windy and precipitous dirt road that became often impassable in winter.

  What seemed to have been kept from them was the fact that – as Don Alberto coolly admitted – this isolation was by no means accidental, and had been contrived by his own family in complicity with three great cork-owning families of the area, two of which had now disappeared, leaving as their memorial only three vast crumbling mansions on the outskirts of Farol.

  All these dynastic fortunes had been founded at the beginning of the nineteenth century when seven cork-processing factories were supplied with fresh-cut cork coming from as far away as Portugal. The corks, poured out by the million, were exported to France – the best variety, from local trees, going to the champagne area. The invention of the metal bottle top had brought this epoch, almost overnight, to an end.

  Don Alberto, and on another occasion Don Ignacio, described the little feudal enclave that had been carved out here for the production of an amenable workforce protected from all disruptive influences. The atrocious road along which no bridges could be built across the mountain torrents kept out all but hardy and adventurous travellers. When the local authorities sent piles of road-building materials prior to beginning work the cork barons ordered them to be shovelled away, and when – only a few years before the outbreak of war – the peasants of Sort got together to widen a dangerous corner, dynamite was used to start a landslide and put an end to their efforts.

  Don Alberto de Soto and his family before him owned nine-tenths of the worthwhile agricultural land and the cork barons owned the mountains, but Don Alberto said that mistakes had been made in the past in his father’s and his grandfather’s time by rewarding workers for especially meritorious service by selling them small plots of land, thus creating a kind of upthrusting and unreliable middle class, and the cork families had made the same mistake with what were seen as unprofitable trees. Otherwise the old feudal consortium, founded, he insisted, as much on ideological as economic factors, had held together well. People longed for firm leadership and limited horizons, he said, especially in a country with a chronic addiction to political discord. The little empire ruled over by the four families was paternalistic, if despotic. Don Alberto’s great-great-grandfather, founder of his family’s fortunes, might have put earth in his peons’ bread, but at least there was plenty of bread, and no one ever starved to death on his estates as they did in considerable numbers elsewhere in Spain at that period. He handed out bonuses for large families, imported an ex-bandit from the Sierra de Gredos to keep order, and when one of the peons killed this man, arranged for him to be publicly garrotted, and the labourers were given a day off work to allow them to attend the ceremony.

  The system immediately prior to the war had remained roughly as before. The Republic had spawned a number of political parties and aggroupments, all of them obnoxious to the rulers of Sort and Farol, but their agents and propagandists had been warned to keep their noses out, or to expect to have them bloodied. When the going rate for a peon was 6 pesetas a day, Don Alberto was still able to pay only 4 pesetas, but he was unusual among his breed of men in providing some minimal help in case of sickness or in old age. All that Don Alberto did he most sincerely believed was for the good of his people.

  He was naturally pessimistic about the future. By dint of saving and scraping and picking up a duro (5 pesetas in the old money) here and a duro there the peons his great-great-grandfather had taken over in Sort had slowly scraped together enough capital to organise their own class system. At the top a few pear-shaped men, with long fingernails to prove they did no work, owned a hundred or so cork oaks and grew sweet peppers, cabbages and maize on a few hundred acres of land. At the bottom of this pyramid the village muleteer, self-employed and therefore working for half the minimum wage decreed by the state, had trained his mule to deposit its manure only at the door of the inn, for which he received a glass of wine twice a day.

  The near-collapse of the cork industry, which had forced
the young men of the village of Sort to seek work elsewhere or to emigrate, had helped to bring about what Don Alberto saw as a deplorable state of affairs.

  All, however, was not lost, because about a year before my arrival the heir to the last surviving cork business in the area, an exceedingly energetic young man, had found an overseas market for first-quality cork, bought up for an old song a number of moribund cork enterprises, and was seen as well on his way to founding a new cork empire. Sentiment had impelled him to give orders for the old house at Sort to be put in order with the intention of using it as his headquarters whenever in the area. It was this project on which Sebastian and a number of builder’s labourers had been engaged, and the work of restoration was on the point of completion. Puig de Mont, the new cork magnate, proposed to arrive for the ceremony of taking possession at the end of the month, and it was hoped that this would coincide with the fiesta on the twenty-third. Don Alberto’s dream, his fondest hope, was that this event would herald the rebirth of the industry, the re-opening in modernised form of the factories, the reclamation of so many promising lads from disordered and aimless lives and the restoration of at least some semblance of the decencies of the past.