Voices of the Old Sea

by Norman Lewis

  It was only at this point that Muga realised that the people of the village he proposed to take over did not travel, not because there was no transport but because they had absolutely no desire to do so. He next learned that half the population both of Farol and of Sort had never left their villages except to go on picnic excursions along the coast. Of the rest only about one in ten had travelled as far as Figueras, villagers who had driven there for medical reasons to avoid treatment by Dr Seduction – treatment, in the case of all external injury, with blue unction (an ointment recommended for the softening of venereal chancres) or, in the case of internal disorder, by drastic purging with Epsom salts. The public sentiment of Farol was that those who were obliged to leave the village were instantly exposed to evil influences which increased almost mile by mile until Figueras – seen as a huge, bewildering and utterly immoral metropolis – was reached. On returning from such a journey it was normal to take a purifying bath, to which certain herbal distillates were added, and if the traveller had passed his fortieth year, and baths had become taboo, he put up with whatever he might have been suffering from, and declined to stir abroad.

  A permanent fair went on in Figueras with popgun ranges, swings and a hand-cranked roundabout, and Muga had handbills describing its excitements printed and distributed round the village, accompanying them with an offer of a free outing for the children. This the children accepted with enthusiasm and all parental objections were instantly overcome. Muga paid the bus fares, gave each child a packet of chewing gum, an aniseed ball, a paper hat and a balloon, as well as footing the bill for the swings and the roundabouts, and for sniping ineffectively with the popguns at ginger bread and kewpie dolls suspended on strings. The children were entranced, and Muga watched them full of satisfaction. They were the raw material of the future, and it was a future, as Muga had repeatedly proclaimed, that he proposed to shape. The parents who had come along remained on the defensive, huddled together nervously in a corner of the fairground, on the lookout for pickpockets and city slickers who might approach them with immoral propositions, but the children had adapted instantly to the temptations and pleasure of the outside world, and would never be quite the same again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  IT WAS NOT ONLY IN FAROL AND SORT that brusque changes were taking place, Don Alberto said. They were happening at a breakneck pace all over Spain. Good communications were the great leveller of customs, and military necessity during the war had compelled the building of roads into many isolated places that had hitherto resisted change. Roads, the radio, the telephone, and now the arrival of tourists, whose appearance and behaviour Spaniards were so eager to emulate, were putting an end to the Spain of old, Don Alberto said. And for those who wanted to see it as it had been, there was not a moment to be lost.

  He had just read a gloomy report in the journal of the Sociedad Española de Antropología, of which he was a member, noting the demise of about half the popular festivals of Spain in a period of forty years, a few discouraged by the authorities on the grounds that they perpetuated barbarous attitudes unacceptable in our days, but the vast majority quietly abandoned because people had lost interest.

  It was this piece of information that prompted his suggestion that I should accompany him on an expedition to San Pedro Manrique in the province of Soria, where he had ascertained by writing to the Alcalde that one of the country’s most remarkable customs, the fire-walking ritual practised on St John’s Eve, the twenty-third of June, still took place. Don Alberto said that we could be certain that this ceremony, practised, according to the anthropologists, since Celto-Iberian times, would not survive many more years.

  It seemed an opportunity not to be missed. Don Alberto had warned me that the journey would be atrocious, and so it was. When we met at the crossroads where the taxi for Figueras was to pick us up I could see that he was ready for anything, in his chamois-leather jacket, polished by age, over a Cuban shirt with numerous pockets and breeches tied with tapes below the knees to exclude crawling insects, nankeen boots and a sombrero de exploración having a sort of rail round the rim to which, if required, a shallow mosquito net could be attached.

  At Figueras we took third-class seats in the tranvía, the slow train which rattled through the heat of an airless afternoon to Barcelona. Here there was a five-hour wait before we boarded a train for Burgos, once again occupying hard, narrow third-class seats. The Spanish railway system was generally supposed to be owned by the Church, and for this reason Spaniards claimed that the trains were slower, less accountable to timetables, more inefficient and uncomfortable in every way than those anywhere else in Europe. Our train was diverted for major line repairs to one-way tracks, and some hours were used up waiting in sidings in provincial towns for trains coming in the other direction to pass. At every station peasants clawed their way in to reduce our living space with their innumerable parcels and their baskets of livestock. We sat jammed together, our knees almost touching those of the passengers we faced, swaddled in air like wool, through a night full of snores and groans, of the wailing of children and the sleepless clucking of hens.

  There was no way of getting along the corridor, sealed as it was by bodies and baggage, to the lavatory, which in any case was certain to be blocked. The train swayed, rattled and bounced through opaque gorges and round invisible sierras, and the passengers struggled to form sad little queues to vomit through the windows into the black cavern of the Aragonese night. To all this, Don Alberto, eyes screwed up over a volume of Seneca in the dim and flickering light, showed a noble indifference. The peasants untied their food packets and thrust on us thick bocadillos dripping with onion, oil and tomato, and I learned from him how to decline these, and the jugs of goat’s whey, without giving offence. When he spoke he was full of good cheer and repressed excitement. ‘We are going to a great adventure,’ he said. ‘I believe that we shall return from it spiritually refreshed.’

  At Zaragoza, where it was two in the morning, we escaped to the platform to be besieged by bootblacks, sellers of lottery tickets and tripe pies, by beggars with appalling deformities, and by an urgent and insistent man who guaranteed to fit us on the spot with perfectly fitting sets of new false teeth.

  Next stop was Calatayud, where we should never have been, carried there through one more major diversion for track repairs. The faces had changed, but the odours and discomforts remained as before. Our travelling companions included a honeymoon couple, a red-eyed unhappy-looking girl with a drunken groom who had sagged over her knees and gone to sleep. Two nursing mothers suckled their babies with great slurping and slobbering of milk within inches of Don Alberto’s face as he strained forward with his book to catch what he could of the feeble light. An unshaven, cigar-smoking priest outlined a scheme by which we could subscribe through him for regular prayers for our souls. Then it was dawn and the cocks crammed into wickerwork baskets thrust their heads through what apertures they could find, and began to crow. Two hours later we chugged into Soria.

  A bus took us to San Pedro through a sun-flayed, calcinated landscape strewn with the bones of ancient rock. The grey villages looked as though they had been ravaged by earthquakes. Troglodytes lived in holes in the walls of a dried-up river, and there were cave dwellings in the plain, with chimneys sticking up through the ground. Men rode like Arabs on the rumps of tiny donkeys, with turbaned heads, blanketed against the heat. We disturbed hooded crows hollowing out a sheep that lifted themselves with a scuffle of wing beats into the air and dropped back again as soon as we passed.

  It surprised us that about half of our fellow passengers should have been what is known in Spain as gente formál, who commented on what they saw with curiosity and sometimes amusement. There were more of them in the meagre street of San Pedro Manrique – women in flowered dresses, with elaborate hairstyles and wearing white shoes; men carrying cameras, in well-cut flannels and ties with clips. Don Alberto found out later that they were a party of business executives and their wives who had
come from Madrid to see the fire-walking. They had been joined by several doctors who hoped in due course to offer an explanation for the phenomenon by which the human body could be exposed for a few seconds to extreme heat without being caused visible damage.

  One glance at San Pedro Manrique was enough to convince me that true poverty in Farol did not exist. The sea provided the fisherfolk with the certainty of survival, but here such a fundamental guarantee had never existed. Tudela was the capital of this stricken region. In bad years before the Civil War people died of starvation in the streets of this town, their bodies sometimes nibbled at by the famished dogs before they were discovered and removed by the police.

  Few people had heard of the town’s wretched little satellite, San Pedro, and fewer outsiders still had ever visited it. It had nothing to offer, produced nothing but bitter olives and goats that had learned to climb trees. For this reason the villagers were left in peace – if peace it could be called – to live much as their ancestors had 3,000 years before, and carry on such practices, forgotten elsewhere, as that of purifying themselves at the time of the summer solstice by passing through the fire.

  The isolation that preserved fire-walking favoured that other Spanish speciality of the remote sierras – banditry – and in the Tudela region the two could be linked in a kind of ritual significance. When on a St John’s Eve back in the nineties, Zolico, the last of the bandidos generosos, suddenly appeared in San Pedro, passed his gun to a follower, removed his boots, muttered a prayer, then ‘taking eight slow paces’ crossed the fire, he was able to do so, he explained, because his trade had taught him how to repress fear. There were other bandits who performed the same feat but with less style. Don Alberto and I spoke to the aged local doctor who had been present at this performance as a young boy, and had joined the rush to kiss the bandit’s hand. He was a tiny man, almost a dwarf, Dr Villalobos said, who may have wished to look like a gnome, as he had grown a white beard and wore a pointed red hat. He thanked his many well-wishers, recommending them not to offend God by blasphemy, was lifted to his horse and galloped away.

  Fame came suddenly to San Pedro Manrique after a visit in 1939 by a Madrid journalist who saw the fire-walking and wrote an account of it in the weekly Domingo full of crafty injections of anthropological lore lifted from a study of fire-walking in the Far East. This took the eye of two academics who went there next year, joined the fire-walkers and were taken to hospital with second-degree burns. These proto-martyrs were followed by a flow of investigators, several of whom allowed themselves to be more or less severely damaged. Their sufferings provided excellent publicity for San Pedro, but in the end the authorities thought it better to lay a ban on attempts by outsiders to cross the fire, which inevitably came to grief.

  San Pedro, as we discovered, made no concessions to the comfort of the visitor, but prided itself in keeping up with the times in other ways. We called on the Alcalde, who was guarded against intruders by a pretty secretary, engaged when we arrived in typing a letter in reply to one of the many received that week – in this case from a scientific body in Copenhagen. The Alcalde, darkly suited, impassive and a little aloof as befitted his position, took Don Alberto’s card, on which he was described as Proprietario, and asked him how much land he owned; when Don Alberto told him, using the grand old-fashioned unit of measurement, cabellerías – denoting the area a horse could be ridden round at a brisk walking pace in one hour – he unbent. He handed us a leaflet he had written entitled El Rito en San Pedro Manrique de la Purificación Por el Fuego, quoting the comments of a number of men of science who had witnessed the ceremony, prefixed by a lengthy disquisition by an Indian mystic, Khuda Bux, described as ‘the King of Fire’, who had performed similar feats to the satisfaction of the ‘London University for Psychical Research’. All the experts cited favoured a paranormal, or psychological explanation for the phenomenon, and it was clear that the Alcalde agreed with them. No space was given to one or two investigators who had published opinions suggesting that the apparent immunity of fire-walkers is explicable in physical terms.

  The Alcalde implored us to put our hats on, clamped his own, by way of encouragement, firmly down over his ears, and clapped for sherry to be brought. He then launched into a short lecture, delivered in a somewhat premeditated fashion, as if often repeated. All that was needed to cross the fire unscathed (he claimed that the surface temperature of the bed of embers was 700ºC) was the inner certainty that one would not be burned. This psychological precondition was only present in the case of persons born in San Pedro. Outsiders who attempted to emulate them did so in a state of real or subconscious terror, and thus inevitably failed. They failed, too, because their motives were impure. San Pedreños approached the rite in a mood of religious fervour. Others did so from motives of curiosity, because they saw what they were doing as an experiment, or simply to show off. The Alcalde reeled off a list of casualties suffered in recent years, adding with a trace of proprietorial satisfaction that in 1922 an over-bold foreigner had died as the result of his burns.

  We strolled down to the space in front of the church where municipal employees were busy with brooms, helped by children who were picking up every stone, matchstick or leaf in sight. It was about eight in the evening. A sparse crowd had gathered, and shortly four carts stacked with olive-wood faggots drove up, and the men with the brooms put them away and unloaded the carts. Then, in a precise and deliberate fashion, they built the faggots, criss-crossing them one above the other, into a pyre. A man identified by Don Alberto as major-domo next arrived. Municipal employees stood at each corner of the pyre like recruits at kit inspection, while the major-domo, in a big old-fashioned hat, white ruffled shirt worn with an artist’s bow tie, and carrying a long iron ruler, nodded his approval of the finished work, measured the height of the piled-up wood and declared it to be exactly one and a half metres. The crowd had now thickened to about five or six hundred, and at a signal from the major-domo, a dozen or so fire-walkers pushed their way through to the front. They were all men in their early twenties. By order of the Alcalde they had been required to boost the village’s image in visiting eyes by wearing white shirts with dark ties, and their trouser legs had been cut off above the knees. They were received with a small outbreak of applause which the major-domo instantly stifled with a loud cry of ‘silencio!’

  At ten o’dock, with the extreme punctuality displayed in Spain on such public occasions, the major-domo was handed a torch which he applied to the four corners of the pyre, from which the flames crackled up instantly. We were standing with the Alcalde at the front, and within seconds we were driven back several feet by the intense heat. Excited as a child, and encouraged by the metaphysics of Khuda Bux (fire sought out impurity and was to be resisted by purifying oneself), Don Alberto had begun a conversation with a group of fire-walkers.

  He was looking for reassurance, and wanted to know if it was a fact that the fire-walkers were animated by religious fervour.

  The answer may have seemed depressingly matter of fact. ‘Not in my case. I’m here because my friends will be watching … well, yes, I suppose it helps to believe in God and the saints.’

  A spiritual driving force was also disclaimed by the second young man, who said that the verbena was the one time in the year everybody relaxed and enjoyed themselves. Being chosen to walk across the fire was like being picked for a football team. He enjoyed the prestige. Who wouldn’t?

  Don Alberto refused to give up. But surely a good deal of self-preparation must be involved?

  Reply: ‘None at all. Whoever spread that story made it up. Care to look at my feet? They’re no different from yours. They talk of mental exaltation, whatever that means, but when I cross the fire I feel the same as I do at any other time.’

  ‘But if I did it, I’d get burned,’ Don Alberto insisted.

  ‘Yes, of course you’d get burned.’

  ‘Why should that be?’

  ‘Frankly I don’t know. You can read abo
ut it in the newspapers. They make up a lot of things.’

  The old account in Domingo had spoken of secret and prolonged rites of self-purification. Don Alberto saw his miracle slipping away and clutched at a straw. At the least he demanded to be told that fire-walking was more than any other acquired skill. ‘You wouldn’t say that it’s no more than a matter of technique, would you? The way you place your feet?’

  ‘It must come into it. You’ll see for yourself. Our method is to press down hard with the heels, take short steps and lift the feet as high as we can.’

  ‘A thing that anybody should be able to do.’

  ‘They ought to, but they can’t.’

  Crestfallen, Don Alberto broke off battle.

  Shortly before eleven the fire had burned down to leave a low mound of embers and ash. The man from the municipality raked this over to form a bed two metres in length by one wide, and the major-domo was ready with his rule to measure the depth, which he found to be nine centimetres. These figures were passed on by the Alcalde, who had joined us again, now wearing his chain of office. The levelled bed was fanned by blankets into an incandescent glow, sparks snapped and crackled, then the glow faded to leave the embers whitening to ash, crested all over with small blue flames. The first of the fire-walkers pulled off his boots, walked to the edge of the fire and stubbed at it with his toe like a bather testing the water. It was a solemn moment, acknowledged by the crowd’s hush. A number of women crossed themselves, and the Alcalde put out his cheroot and threw it down.

  The young man walked into the fire, lifting his feet as if from deep snow and raising small flurries of powder and smoke as he crossed in six short paces. A doctor was waiting at the far end with a torch and a cloth to examine his feet, and his announcement that there were no burns was greeted with applause. The ceremony was to be carried out at high speed, for by this time the second man was already on his way, and six more waited in line, smiling and waving to their friends, to follow.