Voices of the Old Sea Read online

  The face of Don Federico Puig de Mont was from the portrait gallery of a different world, remaining in appearance and gesture wholly apart from those who surrounded him, a man with his feet set on a different path. He was measured and coolly correct in all that he did, sampling the greasy rice and sipping the turbid wine with no change of expression. He bore with the blare of the band’s trumpet, almost in his eardrums, showed no signs of being affected in any way by the peasant heartiness – put on to some extent in the hope of concealing fear – the belching and farting that went on all round him, accepted with a nod of gratitude the fleshy titbit recovered by a gnarled paw from the dish and dropped on his plate. A hen landed squawking on one end of the table and began to peck at the spilled rice, and Don Federico never glanced in its direction. He had trained himself to handle any situation.

  A visit to the trees was next on the agenda, but shortly before this, after the fiery aniseed liqueur had been poured out, Don Federico’s agent slipped a paper in front of him. The agent had been sent to Sort three days in advance of this visit, had carried out an inspection of several square miles of forest, and this was his report. Don Federico’s brows knitted as he digested the facts it contained, and when he had finished, he took out his pen, jotted down a number of figures, and did a few simple sums.

  We all then went to see the trees, following roughly the direction taken by the Curandero a few days before. Looking down into the first valley where the oaks began, we saw that the bare earth was the colour of milk chocolate paled by exposure to the sun in a shop window, and covered by an interlacing pattern of fine black branches stripped of the last of their leaves. It was a day when from some freak of the local atmosphere having to do with wind direction and humidity the sky appeared purple rather than blue, and although we were a mile from the village, all its sounds, such as the donkey’s braying, and even the children at play, which would normally have been muffled in foliage, reached us with an almost piercing clarity.

  Don Federico and his agent had drawn close together, and the members of the party from the village seemed to have moved away from them a little apprehensively. Everyone stopped while the agent opened a knife and cut a piece of cork from a tree. Both men examined it in silence and Don Federico shook his head.

  After this we went back downhill to the village, where nobody could find anything to say. When we reached the little square where Don Federico had left the car the two men shook hands all round, and Don Federico gave the Alcalde a slap on the shoulder and said, ‘Well, we’ll be letting you know.’ Then they got into the car, waved from the window and drove away.

  Don Alberto said to the Alcalde, ‘I suppose you know what happened?’

  ‘I have a good idea,’ the Alcalde said.

  ‘He’s changed his mind, and he’s pulling out,’ Don Alberto said. ‘Until now I’ve gone on hoping that something could be salvaged from this. Now I see it can’t. There’s no money to be made here any longer.’

  ‘If that’s so, we’re finished,’ the Alcalde said.

  As an outsider I had been excluded – as in fact almost all the males of Farol were – from the principal part of the fiesta, which had taken place in the early morning, and as an outsider I should not even have been aware of its existence. The fiesta as a whole was generally referred to as Sa Cova – ‘The Cave’. There was a central feature, a mystery, which was kept a close secret in the village, and it was considered unlucky to make any reference to it in ordinary conversation. This took place in a cave, the existence of which would actually be denied if a stranger started asking embarrassing questions. Carmela had made some vague allusion to there being ‘something more to Sa Cova than met the eye’ but, having been born elsewhere, could provide no details. Sebastian was in the same position, though his wife gave him some reluctant account of the matter.

  Elvira explained to him that every year at the end of the fiesta, a ‘candidate’ was chosen from among the young village girls to head the festivities for the year to come. The selection was based upon consensus of opinion and sometimes, when no decision could be reached, the straws would be drawn. Appointment brought great prestige to the girl and to the family thus honoured. Sebastian said that his wife seemed sour about it all, because there had never been any question of her candidacy being put forward. This chosen one, as she was called, was normally between five and ten years of age, pretty and intelligent (and if she had fair hair, so much the better). Sponsors – all of them women – would be appointed from other families and they would help with any expenses that might arise in preparing the child for the fiesta. The year for her would be one of privilege and full of small attentions. It was the custom for all the women and children of Farol to be provided with new clothes to wear on 26 September, and the chosen one was dressed in white as if for a first communion and lent or given a few pieces of inexpensive jewellery for the occasion. On the morning of the fiesta she would be expected to eat a small specially baked chocolate cake.

  Then the Romería – the short sea pilgrimage – would begin. The child and her mother would get into a boat in the charge of a man who was not her father and, followed by several other boats, all of them full of women most carefully turned out in their new clothes, the procession would set out along the coast. The boats would then row several miles to a cave at the bottom of a cliff, where the chosen one and her retinue of women would be put ashore, and while the men waited in the boats the women would go into the cave. Once inside the mother smacked the child quite lightly, the child pretended to cry, and that was the end of the thing. Back in the village there would be a general rush to embrace and kiss the girl, and the men were not excluded from this. It was meaningless, absolutely meaningless, Sebastian said, but it was far and away the most important event of the year for the people of Farol.

  In theory no male villager had ever entered the cave, but, being an outsider, Sebastian saw no reason why the prohibition should apply in his case and one day, when he was sure that the coast was clear, he had gone there. He noted that as in many other sea caves the water was of great transparency and brilliance, and that the vestibule of the cave was suffused with a strange, blue light. The rocky floor sloping up from the water was very smooth, as if polished over the centuries perhaps by innumerable feet. The cave contained nothing but the stumps of a few broken stalagmites, but there were sooty markings on the wall that might have been caused by lamp smoke, and seemed to form some sort of pattern. He was suddenly overcome, he said, by a sensation of doom, as if he were in the presence of evil. He added, ‘But then I am very imaginative, and susceptible to atmospheres.’

  The main preoccupation of those villagers who did not go on the sea pilgrimage was the preparation of food; obligatory messes demanded by tradition, many of them unpalatable to those who tried them for the first time. The Farol people, condemned on the whole to plain food and little of it, were not only heavy-handed on the spices on festive occasions, but had the extraordinary habit of putting chocolate into almost everything – a habit Don Alberto was convinced had been picked up in Mexico from seafaring forebears. The chocolate was kept by the shopkeeper in a canvas bag hanging from the rafters away from the rats. It had to breathe, he said. When anybody ordered a supply he got out a lump and broke it up with a hammer. After many years of breathing the surface pores had turned white, but the freshly exposed surfaces of the chocolate were almost black. Its flavour was penetrating and bitter. The most festive of all festive dishes was calamares cooked in their own ink, with chocolate and saffron, and it was at this moment that I realised why the Grandmother had been so insistent that Sebastian and I should bring her all the fish that we could catch.

  Those who could find no calamares had to fall back on meat, rarely to be had in Farol and, even when available, of the poorest quality. As a rare flavour for this special occasion the wholesale butchers had provided a quantity of offal: hearts, lights, liver, stomach and sexual parts (the last ordered from the butcher’s wife wordlessly, with the gest
ure of a bell-ringer pulling on his rope). A number of families would sit down to a stew called asadura made from these ingredients, its slightly repellent flavour masked by a large quantity of peppers cooked in the dish.

  For the lucky few with a little spare cash left over from the proceeds of the tunny fishing, or whose credit was better than average at the butcher’s, there were chickens and rabbits. The chickens were old boilers. Their flesh was given to sickly children as were the odds and ends of giblets an elderly hen provided, plus its head – shorn of beak – and the feet, which were put on display in saucers along the counter as if they had been offerings at a shrine. Rabbits had become scarce and dear, and the butcher’s wife used all her native artistry on the small number she had to offer. They were suspended in heraldic fashion along the length of her counter, legs widespread to show a brilliant little banner of liver at the entrance to each vacant abdomen, fear-obsessed eyes bulging from their sockets, a tiny white rosette pinned to the tip of each ear. It was a national law that all rabbits had to be shown thus, complete with identifiable heads, to prevent fraudulent substitution by cats.

  I had visited the butcher’s shop with Carmela shortly after it had opened for business that morning and we had found the butcher’s wife all ready for the fiesta under her blood-smirched apron, with hair piled in rolls straight from the curlers, her rows of pearls and her new silk dress. She was pink and hearty, with pouting, cherry-red lips and her big, smooth arms flecked with the tiniest of vermilion spots, as if her skin were in harmony with her environment. Carmela warned me to look away as she took up her cleaver and began to hack a small bit here and another there from the unrecognisable animal tissue on the counter. When Carmela picked up her purchase, wrapped in a newspaper sheet containing nothing but religious information, it squelched faintly, and she let out a cry of ‘todo es bueno!’ – it’s all good food – her frequently repeated motto.

  Nobody did anything strenuous on the day of Sa Cova. The big meal started at 2 p.m., and went on until about 3.30, after which most people went to bed. In the period of the siesta anything went, and sex-starved husbands made the most of it. Taking a brisk walk that afternoon in an effort to quell the heartburn, it was impossible to overlook the matrimonial rumpus behind shuttered windows in the otherwise silent street.

  At about five things began to move again. The villagers got up, washed, threw the washing water out of the window, then dressed with great care for the early evening promenade due to begin when at least half the street was in the shade. It was expected that this would be the best turnout since pre-war days due to the dresses to be shown off, copied from designs in Maria Cabritas’ French fashion magazine.

  In the Sa Cova promenade the females, the more important element in the procedure, were segregated from the males. For the line-up the female members of the D’Escorreu family, who had provided this year’s ‘chosen one’, were placed in the front, the nine-year-old Marta, still in white, in the centre of the line, flanked by her mother, a pair of aunts and sundry girl cousins. Immediately behind came the Alcalde’s wife, as tall almost as if on stilts, accompanied by her two sisters. Next in line was the Grandmother, an ill-favoured daughter on each side, the older daughter Maria tugged at by a spoilt little girl of three who cried and whined incessantly. After that it was the turn of the shopkeepers, the butcher’s wife at their head, with her pair of pink-skinned simpering girls. Juan’s smart wife, Francesca, walked with Maria Cabritas, now confirmed in her semiofficial function and dressed for Longchamps of the previous year. A line of girls in mourning offered a sombre counterpart at the roadside. They were allowed to look on, but not join in, debarred from any expression of joy by the uncleanness of grief. Some of them had a backlog of fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters to be mourned that would keep them in black until middle age. The Grandmother, only out of mourning that month, had wrapped herself in something resembling a grey curtain for the ceremony, mentioning that she would be happy to get back to her familiar black when it was all over. It was the custom that visitors to the village would fall in immediately after the women, to be followed by the fishermen, each wearing a new pair of pale blue alpargatas and a black hat. The reason for placing them in this position was that when the head of the promenade reached a point some twenty yards from the church the fishermen would fall out without disrupting the proceedings in any way, and wait until the women and the visitors had gone in to pay their respects at the church’s open door before turning back. They then joined in again. All this marching and counter-marching was conducted at a funeral pace. Marta, the chosen one, was supposed to keep an unwavering smile on her face for the half-hour or more required to walk from one end to the other of the village and back. Nobody was allowed to utter a word from the moment the parade started until its end, although the men made a low groaning sound, almost a grunt of exhaustion, with each step they took.

  It was the moment of grateful surrender to unreason, and people had come to Farol from faraway places for just this. Three women and two men who had been born in Farol, but had spent most of their lives elsewhere, had made the effort to return to the place of their birth for this great moment. One woman had spent twenty years in near-poverty in Argentina, and for the last three of them had been saving up for this trip. She told me that she had never looked forward to anything in all her life as much as this half-hour walk up and down the street of Farol on the day of Sa Cova. It was all meaningless, as Sebastian had objected. No one knew or could even hazard a guess as to what it was all about, and yet a meaningless custom was observed stubbornly, almost with passion, as if the participants craved the opportunity it offered to cast off the responsibility of explaining their actions.

  Problems had arisen with the visitors from Sort, who had only come in the first case as a favour to Don Alberto and, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, to set the seal on the renewal of normal diplomatic relations between the two communities. Seven of them arrived wearing leather shoes. All the Sort contingent was thoroughly disgruntled to have been told at the last moment by Don Alberto that the fireworks had turned out to be damp, there was to be no circus as promised, no fancy-dress parade, no prizes, no free wine – not even a band, for the bandsmen had trundled their instruments as far as the first village house only to be stopped and warned off. ‘Sorry, no music here, if you don’t mind. Any other time, but not just now.’ It was useless for Don Alberto to try to explain how wholly taboo the wearing of shoes was in Farol, and much as they might be tolerated when worn by an outsider paying a casual visit or just passing through, no one could walk in the Sa Cova promenade wearing anything else but rope-soled alpargatas.

  Exclusion was taken as a gross insult. The fishermen were over-brimming with anxiety to make a show of hospitality, offering the local alpargatas to the seven shoe-wearers to allow them to walk in the parade, but the people from Sort had had enough and after a brief petulant discussion among themselves decided to leave.

  With this final outraged clicking of tongues and waving of arms Don Alberto’s ham-fisted attempts to impose a pacific solution upon the two peoples came to an end. Witnessing the confrontation between the stolid, striving and calculating peasants produced by the arid landscape of Sort and the mercurial yet fatalistic fishermen, it was hard to see that they would ever come together. The dog people went home, and the cat people got on with their fiesta. I walked on the promenade with the ecstatic and tearful women who – although treated now as strangers – had at last returned to their village. After dark the whole thing was repeated at the double – a speeded-up version of the evening promenade with plenty of excitement and noise, and a little horseplay.

  There was no more to it than that. My fishermen friends said that it had been a successful Sa Cova, auguring well for the prospects of the coming year. The events of the next few days proved them to be wrong.

  Chapter Ten

  SHARP VARIATIONS EXIST in the climatic patterns of the Mediterranean area. Unlike Italy, when October provides a successio
n of faultless days, this is the month along the Spanish coast when a prolonged summer suddenly collapses, and the year is gone. What follows for the fishermen when the winds calm, the rain ceases and the sun shines once more is a lifeless parody of the lost summer. The sea’s currents change direction and turn cold, and the big shoals of fish, like migrating birds, move away southwards. The fellowship, the shared excitements and frustrations of men working together in the big boats, is at an end. In the dead season a man takes a boat out on his own, or squats alone to fish from the rocks. For the fishermen there are only six months to the year, which fades into a kind of timeless limbo in October, not to be reborn until March. Towards the end of the first week in October the big boats are put on the rollers and dragged to the top of the beach, where from time to time men do a little desultory work on them to make them ready for the next season. For the rest the fishermen sleep what they can of the time away, or spend long periods sitting in bars, staring into empty glasses. The passing of summer is felt even more keenly here than in the north. As my next-door neighbour Juan, with his aptitude for the telling phrase, put it, ‘In winter, this is the cemetery of the living.’