Voices of the Old Sea

by Norman Lewis

  Later, my neighbour Juan added a suggestive detail by way of a postscript to this story, mentioning when some discussion about the bar came up that the Alcalde’s predecessor had surprised everybody by putting himself to the expense of covering the cellar floor under three inches of concrete.

  Chapter Ten

  IT WAS BECOMING CLEAR that Muga’s influence in the area was in the ascendant, and inevitably to some extent a consequence of this, Don Alberto’s was on the wane. The fishermen found it amazing that a man who appeared so childish to them should wield so much power. Muga could decide that a road which had been hardly better than a cart-track must be widened and properly surfaced, and that a dangerous bridge carrying it should be rebuilt at the national cost. He provided running water piped from a distant spring for his own house, but raised no objection to any villager whose rainwater cistern ran dry in summer bringing any number of receptacles to be filled at his tap. A word in the ear of a well-placed friend was enough to bring an extension telephone line some twenty miles to Muga. Not more than three people in Farol had ever used a telephone, but there was nothing mean-spirited about Muga, and he let it be known that anyone could come to his house in an emergency, and make use of his, at any hour of the night or day.

  So far, so good. What astonished the fishermen, who were realists, was Muga’s enthusiasm for make-believe and for toys. Sebastian, helping to fit an Andalusian-style fountain into one of the rooms, had been fascinated to see Muga take a telephone call while seated at his desk. No bell had rung, but a sound like the shriek of a railway engine’s whistle in a Pyrenean tunnel had been followed by the appearance of a miniature locomotive through gates that had sprung open in the wall, and this had come chugging over ten feet of miniature viaduct to pull up, carrying the telephone on its single carriage, to within inches of Muga’s hand. The call conducted, Muga had replaced the receiver, and the engine whistled its departure, let out a couple of puffs of smoke and backed away out of sight into the wall.

  Don Alberto, detesting everything that Muga stood for, conceded that he was a force to be reckoned with, and clung to the delusion that it might be possible to tame the black marketeer, to civilise him, and head him off from the direction of barbarous change. He was beginning to see that the ideal human society – as he remembered it – of responsible landlords and devoted tenants was breaking up before his eyes under assault of natural calamities and disruptive ideas.

  Both peasants and fisherfolk were at the end of their tethers. In Sort, after the acorns of the winter, the spring rains had failed, so that every inch of the land had to be watered by hastily dug irrigation channels. The situation of Farol was an ironic one. For once both the spring tunny and spring sardines had arrived on time and in plenty, but with only two big boats able to put to sea the catch had fallen short of normal, and there had been no spring marriages. Don Alberto pocketed his pride and called on Muga, being received, as he reported, in surroundings of asphyxiating vulgarity. Their conversation, which was about the possibility of raising credits to revive the local economy, was interrupted by the incursion of the telephone-bearing locomotive and Don Alberto found himself obliged to listen to one end of a conversation with a man in Madrid who was afraid that the bottom was about to fall out of pigs, and had 100,000 to unload.

  After Muga had bought 50,000 pigs and put through another call to resell them, he was ready to listen with sympathy while Don Alberto tried to make out his case. Muga showed himself full of concern, but in the end shook his head. The past was dead and done with, he said, and now they had to look to a future of a different kind. What was the point of putting modern irrigation systems into land used to grow wholly unmarketable crops? ‘It’s growing for the market that brings in the cash, and you can’t sell beans any more!’ Why also delude oneself about inshore fishing? It was at an end, so investing in new boats in Farol would only be throwing good money after bad.

  ‘I want to help people,’ Muga said to Don Alberto, ‘because that’s the kind of man I am, but subsidising them to go on living in the way they do now is only perpetuating their misery. Of course I’ll help if I can but I’d want to be sure that any credit that had my support was directed towards bringing about change. If you’ve any concrete proposals along those lines, I’m your man.’

  Don Alberto got up to go. ‘I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing,’ he said.

  Muga now started a campaign to tidy up Farol, in the course of which he ran into a number of obstacles. In addition to his own house he had bought the two other old cork mansions, one of which he renovated, covering its austere facade with fanciful Portuguese tiles. The other he was obliged for the time to leave untouched owing to the presence of sitting tenants, Maria Cabritas and her mother, who occupied the two habitable rooms in what was otherwise a near ruin. They had found some way of paying a peppercorn rent and there were legal difficulties in getting rid of them that Muga might have been able to get round if he had not been anxious to do nothing likely to tarnish his image in the vicinity.

  He had also taken note of Carmela’s garishly painted shack. This time the law was on his side. The thing had been put up without consent, and it could have been just as easily pulled down. Muga preferred the soft approach. He said that one way or another the shack would have to go, but that he wanted to come to an amicable arrangement with her, and he offered to find her proper accommodation in the village, for which she would pay nothing in exchange. Carmela’s reply was that she chose to live where she did well outside the village because the sight of other children playing made Rosa unhappy and unmanageable. Muga asked to see Rosa, and said he would pay for her to be brought up in a home. This offer was turned down with indignation, but his next suggestion was more to Carmela’s liking. Muga agreed to foot the bill for a visit by the two of them to a Barcelona specialist and for any treatment he might recommend. It was a proposal, she told me, she was seriously thinking about, one indeed she felt she had to accept.

  The stiffest problem confronting Muga was what to do about the house that spoiled the view of the sea from his hotel. Cabezas, the man who had built it single-handed, showed him over it with pride. It was a single-storey building with six rooms in line without ceilings, going straight up to the naked tiles of the enormously high roof. For the sake of appearances Cabeza had built windows to non-existent bedrooms on a non-existent first floor, and an outside staircase that pretended to give access to these. One of the rooms in which the animals would be kept in winter had a sloping concrete floor down which the urine would drain to a channel. A stall-like enclosure provided with a bucket and having a three-feet-high fence was for human use. The door was designed to resist assault by corsairs, who had frequently operated along this coast a century and a half before, and Cabezas had to lean all his weight against it to push it open.

  Muga asked Cabezas why he had decided to devote the active years of his life to building this house, being content until now to live in a cave in the forest, just as his ancestors had done ten thousand years or more ago. Cabezas replied that he had done it for the sake of his family. Question: where were they? Answer: his wife and two children were dead, leaving him with one son. Question: and was the son proud and happy at his father’s achievement? Answer: he didn’t seem to care much one way or another.

  Every man, according to Muga’s philosophy, had his price. He asked Cabezas how much he thought he’d invested in this project over twenty-nine years, and Cabezas said, very little but love. He’d quarried the stones himself, wheelbarrowed them to the site and raised one on to the other, day after day, week after week and year after year, and he and his family had lived, somewhat abstemiously, he agreed, on a minute legacy that brought in 50 pesetas a week. He thanked God for the miracle that had allowed him to finish the work just as his strength ran out. Cabezas quoted Barros: ‘We’ve built the house. Let’s make a start on the grave.’

  And what was he going to do with it, now that he was finished? Muga asked, and Cabezas said,
live in it. He and his son, now aged twenty, would live in style, and forget the hard past. Muga offered him one million, two million, three million pesetas for it – the final price being more than he’d paid for the three cork mansions put together – and Cabezas laughed and shook his head.

  Frustrated by Cabezas’ obduracy, Muga next turned his attention to a well-publicised crisis facing the once prosperous and powerful Pablo Fons.

  A single bad year was enough to convert Fons from a rich man by peasant standards into a poor one, and poverty stripped him of his self-confidence and some of his spirit. His early crops failed, a number of cows were found to be suffering from mouth ulcers and had to be sold to a discreet butcher at ruinous prices. A law suit that had been running up costs for several years failed, and finally his eldest son was in trouble with the police for exposing himself to a French girl who had risked sunbathing on a beach near Farol. For this he was thoroughly beaten up, and Fons had to pay a stiff bribe to keep him out of prison.

  These facts were passed on to me by Don Alberto who said that the local view was that Fons’ son had been harshly treated. It was pointed out that the Civil Guard would normally never have bothered about a case of self-exposure, regarded rather as a family affair within the village, and it seemed hard that young Fons should have been punished for what was almost a traditional reaction of wonder and admiration just because this had been directed at a foreign woman. The grave news that followed these misfortunes was that, having heard of Fons’ losses, Muga had offered to buy part of his farm. For a peasant to sell land was quite unheard of, but Fons had no choice in the matter. Don Alberto said that by the terms of an old contract Fons was obliged to offer any land he had for sale to him first, but he had decided to waive any claim on it, having no wish to extend the boundaries of the semi-desert he already owned. I asked, of what use was the land to Muga if nobody else could do anything with it? Don Alberto said, in the slightly shocked tone of a man describing malefic practices, that he was prepared to use fertilisers. It was something, he said, that no local man would dream of doing. Not only because of the costs involved, but because it called into question the value of something given into his keeping by Almighty God.

  A few days later the deal went through. Muga became a landowner, and let it be known that he expected to be addressed by the village underlings as Don Jaime in future. He was frequently to be seen clumping across his new acres accompanied by a man with a kind of enormous auger who from time to time drilled a hole in the iron-hard surface to take out a core of earth and drop it into one of a number of small labelled bags.

  Fons and Muga got on well together. Fons could not have carried on without Muga’s money, and Muga found it valuable to draw on Fons’ experience as to how things were best arranged in an environment where the force of custom could be stronger than that of law. It seems probable that Muga had asked Fons’ advice as to how best to deal with the sitting tenants in the third cork mansion, and that Fons suggested a plan by which the easily provoked fury of the witch-hunters of Sort could be harnessed to Muga’s expansionist ambitions.

  On the night of 7 June someone broke into the corral Maria Cabritas had put up in the garden of the house, released her seven goats and drove them into the fields where they wrought havoc among the meagre crops. The sight of Maria next morning in her silk stockings and modish dress careering about their land in chase of her goats provoked the explosion of wrath that was to be expected, and the Alcalde of Sort, admirer of goats though he was, and predisposed until this to favour Maria’s cause, was obliged under pressure of village opinion to issue what was known as a solemn warning.

  The next night there was no moon, the most favourable condition for fishing with the lights at this time of the year, and almost every boat put to sea immediately after dark, leaving Farol nearly denuded of its able-bodied population. It was a circumstance that seemed to Don Alberto to tie in with the fact that on the evening of this day the two Farol Civil Guards had been called to their headquarters in Figueras. Such overnight absences were rare indeed, and in this case, he thought, in the light of what took place, of exceptional significance. Don Alberto supposed that if Muga had been able to buy up the whole of the police force of the port of Palamos, there was really nothing to stop him giving orders to the major in Figueras if he felt he needed to.

  At about eleven o’clock a party from Sort surrounded the house in which Maria Cabritas and her mother were sleeping and began to beat on the tin trays, the kettles, the pots and the drums they were carrying and to scream obscenities at the couple they were determined to drive out of the neighbourhood. The encerrada, an ancient and now illegal custom, was the traditional method of ridding a village of the contamination of a man or woman who had flouted public opinion by remarrying after the death of a spouse, or more rarely of an adulteress. Those who took part in it were expected to be above moral reproach, yet the encerrada not only licensed but encouraged the grossest public indecencies. When, after two hours of trying to sleep through the racket, I went to see what was going on, I found a red-eyed lynch mob of men and women who had been rescued by hate from the chrysalises of little lives. Banging on their tin trays, blowing their horns, neighing the filthiest god-sullying oaths their imaginations could create, they whirled and slobbered like dervishes. Ugliness and obscenity were demanded of them, and they gave lavishly and with all their hearts. The place stank of sweat and excrement. Men lined up to piss against the wall of the house and women mouthing and screaming squatted by the roadside to relieve themselves under their skirts. Someone was throwing dung at the windows.

  Two lords of misrule drove up in a cart, their faces inflated with a hideous piety. They rushed into the corral at the back and began to bring out the goats, legs tied, one after another and flung them into the cart. Then one of them kicked open the door and went in. A few minutes later he came out with the two women, hustling from behind as they struggled with their bundled-up possessions. Maria and her mother settled themselves among their bundles. The girl had dressed herself as carefully as ever for this moment. Her mother held a cloth to her eyes but Maria looked straight ahead, and her expression, as usual, was one of indifference.

  The cart was driven away. The mob howled after it and gesticulated fornication with their arms. Then the hate began to run out, the screams quieted to a low grumbling murmur of satiety. Anticlimax was upon them as they began to wander away.

  The episode, Don Alberto said, marked in a clear-cut fashion the end of an epoch, as well as showing how easy it was for a vulgar gangster like Muga to manipulate simple peasants into destroying themselves eventually, along with the delicately adjusted balance of village life that had produced them. Don Ignacio, chained now to a routine of Masses that no one attended, was all for an end to all forms of outside interference, and agreed with him that Muga would have to be stopped somehow. The stand against him might as well be made now when there seemed to be a chance of cobbling together an accusation of conspiracy to break the law. Disorderly gatherings for any purpose were taken seriously by the régime which could usually be counted on to act against them or in punishment of them with exemplary promptitude and severity.

  Don Alberto said he had questioned two of his tenants who not only admitted having been persuaded by Fons to join the encerrada, but claimed that he had paid them a small sum to do so. These men, according to Don Alberto, were so alarmed at the possibility of their involvement in any action that might displease their landlord they practically begged his permission before sleeping with their wives, so naturally they told Fons they ought to get Don Alberto’s approval before committing themselves to the encerrada, however much they might enjoy the excitement. To this Fons had replied that no one had anything to fear from Don Alberto any longer, and that if any problem arose Muga, who was the richest man in the province, would look after it.

  Sebastian supplied a small piece of information that Don Alberto eagerly jotted down, to the effect that shortly before the encerrada Mug
a had stopped him in the street and told him that the hold-up over the third cork mansion had been settled, and he would be starting work there within the week.

  The most telling piece of evidence was offered by the leader of the female contingent at the encerrada, an old fanatic who headed the Christ the King movement in the region. This woman, who I had once seen carrying a banner in a procession which said, ‘I promise the Sacred Heart of Jesus to read no novels, newspapers or magazines, and never to wear make-up as long as I live,’ told Don Alberto that Muga had recently given her a crucifix. ‘For a service,’ she added, smiling bitterly.

  There seemed to be enough substance in the evidence he had gathered to warrant going ahead, and Don Alberto asked Don Ignacio to help him with the composition of a letter to be sent to the commandant of the Civil Guard in Figueras. To this enormously long document they received a considered reply. Reading it, Don Alberto decided that all hope was lost.