Voices of the Old Sea

by Norman Lewis

  The commandant said that he had ordered a full investigation of the matter reported to him by his man on the spot, and his conclusions were as followed:

  One The nature and importance of the incidents referred to seemed to have been much exaggerated. There had been public criticism of a woman alleged to have been engaged in immoral acts, but there had been no acts of violence or damage to property.

  Two Contrary to assertions contained in the letter no coercion had been used to induce this woman and her mother to leave the village, and they had signed a statement to that effect.

  Three The commandant did not find that the public criticism of which Don Alberto and Don Ignacio complained constituted an unlawful gathering, a plot or incitement to plot, and was to some extent a regional and traditional expression of disapproval and accepted as such. The commandant understood that one of the signatories of the letter was a well-known student of folkloric themes, and should appreciate this.

  Four The couple in question had been formally invited by the Alcalde of Sort to return to the village and take up residence again in the house they had vacated. This they had declined to do.

  In conclusion the commandant said that he had decided that he was not justified in taking action in this instance.

  Chapter Eleven

  WITH THE DEPARTURE of Maria Cabritas it was a matter of urgency to find someone to take her place, and an underground movement sprang up in Farol having as its aim the restitution of Sa Cordovesa to her original role in the life of the community.

  She had naturally been recommended to slim down as fast as she could, and she applied to a number of persons for advice as to how this was best to be done.

  Dr Seduction prescribed a diet based mainly on a sludge made from ground-up locust beans mixed with lemon juice. Don Alberto’s aged ex-mistress resurrected several remedies from the far past, urging Sa Cordovesa to drink nothing but Bulgarian ambrosia, available in all the spas in Europe before the First World War. The women of the village suggested that she should expose her limbs for as long periods as possible to the light of the waning moon, and Don Ignacio, when approached, could only offer prayer, which he did without conviction.

  The female leading lights of the village, led by the Grandmother and the butcher’s wife, began to concoct little stratagems and conspiracies by which, at the end of a month’s seclusion after the slimming processes had taken effect, Sa Cordovesa would be formally relaunched into village life.

  The occasion chosen for this was naturally the Sunday evening promenade. This, the women agreed, should be a theatrical moment, and when the day came they prepared Sa Cordovesa for it like a kabuki actress for her entrance on stage. Spanish women kept a close eye on the girl tourists beginning to arrive from France for pointers on matters of style, and whatever appealed to them was slavishly copied. It was a year when the French had taken to the use of stark-white face-powder so when the Grandmother and the butcher’s wife had finished with Sa Cordovesa’s make-up in preparation for the promenade, the great black eyes stared out from a chalk-white mask on which the first post-war lipstick to arrive in Farol had painted a somewhat uneven mouth. This was the colour of the dark gore so abundantly splashed about the butcher’s shop.

  The visitors from France wore heavy costume jewellery this year, so Sa Cordovesa’s arms were ringed with many glass bangles, and she wore a necklace made from sea-shells, and earrings like miniature chandeliers that actually tinkled in the gusts of wind. Her two sponsors were disappointed to find that the weight loss brought about by exposure to the moon’s rays, a starvation diet and prayer was less than expected; however, they forced her into one of the Grandmother’s corsets, and then into a blue dress of the kind no French girl would have been seen dead in by reason of its old-fashioned frilled skirt. The Grandmother and the butcher’s wife added the final touches, then clapped their hands in delight. They put a pink fan in Sa Cordovesa’s hand to signify that she was neither married nor promised in marriage, then they all climbed into a cart and were driven round the back of the town to be deposited at the top of the street, by the church door.

  The further report on chic Parisiennes was that, when not frolicking on the beach, they moved stiffly, taking small steps, arms hanging at their sides and palms raised as if to pat the heads of large, invisible dogs. This was the style in which Sa Cordovesa took her place in the promenade and, flanked by the Grandmother and the butcher’s wife, began her slow geisha totter towards the end of the village in the alpargatas lent her that were a size and a half too small.

  It was a spectacle that filled the women with wonder and admiration, although the menfolk seemed doubtful. Fifty or more persons had joined the promenade, strolling in groups of threes and fours, stopping frequently to exchange gossip with elderly folk excluded by custom at roughly the same time in life when they gave up taking baths. The function of the Sunday promenade was that of a marriage market. Parents placed their eligible young on display and the young eyed potential partners with hope prepared for long deferment.

  Ideally in the composition of the promenade both sexes should have been equally represented, but I noticed on this occasion a remarkable preponderance of females. It was – or it could have been – a subtle affair full of innuendo and cautious sexual signalling, most of which would have been lost on the outsider. A young man would display his attitude towards a girl, rather than expressing any intention, by the manner in which he inserted himself into the promenade, overtook her, passed her, and turned back for a ritual second look. This procedure was known as ‘signing on’, it committed nobody to anything, and further intricate movements would be performed in the ceremonial spider’s dance of love before an engagement would be presumed to exist.

  The young males of Farol were conservative, ill-at-ease in the presence of novelty or change of any kind, inclined – I would have said – to be frightened off by the would-be sophistication of Sa Cordovesa in her new image, whatever they might have felt about her excessive weight.

  Sa Cordovesa and her sponsors progressed slowly up to the end of the street and turned back, but no young men overtook her party, and the gap of twenty yards between the three women and the first of the promenading males never showed signs of closing. Smiles stiffened, the interchange of courtesies became spiritless, Sa Cordovesa brought up the hand holding the pink fan to swipe at the flies attracted by her make-up. Most of the young males were now beginning to trail away from the promenade in the direction of the bar.

  When they reached the church again the Grandmother put her hand on Sa Cordovesa’s shoulder and said something in her ear, perhaps by way of commiseration. At that Sa Cordovesa burst out laughing. She had a strong voice, and people in the vicinity looked startled and embarrassed.

  Later it was reported to me that she had used a disgusting oath, of a kind tolerated in a man, but unthinkable in the mouth of a woman. The cart came rattling round the corner, and Sa Cordovesa threw away her fan, hitched up her skirts and climbed into it like a man. She then spat over the tailboard in the direction of nothing in particular, and was driven off.

  Two days later Carmela left with Rosa for consultation with the specialist in Barcelona, and Sa Cordovesa went with her.

  Chapter Twelve

  DON ALBERTO SAW HIS WORLD threatened by rapid and irreversible decline. He thought of himself, he told me, as the least superstitious of men, admitting that had he been inclined to be influenced by such things as presages and omens, he might have linked the abandonment of the fiestas of Sort and Farol with this premonition he had of change and decay. The boring Sort fiesta, tied to the well-being of the trees, had automatically been extinguished with them. In Farol the mysterious Sa Cova, central to the village’s metaphysical existence, had been suspended indefinitely following the news of the death in hospital of Marta D’Escorreu, the last chosen one. No family had been found ready to put forward their child as candidate for this year.

  Muga, striding through the village, arms akimbo, and terr
ifying the children with his ferocious samurai’s smile, tightened his grip. Within days of Carmela vacating her shack it was pulled down and burned, to the enormous regret of Don Alberto, an artist of limited talent who had sat there at his easel for many hours struggling to explain in paint the great conflict of colour and light to be observed as the rampant blue flowers struck out like serpents across the chrome walls.

  It was Muga’s intention next to improve the seafront, a goal which he approached in an extremely subtle fashion, having understood by this time that embellishments of any kind would arouse the fishermen’s tooth and nail resistance.

  A meeting took place between Muga, the Alcalde and the fishermen who dominated the principal boats, at which Muga reminded his listeners of the storms of the past autumn and winter, telling them that meteorological experts had warned of a change in weather patterns along the Mediterranean seaboard, and said that they were entering a cycle of bad winters. There was general agreement about this. The fishermen had already gone through three bad winters in a row, and the general belief was that there were four more to come.

  Muga told them that he had now come to regard Farol as his home, and that he wanted to do what he could for it. The storm of last October had sent waves across the beach as far as the fishermen’s houses, not only smashing the boats but carrying away a number of outbuildings, chicken pens, rabbit hutches and the like. Muga thought, and the others agreed, that this could happen again.

  What Muga had come to tell them was that he was prepared to build at his own cost a sea wall that would banish this threat for ever. He went on to say that in order to give access to vehicles carrying the stone to build the wall, a strip of land would have to be cleared of obstacles and levelled between their houses and the top of the beach. This would in effect be a narrow road.

  At this point Muga noticed stirrings of ill-ease and there were muttered objections. ‘No tarting up, eh? No trees.’ Muga put down this threatened insurrection. He guaranteed to plant no trees, nor to attempt to prettify the area in any way, but apart from that insisted on being able to do whatever was to be done in his own way, and without interference.

  The fishermen remained uneasy about the suggested road, largely because if it came to be built, people would be likely to stand on it, looking out to sea, thereby in some cases – however innocent their intentions – bringing bad luck to the fishing.

  In the end it was agreed in principle that the wall and the road should be built. The problems concerned with undertaking such new constructional work were less complex in Farol than elsewhere due to the fact that it was rare for anyone to lay claim to the ownership of unoccupied land. Moreover all land covered at any time by the highest tide fell within the public domain.

  Don Alberto, threatened with this calamity, put his hope in the office of the Aparejador, the provincial planning authority, famous for procrastination, indecision and general sloth. Plans would have to be drawn up and submitted for consideration at a meeting held at three-monthly intervals, and Don Alberto had learned that it was the habit of the inert body of men who formed the committee to play for safety by the almost automatic rejection of five applications out of six.

  The Alcalde had provided Don Alberto with a preliminary sketch of the planned alterations and we visited the area together. It was a place of forlorn, wasted beauty, a marine frontier tinted with delicate washed-out colour, striped with the bluish foliage of oleanders that put down roots to any depth where water was to be found, although in this case they grew in the coarse sand of the shore, which they puddled with their fallen blossom. The boats leaned over in line at the bottom of the beach, freshly painted the lemon yellow of exorcism, with a green stripe round their middles, and purple bottoms. This was a place where the cats came to chase after land-crabs that had learned never to stray more than a foot or two from their holes, competing for their prey with a small population of pale-furred, distinguished-looking rats which amused the fishermen endlessly with their mating rituals, and were therefore regarded, if not with affection, with some respect. There was no mess on this beach. Everything but the rusted anchors was made of wood, and the sea and the sun had gradually shaped and chamfered and endowed every such wooden object – an old windlass, a gallows on which fish were hung to dry or an ancient tree trunk – with a soft grey patina of salt. ‘We’re losing it,’ Don Alberto said. ‘It’s slipping away before our very eyes.’

  The original plan, the Alcalde had told Don Alberto, provided for a four-foot wall with castellations, to which the fishermen had instantly objected. ‘Why the castle effect?’ they asked. ‘What’s the point?’

  Muga gave way to the protest, but asked for the road to be edged with a narrow garden planted with Livingstone daisies, which were notorious for the fact that they grew and spread in all directions producing an unending multiplication of their tin-foil blooms without the slightest care or attention.

  The Livingstone daisies were out. The fishermen had insisted from the start: no trees, no tarting-up, no seats.

  What Muga was determined to put through was a lighting scheme, embodying a dozen standard lamps, and this, after much argument, the fishermen were persuaded to accept. ‘We shall see,’ Don Alberto said. ‘We shall see. I have friends at court, too. Even I can pull strings if they force me to.’

  Next day, even before the final plans had been submitted, the alterations began. A gang of men arrived to grub out all the oleanders and clean up the beach. A tractor dragged a harrow backwards and forwards over the part colonised by land-crabs, and on the following day shortly after dawn a marksman with a .22 rifle arrived to deal with the rats. He had picked off two of them before a fisherman came out of the nearest house and asked him to go away. The man was bewildered. ‘Everybody knows rats are a health risk,’ he said. ‘They carry the plague.’

  ‘As soon as anyone gets the plague we’ll get rid of them,’ he was told. ‘We don’t like to kill things here unless we have to.’

  The Alcalde told me that Muga had been to see him to ask him if he couldn’t do something about the bar.

  ‘In what direction?’ the Alcalde asked.

  As it was it lacked any romantic appeal, Muga said. He expected an influx of tourists from France at any moment, and from his knowledge these people had an exaggerated idea of what Spain had to offer. They thought of it, for example, as a land of music and song. Muga suspected that with preconceived ideas of that kind Farol might come as a let-down.

  The Alcalde told him he knew of an old man in Sort who played a pipe with five notes. He personally didn’t regard it as an inspiring performance, and moreover the old man wasn’t very presentable owing to a permanent infection of the eyes. Muga said what he had in mind was not so much a primitive pipe but a guitar, and the Alcalde told him that if he was thinking of introducing guitar music to Farol he faced an uphill struggle with the natives, who by his experience didn’t go much for music of any kind.

  ‘Tourists want to go somewhere and listen to music,’ Muga said. ‘Whether we like it or not. The location of this place makes it ideal. Couldn’t it be fitted up if necessary with a gramophone and an amplifier?’

  The Alcalde said he was trying all the time to stall him off. ‘I’m always ready to listen to new ideas,’ he told Muga. ‘Provided I don’t lose my customers.’

  During this conversation the boy who helped in the bar sat there giggling, reading a comic paper, and picking his nose. He was a nephew of the Alcalde’s, who had felt obliged to give him the job. ‘I’m not too happy about that fellow you employ,’ Muga told him.

  ‘He’s harmless,’ the Alcalde said. ‘I wouldn’t like to get rid of him.’

  ‘Someone should tell him to stop grinning about nothing, not to breathe on glasses before polishing them up, not to sit down at a customer’s table and pour himself a drink, and to keep his farts quiet.’

  ‘I’ll mention all these things to him,’ the Alcalde said.

  ‘And where, by the way, did you get that merm
aid object?’ Muga asked, jerking his cheroot in the dugong’s direction.

  ‘A man who used to own the place bought it from an exhibition that closed down in Barcelona,’ the Alcalde told him. ‘It’s unique. It possesses a real vagina. The police made him stitch on a flap to cover it up, but you can pull it back and look for yourself if you like.’

  ‘It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,’ Muga said. ‘I can’t bear to look at it. It gives me the creeps and I imagine it would have the same effect on most people.’

  ‘You soon get used to it,’ the Alcalde said. ‘They say here you can tell the weather by the way it looks.’

  ‘It would frighten any foreigner who came in here out of his wits. If you don’t want to take it away, couldn’t you cover it up? Couldn’t you put a curtain in front of it?’

  ‘They don’t appreciate changes of any kind in this village. The mermaid’s a fixture of the place. For my customers it’s practically a human being.’

  ‘One final question,’ Muga said. ‘Would you sell this place?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even for two or three times what it’s worth?’

  ‘There wouldn’t be any point,’ the Alcalde told him. ‘Ask yourself. What would I do with the money? I’d have to go off somewhere and buy another bar, wouldn’t I? As this place happens to suit me, I might as well stay as I am.’

  Isolation Muga saw as the enemy of progress, guardian of stagnant tradition and the promoter of fears and xenophobic suspicions of every kind. Farol was cut off from the world for six days in the week and the undependable bus operating on the seventh day served, as it seemed, the sole function of carrying Don Ignacio away from his priestly duties to his archaeological dig in Ampurias, from which he was obliged to return as best he could. Muga pulled strings to organise a daily bus service to Figueras, but after a week the driver called at his house to appeal to him. He was dying of boredom, he said. How long was he expected to go on driving the bus when to date he had not had a single fare?