Voices of the Old Sea Read online

  Don Alberto mentioned his intention – although he did not wish it generally known – to import a band to welcome the saviour of the area in a fitting manner, and as he stepped down from the car that had brought him, the band would strike up See the Conquering Hero Comes – the Spanish and English versions of which are almost identical.

  Chapter Nine

  THERE WERE TWO pescas grandes, main catches, to be expected in the year. The first and most important of these, the spring catch of sardines, normally happened in March, immediately following which – if the catch proved satisfactory – a number of long-deferred marriages would take place. These were in church, in surroundings for which the fisherman bridegroom felt an intense superstitious aversion which led occasionally to extraordinary scenes. Filled up with brandy, reeling and staggering and supported on one side by his mother-in-law-to-be and on the other by his bride, he would be escorted to within sight of the church door, after which, with final shouts of encouragement, all the males of the party would turn round and go back, leaving only a few hard-bitten old women to carry on and enter the church.

  Don Ignacio, highly sensitive to the embarrassment provoked by the occasion, kept the service short and sweet, and was sufficiently understanding not to insist on celebrating Mass before getting on with the ceremony, which the priest of Sort always did. This priest had been known to dismiss couples whose responses he found unsatisfactory, claiming in one case that the groom had muttered incantations and counter-charms under his breath. When Don Ignacio had finished with the couple, he got rid of them abruptly without offering to shake the groom’s hand, and was quick to turn away so as not to see him spit ritually into the wind as they went. Normally the couple went back to the mother-in-law’s house, where in many cases they would continue to live. Because of the windfall of pesetas brought by the sardines in March, most children were born in Farol under the sign of Sagittarius in December.

  For several years the first pesca grande had not taken place, reducing the annual income of the village by about one-third. The second pesca grande, that of the tunny, had been only moderately successful, leading to two marriages, and the final hope for an eventually prosperous year lay in the pesca minor, the ‘small catch’ provided by autumn sardine shoals that arrived with fair punctuality. The first shoals were reported on 16 September in the first quarter of the moon – a time when, although no one could explain why, few fish were ever taken. Between them the men of the village sold fifty-one cases for 69 pesetas a case – an incredibly low price, as a case of sardines at this time of year was expected to fetch 250 pesetas. The fishermen suspected that they had been the victims of a market rigged by gente comprada – petty racketeers who bred like flies in this highly favourable environment. As a matter of passing interest, no one could be found in the village with enough arithmetic to work out fairly rapidly the total sum due to them for this transaction, and I had to be called in.

  From that time on only small quantities of sardines were taken. I went out with Juan, and we fished all night and caught less than a case. There was no market for these small and sporadic catches of fish, most of which were eaten in the village, or exchanged for vegetables. The Farol method of cooking fresh sardines may have been unusual. They were salted and kept in a cool place for four days, and after that always grilled.

  At this time the village of Sort made its wine. The grapes were always cut on 20 September, and I was invited by Don Alberto to take part in treading them next day. A room in one of the village houses containing an enormous tub was used for this purpose. The grapes were tipped into the tub to a depth of almost two feet, and – while the women were excluded in the street outside – the men marched in, took off their rope-soled alpargatas, rolled up their trousers and the treading began. There were no concessions even to basic hygiene. The splendid reddish-purple grapes, claimed by Don Alberto to be of Roman origin, were thick with dust when they went into the tub, and in many cases sprays of leaves were attached to the grape-stems, and there was an overpowering stench from the alpargatas strewn about the floor.

  In the meanwhile two men wearing black and white patched shirts and armed with short batons pushed through the line of women in the street, and began to whack out at each other, uttering weird cries while a third man, similarly dressed, played a pipe. This was another of Don Alberto’s folkloric revivals, which the villagers found absurd. Don Alberto said that his arthritis prevented him from joining in the treading, but he was in attendance, seated on his aged Levis two-stroke motorcycle and looking like a praying mantis. The Alcalde, an illiterate ex-goatherd with a row of pure gold teeth, was also there, and the priest of Sort, a saturnine and unshaven fanatic much disliked by his parishioners, prowled menacingly in the background. There were no representatives from Farol.

  After we had traipsed round the tub for about a half-hour the trodden mass was shovelled out to be transferred to several large barrels in which it would stand to ferment for three days. Following that, the grape juice would be drained off and poured into a number of small barrels prepared by washing them out in hot wine. As soon as each barrel was filled to the top a mouse would be dropped in, held under the surface until drowned, and then removed. Finally, just as a bitter branch was added to the baker’s dough, a small branch from the vine was added to each barrel, to impart a vinegary flavour. The original intention had been to make the wine less palatable to the peons who would drink it, but it was a device that no longer served its purpose as all local wine-drinkers, including Don Alberto himself, had acquired a taste for the flavour.

  The wine would continue to ferment until 11 November, and on St Martin’s day the barrels would be plugged. From that time on it was ready to drink. This year Don Alberto had planned a ritual wine-tasting, with pipes and drums, by peasants wearing the old stocking-type caps, breeches and gaiters, and seamstresses had been put to work to produce these garments copied from a picture on an old soap calendar.

  Following the wine-treading Don Alberto and I were invited to the house of the Alcalde, who had done well out of the war and was no longer dependent upon goats, but still had a small herd of them about the house, kept on as pets. The goats lived in a room adjoining the one in which we were received, and the Alcalde was delighted to be able to entertain us by opening the door and calling them one by one, by name, into our presence. Each goat came through, trotted up to us, held its paw to be shaken and went tripping back. One of them paused for a second, parted its rear legs, and let go a stream of urine before doing this. This caused both men some amusement, and Don Alberto was delighted by the performance as a whole. It occurred to me, subjected to what I should once have found the overpowering fetor of these surroundings, but which now provoked in me no disgust, that I had made considerable progress in the last two months.

  With only three days to go to the fiesta the strangers invited by Don Alberto appeared in the cat village and began to put up a large tent on the beach. This was his circus, but which turned out to be no more than a travelling theatre of the kind which still survived where there were no cinemas within reach – a sad and seedy affair providing the barest of subsistence for ageing and talentless players who had come to the end of the road.

  A garish poster covered the front, of monsters and devils and man-eating tigers and a man in a balloon, and under it a notice read: The Palace of Illusions, A Spectacular Parade of Great Luxury. The sweet, sad, shallow music of the far south came through the tent’s opening all the long late summer’s afternoon and aged actresses, ravaged by the years and exposure to the sun, hung about despondently in carpet slippers, kimonos and beach suits in appalling taste. A blood-red ticket box plastered all over with handbills of performances that had taken place many years before in important towns bore a placard that urged, ‘Hurry! Don’t delay a moment. The spectacle is about to start, and few places remain’, but nobody went to the theatre, because nobody in Farol felt they could afford to throw four pesetas away in entertainments of this kind. They had also
realised that these people were gypsies and they disliked and mistrusted gypsies and everything to do with them. This antipathy was irrational and reflected no more than a national prejudice, for it was unlikely that any member of the community had ever spoken to a gypsy, but for all that it was deep-seated. When Carmela seized a cat up by the tail, swung it round her head and hurled it through the window, or dropped a mouse sizzling into the nearest fire it was always with a cry of hatred: ‘Gitano!’

  I asked her and the Grandmother to list their objections, and they were these:

  1) they were treacherous and unpredictable;

  2) they dressed flashily and were given to boasting;

  3) they preferred to live in caves (which was true);

  4) no male gypsy ever worked if he could find a girl to pimp on. Having found a girl to keep him he spent his life sleeping or playing the guitar.

  In the course of this enquiry it came out that many things regarded by foreigners as typical of Spain, such as flamenco dancing, were held in contempt by the cat people because of their gypsy origins.

  I was in the bar with Juan and Sebastian when a young man from the beach theatre came in with a guitar and began to sing cante flamenco. This annoyed my friends, and after a moment or two Juan said, almost in an undertone, ‘May the devil shit out your soul.’

  The gypsy heard him and immediately got up to go. Juan was conscience-stricken at having given offence, so he went after the man and stopped him at the door. He said later that he felt terribly embarrassed because although he was ashamed he couldn’t bring himself to apologise. In the end he asked the man, ‘Why do you sing like that?’

  ‘To frighten fear,’ the gypsy told him.

  This was the kind of way any Spaniard liked to hear a man talk and Juan began to take a liking to him.

  ‘Who wrote the words of that copla? You?’

  ‘No, a man called Lorca,’ the gypsy said.

  ‘Well, I like it anyway. From your part of the world is he?’

  ‘Nearby. He died.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Juan said, ‘because he was a man I would have liked to meet. Anyway, come and meet my friends, and have a drink.’

  Next day Maria Cabritas reported a sad incident to the Grandmother when she went to buy fish. The people of Farol were very proud of taking care of the old and needy, which they did in a tactful and unobtrusive way. In this season the boats went out shortly after dawn to put down the nets for bogas, a fish about twice the size of a sardine which could only be taken in the first hours of daylight, after the dolphins which continually pursued them had gone. The boats normally beached with their catch at about eight and, watching this scene from my window, I could expect to see two or three old ladies, all of them widows, loitering in the vicinity close to the water’s edge. The fishermen had worked out a system for giving without seeming to give, and in this way avoiding all possibility of humiliating the taker. Every day a number of fish would be left as if overlooked in the boats, and while fishermen turned their backs, ostensibly occupying themselves with their gear, the women would go over to the boats and help themselves to all the fish they could carry in their hands.

  Maria Cabritas told the Grandmother that she had been taking a short cut along the beach with her goats that morning when she had noticed one of the women from the theatre standing with the old ladies waiting for the boats, and when the moment came for them to help themselves to the fish she went with them. She wrapped the fish she picked up in her scarf, walked back up the beach, and then sat on the sea wall to look at the fish, and at that moment several cats attacked her. Maria said she was screaming and trying to fight the cats off, but they were climbing all over her. They tore the fish out of her hands and ran away, and the woman sat down on the wall again, covered her face with her hands and began to weep.

  The fishermen were extremely upset to hear about this. Someone said, the players must be starving but we didn’t know. That night a case of sardines was taken down to the beach and pushed just inside the opening of the tent, and next day most of the wives and children of the village attended the performance and did their best to enjoy it. There was renewed talk about getting rid of some of the cats and the village halfwit was paid a small sum to round up about fifty of them and take them up to the forest. It transpired that he released them too close to home for in the next few days most of them – recognisable from their various disfigurements – were back in circulation.

  The twenty-ninth of September, the day of the fiesta, dawned. It had become clear to Don Alberto that little or nothing was going to be done to turn this into a more joyous occasion than any of its predecessors.

  Nobody in the cat village would agree to put out flags, nor for one flimsy excuse or other would they allow confetti to be used. At most they gave grudging assent for a few fireworks being let off late at night. The underlying feeling he picked up – although no one put this in so many words – was, what business is this of yours? You don’t live here.

  The idea of a fancy-dress procession was dismissed with incredulous laughter, and fishermen who mentioned this suggestion to me said, ‘You listen, and pretend to go along with him. It’s all you can do. In the first place, where’s the fancy dress coming from? I’ve worn these same things you see me in now for the past three years.’

  We went together to discuss the matter of a free issue of wine with the Alcalde.

  ‘We have to buy our wine from your friends up the road,’ the Alcalde told Don Alberto, ‘and what we’ve got left over from last year’s gone sour. It’s undrinkable.’ As for dancing in the street that idea was instantly knocked on the head. ‘Why not leave the thing as it is?’ the Alcalde said. ‘You won’t find anyone in this village who even knows how to waltz.’ His advice to Don Alberto was to forget the magic lantern show, because – although he might not have noticed it – they’d spruced up the old slaughterhouse dating from the times when people could afford to eat meat, put seats in it, and now put on a movie show once a fortnight. This meant that no one bothered about magic lanterns any longer.

  When Don Alberto got onto his motorcycle and puttered down to the beach he found the gypsies’ tent had been taken down, and they were packing up their gear ready to move off. Their manager told him their takings for three days had been just over 200 pesetas, and he was bitter and derisive, as gypsies are wont to be when things are not going their way, about the false hopes Don Alberto had encouraged.

  Don Ignacio had a suggestion to make and we went to his house where he showed us a collection of bric-à-brac collected on one or another of his archaeological digs. There were numerous pieces of broken clay pottery, fragments of glass, a foot of Roman drainpipe, a third of an infant skull, and many more nondescript and unidentifiable objects. The only sound and undamaged item he described in an awe-hushed voice as a third-century inkwell – held as if it had been a jewelled egg from an imperial Russian collection. His proposal was that this dismal paraphernalia could form the basis of an exhibition, certain to attract excited crowds who could be charged an entrance fee of 2 pesetas – to go to church funds. When Don Alberto turned this down he suggested an entertainment by a local lad who could imitate crickets, bullfrogs, the kind of snuffling and whining that the hungry hounds of Sort constantly kept up, and the screechings the local cats gave out when busy with their nuptial routine. Don Alberto shook his head at this, too, mentioning a music-hall attraction he had witnessed in Barcelona some years before, featuring a man able to fart simple tunes. He imagined he must be dead by now.

  All that remained of the original plans for enlivening the day was the band, whose members arrived by bus in good time on the morning of the twenty-sixth, in their greyish, once purple tunics, their braided caps and carrying their cornets, trombones, a single tuba and an enormous drum.

  Their first engagement – quite independent of any commitment to the fiesta – was to welcome young Puig de Mont, who was to arrive on this very day to claim his family domain. Huge effort
s had been made under Don Alberto’s urgings to clear the calamitous road down to Sort of major obstacles and to fill in the atrocious potholes so that an expertly driven car could reach the village. Work on the old house had been finished with only hours to spare, Sebastian and his team having worked overnight by the aid of flares. An alfresco meal was to be served, for which a trestle table had been set up in the street outside the Puig de Mont mansion door, and the Alcalde, backed by the pear-shaped old men lined up in order of importance, waited for the appearance of the car to give the signal for the band to strike up.

  A moment later a ripple of excitement spread through the crowd as a shining Mercedes with folded-down hood and two outside exhaust pipes turned the corner. It stopped and Don Federico Puig de Mont stepped down. He patted the dust from his grey flannels, shook hands all round and was conducted to the table. The band crashed into See the Conquering Hero Comes. A photographer brought in from a nearby town held up a contraption like a small bird-table heaped with magnesium powder which he exploded, and the women squeaked with excitement in the background and were hushed.

  The band galloped through the Conquering Hero and launched out into the Triumphal March from Aida. The great man sat down, and the village dignitaries, every man of whom wore a black hat, borrowed or otherwise, took their places. One or two important women had been allowed to huddle unobtrusively in the background, and at the end of the street two Civil Guards, rifles slung, and neck-protectors of white cloth suspended from the backs of their hats, looked from the waist up remarkably like sphinxes.

  An enormous dish piled with goat’s flesh embedded in a mountain of soggy rice was brought to the table, and several of Don Federico’s neighbours began a struggle, with rice flying in all directions, for the honour of piling food on his plate. I sat facing the guest of honour, flanked by the notables across the table, and it suddenly struck me that apart from Don Federico all these men were cast in the same mould. Don Alberto could have been almost the twin brother of the illiterate Alcalde, and even the pear-shaped men with immensely long fingernails and several chins appeared as self-indulgent members of the same family. Thinking further about this it occurred to me that Don Alberto and Don Ignacio, the priest, were physically practically indistinguishable – the products of a severe and dominant environment – and that so strong was this racial imprint that it cut across the classes, to the point that no one who didn’t know them would have been surprised to see the cadaverous muleteer of Sort puttering about the place perched on Don Alberto’s motorcycle, or Don Alberto hastily dragging a mule in the direction of a tavern outside which it would punctually deposit its dung in payment for its master’s glass of wine.