Voices of the Old Sea Read online

  This year autumn’s attack took Farol by surprise. Small shoals of sardines were still reported in the offing as late as Sa Cova, and fishermen working alone were still taking a few in their nets. It had been an erratic season, leading to the belief that a delay in the migration of the fish had happened and that larger shoals might reappear. For this reason, the weather remaining fine, the big boats were kept in readiness instead of being winched up to their winter positions after the first few days of the month.

  The only warning given by the calm morning of 8 October of what was to come was the purplish, depressed colour of the sky, and the growth out of the horizon of shapeless yellow clouds. At about nine o’clock a wind blew up suddenly, gusting from the north, veered round to due east, and increased to a gale. I stood at the window of the Grandmother’s house, saw the sea boil and turn white as a great, scalloped wave twenty feet high charged up the beach, with a small boat bobbing on its crest like a ball in a shooting range water-jet at a fair. There was only time to winch two of the five big boats to safety before great paws of water grabbed up the remaining three, hurled them against each other, and stove their planks in. The smashed boats seemed irreparable, and the fishermen understood that even if the sardines came in March, most of the harvest would be lost.

  On 10 October the news was that Marta D’Escorreu, the chosen one, had been taken ill. The village clubbed together for a taxi to rush her to hospital in Gerona, where she was pronounced to be suffering from tuberculosis, and where she was to be kept for at least three months. The more superstitious of the fisherfolk linked this happening to their other misfortunes, and viewed the future with extreme pessimism.

  Don Alberto invited me to his sombre house where we mulled over the prospects for Sort, which seemed if possible worse than those that confronted Farol. ‘Make no mistake,’ he said, ‘we are about to witness a calamity.’ He handed me a letter he had just received making it clear that, as foreseen, Puig de Mont would not be coming back. Not only that, said Don Alberto, but, what was almost worse, he had sold the family house to the most notorious black-market operator in the province, who would soon move in.

  The aged crone who had once been the toast of Madrid came at us out of the gloom with two smeary glasses of rancio. ‘The situation of these people is tragic,’ Don Alberto said. ‘They’re left with nothing.’

  ‘So it’s confirmed that none of the trees will survive?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘But surely they have other resources?’

  Don Alberto explained that apart from the sale of the bark, which didn’t amount to much, but was still something, the villagers had an income from the rabbits trapped or caught by their dogs, from a great variety of mushrooms, berries and nuts collected in autumn, and many birds, large and small, taken in snares at all times of the year. But all of these could only exist in an environment provided by the living trees.

  ‘What about the crops they grow? Can’t they fall back on that?’

  The land, Don Alberto said, was extremely bad. All the best of it had fallen into the hands of five or six families. ‘You can blame it on the inheritance system,’ he said. ‘People end up with a patch of brambles and having to use a rope ladder to get into their room. Those fat men you see about the place own everything worth having. What you have here is the feudal system in operation.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I may be mistaken, but aren’t you a feudalist, Don Alberto?’

  ‘At heart, absolutely not. At heart I subscribe to the noble philosophy of anarchism. I’m a victim of the system just as anyone else is. Let me tell you what anarchism is about. We anarchists are opposed to state interference. We can look after ourselves, build our own houses, make our roads, teach our children all they need to know. What do we need from the state? Take those two policemen who are supposed to keep an eye on us. Anyone can buy them off for the price of a cigar a month.’

  I asked him if it might be a good thing to divide up some of the

  estates. ‘It wouldn’t make a scrap of difference,’ he said. ‘In fact it would only make things worse. Let’s suppose I decided to let any of my land go. Who would get their hands on it in one way or another? Guess who? You’d have even worse irregularities than you have now.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you would,’ I said.

  ‘Let me explain. I regard myself as holding this land in trust for the generations to come. Look at me. What do I eat? What do I drink? What do I wear? What do I take away from these people? To each according to his needs, and mine are very small.’ Don Alberto was said to give away money in secret, and to let his tenants off payment of their rent in times of crisis, but he would no more part with his land than he would his flesh.

  I drained my glass, wincing at the decayed tartness of the rancio. This was a setting from a peasant interior by Zurbarán, a room stained by the years and ancient smoke, furniture built like siege-engines, a trough sunk into a corner for visitors to wash their feet, old swallows’ nests on the beams, with little white piles of droppings to mark their positions on the flags beneath. The prehistoric odour of smouldering charcoal came through the opening to the kitchen and with it a drift of sad-sweet music from times long past. I could see Don Alberto’s crone, backed by a witch’s cauldron, bent over a gramophone. She wound it up and put the record on again and for a moment we listened to a quavering soprano rendering of the aria ‘The Violet Seller’ from the old Spanish opera La Violetera. ‘Spring shines on us shyly, and now once again the Violetera is here with flowers and hope – ’

  Don Alberto accompanied me to the door.

  ‘So you’ll be leaving us soon?’

  ‘In a matter of days. But all being well I’ll be back next year.’

  ‘Si Dios quiere.’

  ‘Si Dios quiere.’

  My path crossed his estate on the way back to Sort. The bleached litter of autumn lay on his fields, which were the colour of tin plate, and studded with the sabre-toothed calyxes of enormous thistles. Wind ripped and rattled through the foliage of patches of Indian corn, which was the last crop of the season. A dog crossed the path ahead dragging a log yard by yard, stopping after each effort to fall back on its haunches and pant. At the entrance to the village a man was ploughing with a nail-plough of the kind one sees in Roman mosaics. It was a placid and amiable scene.

  *

  Sebastian and I walked down to the sea together. It would be the last we should see of each other until I came back in the spring, for his work in the village was at an end now that the Puig de Mont mansion was finished, and he would be obliged to take work as a builder’s labourer in Gerona until such time as any new project started up in this area.

  We followed a path sloping eventually to a low cliff for a better view of what we were leaving behind. The morning had fallen to a flat calm, full of marine herb scents and the flinty twitterings of finches. The storm had drawn a firm new line of wrack beneath us all along the beach, marking out the new winter boundary of territory claimed by the sea, and children were scrabbling in the coarse sand for the coloured glass pebbles turned up by the storm. We watched a man called Pedro paddle his boat to within feet of a patch of sea that twitched with the movement of fish feeding on a barely submerged rock. His raï opened a perfect coronet of splashes where a shoal should have been but he caught nothing. The Grandmother, back in mourning now that the fiesta was past, made a distant black pyramid as she squatted by a boat just beached, to pick through a meagre catch. It was a sign of the times that the widows waiting for the boats to come in limited themselves now to a fish or two per boat rather than the handfuls that nobody missed in summer.

  Maria Cabritas, inscrutably smiling and as elegant as ever, passed with her goats down a lower path, and we caught a brief glimpse among the houses of Don Ignacio, a longish parcel certain to contain a shovel under his arm, on his way to catch the twice-weekly bus that would take him to his archaeological dig.

  What really engaged our attention in this marine panorama as we
took an offshoot of our path leading to the beach was the sight of three stocky young peasants from Sort fishing with rods from the rocks. Several Farol fishermen had spotted them, too, and from time to time a man’s curiosity would get the better of him and he would make a pretence of going on some errand that would take him close enough to them to study the details of what was going on. Sebastian and I walked across and asked them what luck they had had, and they made a face, and said none at all. They had baited their hooks with winkles collected from the rocks, and Sebastian suggested they should try sonsos or pieces of octopus. The information was well meant, but they went on fishing with the bait they had because there was nothing else they could do, and by this time I knew enough about fishing to know that that day they would never catch a fish.

  But what of the future? – because even peasants could turn themselves into fishermen of a kind if they were serious about it, and tried hard enough. The competition of three, thirty or three hundred such amateurs would not worry the professionals of Farol in the slightest, but this was a sight, when we discussed it further, which whispered to us both of possibilities undreamed of until this moment.

  SEASON TWO

  Chapter One

  I KEPT IN TOUCH WITH SEBASTIAN during the winter, receiving one letter to say that he had been called back unexpectedly from Gerona to start work on the renovation of the two other abandoned cork mansions. In a second letter he said that he needed a holiday, and knowing that I expected to be heading south again in the near future, suggested that we should meet at Port Bou, just across the Spanish frontier, and go on a lobster-fishing trip together.

  His arguments seemed convincing. Nobody bothered, he said, about lobsters along the Spanish coast where they abounded in the cold water at this time of the year. The French, however – and this I knew – were devoted to them, an addiction resulting in their near-extermination along the French Mediterranean seaboard. His plan was that we should catch the fish by hand, using diving masks. He said that a friend of his, using the box with a glass bottom through which the fishermen scan the seabed, had seen them everywhere. As far as I was concerned there was nothing to be lost as I proposed in any case to enter Spain by Port Bou. A couple more letters were exchanged fixing a date and place, and at the end of March, exactly as in the previous year, a taxi took me to the frontier from the railway station at Cerbère, I carried my baggage across the theoretically still-closed border into Spain, and took a Spanish taxi down to Port Bou.

  Sebastian was waiting for me in the Café de la Marina, where some of the first French tourists of the post-war era had gathered, ready for adventure in a country once again mysterious after its years of isolation (‘Parole d’honneur. Ils sont comme les Arabes. Ils ne laissent pas les femmes sortir’). He was even thinner than when I had last seen him. His face seemed graven with ineradicable anxiety, and heavy labour in Gerona, where he had worked nine hours daily for a wage of 21 pesetas, had left calluses on his hands. They had gone as far as they could with the reconstruction of the cork mansions, and now, while they awaited the arrival of such things as bathroom fittings, he had been given a month’s unpaid holiday.

  He was desperately anxious to find some way of raising cash during this period due to a domestic crisis resulting from an ultimatum he had just received from the Grandmother. She had ordered him to procreate a child by the end of May and had already decided on a preferred name, Timburlán (Tamerlane) in the case of a boy, Cleopatra if a girl. In the years of his married life Sebastian had never until this moment stood up to the old woman, and felt only able to do so now if in a position to argue from strength – threatening in fact to move out. But half the furniture in the rooms they occupied belonged to the Grandmother, and Sebastian’s savings to date, amounting to seven hundred pesetas, were not enough even to buy a second-hand bed. His hope was to be able to raise a thousand pesetas on the lobster-fishing trip, a hope that to me seemed of the stuff that dreams were made of.

  To protect his tiny capital I agreed to pay for the hire of a car, and we found an aged Simca, literally held together by string, with one door missing and wheels of uneven size, and in this we began a cautious reconaissance of the coast, round to the south. We made a first stop at Grilén, hired a boat and made a start with the fishing at Punta Cap Ras. To my immense surprise, and to Sebastian’s relief, the fish were actually there as reported. They were not lobsters, but escarmalans – a large crayfish of a kind I had never seen before, resembling a lobster, but clawless, and with a minute head. This was clearly a fish of the winter season. To our delight they were to be seen in numbers in stealthy movement among the fronds, the ribbons and the rosettes of weed in water as shallow as ten feet. Sebastian had learned to swim in the interim and had brought with him the old speargun he had inherited from me at the end of the last season, while I had taken the opportunity to pick up a more powerful speargun in France. It would have been possible to spear the escarmalans by the hundred, but to be saleable they had to be taken alive. This was a tricky and precarious business for which gloves were an essential protection. You had to dive on an escarmalan and grab it quickly before it darted into thick weed, or under a rock, and when caught it would attempt to free itself by snapping vigorously with its tail. As the underside edges of the shell were provided with razor-sharp serrations cut fingers were not at first to be avoided.

  The real problem was the cold, bad enough on the surface, but increasing with every foot of a dive. Moreover the visibility was bad. The fish were always there, but we lost time in having to dive and search for them among the weeds. After fifteen minutes of this it became impossible to stay in the water any longer. We hauled ourselves back into the boat, pulled on our sweaters, gulped down coffee mixed with brandy from the thermos, and waited for the circulation to return. The sun shone brilliantly on the mirror of the sea, and the great buttresses and pinnacles of rock floated in mist over the water. Below us the escarmalans awaited our return in the murky and frigid depths. Sebastian was calculating now that with every dive, occupying less than one minute, he made a day’s wages. We dropped back, groaning, into the water again and began to clutch at the escarmalans with bleeding, freezing fingers and toss them into the boat. In the end we reached a point, numbness spreading from our bodies to our brains, when we began to wonder whether we had done some permanent damage to ourselves. When I pinched my thighs I could feel nothing, but both of us were suffering from pain in the extremities of the limbs, and intense headaches. Watching Sebastian swaying and staggering among the escarmalans, three or four deep, crawling over each other in the bottom of the boat, I saw the pink shadowy outline of his skeleton marked in his skin, which seemed transparent.

  We rowed to the nearest beach, lit a driftwood fire and huddled round it until our brains began to work again. Sebastian, unable even to express himself in Castellano, kept mumbling, ‘Puta, son mort de fred’ in his local dialect, which was closer to Italian than Spanish. He told me that only the thought of the furniture he was going to buy had kept him going. Ten escarmalans, half a second-hand bed. Ten more, a bedside table and perhaps a reconditioned chair. Fifteen, some sort of a chest of drawers, in need of repair in all probability, so allow two more escarmalans for the local joiner’s work on them.

  On that first day we caught sixty-four fish. The fishermen in Llansá let us keep them in a cage in their vivéro, and we showed our gratitude by giving them a few fish. They pointed out a fonda where we got a room each for two pesetas a head, and the innkeeper, who was one of those brooding, introspective men who seem often to follow this profession, gave us beans soaked in oil with some local sausage, so hard you practically had to break it up with a hammer. Sebastian fell asleep after the second or third mouthful. He knocked over his rancio, his head fell on the table and he began to snore. The innkeeper took his food away, sat down at the next table and ate it himself.

  We stayed in this fonda, pulling ourselves together slowly, all the next day and the next night and then, the day after, wit
h half the male population of the street pushing the Simca to get it to start, we moved on to Puerta de La Selva where we hired another boat and ventured out after some hesitation along the wild and dangerous north-facing coast to Cabo Creus. There were no weather forecasts to be had then but the fishermen told us that by their experience the good weather should hold up for at least a day. However, they said, one never knew along the coast, and should a storm blow up there was nowhere to run for shelter. With this possibility at the back of our minds it was hard to settle comfortably to fishing. We moved along at the base of sheer cliffs that would have impressed me with their grandeur at any other time, but, as the fishermen had said, there was not a cove or inlet anywhere. The water here was not only foggy and cold, but too deep in the places where we found suitable weed for us to fish. We carried on for a few hours, looking over our shoulders as we worked, and in the end took twenty-eight escarmalans before being chased by a few wisps of cloud back to Puerto de La Selva again, chilled to the bone and utterly exhausted.

  Next day we decided to play for safety and moved back into the more protected area round Cabo D’en Poch where we spent three days, and put up in a fonda almost indistinguishable – even to the beans and hard sausage – from the one at Llansá. By this time, counting the ones they were keeping for us in the vivéro at Llansá, we had 244 fish, so we moved back to Llansá, where our fishermen friends helped us to box up all our escarmalans in seaweed in professional style before taking them on to Port Bou.