Voices of the Old Sea

by Norman Lewis

  Carrying out his threat, Muga hired a fishing vessel in Palamos, and its crew sailed it to Farol and took the tourists on their beach picnic. Four members of the party who had booked for the trip got lost in a walk through the devastated cork-oak forest, and found by the time they reached the beach that the boat had already left. Several villagers gathered, full of sympathy, to discuss their predicament. Despite the embargo imposed by the fishermen on carrying them in Farol boats, it was generally agreed that something ought to be done. A young fisherman called Jordans, who came on the scene and had absolutely nothing to occupy himself with for the rest of the day, was encouraged to make an exception in this case and row the four tourists over to the beach. It was a long haul, and the two French couples showed themselves overwhelmingly grateful. They insisted on sharing their packed lunches with Jordans and, because it would have been impolite to do otherwise, he accepted. Later the matter of a reward had to be considered. Jordans insisted that he did not want to be paid, but the French were equally adamant, and in the end he gave in and accepted 100 pesetas. The fact that he had taken this money caused hard feelings when he reported it to the other fishermen, who talked about the thin end of the wedge. That same evening the Alcalde’s young barman was caught by his employer in the act of pocketing a tip of ten pesetas. ‘I’ve been paying him twenty pesetas a day until now,’ the Alcalde said. ‘What can I expect?’

  After dropping the tourists off on the return trip the three men from Palamos called in at the bar for a drink and bought a round for the Farol fishermen they found there. They apologised for their unintentional interference in the dispute, but apart from that defended the ethics of what they were doing. ‘It’s not as if we’ve any intention of giving up fishing,’ they pointed out. ‘We go out at night and put the nets down the same as ever. This makes life a bit harder, but there’s more money coming in. You ought to give it a thought.’

  The Farol men nodded their polite agreement, returning as soon as the outsiders had left to their private discussions and their versifying. It seemed that a measure of decadence was to be detected in these later sessions. Of old, every day at sea had produced its adventure. Now experiences were on a smaller scale, and spontaneous interchanges in blank verse satirical rather than epic in inspiration. The fishermen poked fun at the foreigners who involved them in a succession of ludicrous experiences. Too often the males were undignified and drunken, while, as this ungallant fragment suggests, the women on the whole appeared to them overdressed and plain.

  Chicas nos vienen a visita’,

  Ricas son, plata tienen,

  (Pero) Aunque la mona se vista de seda,

  Mona es, y mona queda.

  Girls come here to visit us,

  All of them rich, stuffed with money,

  (But) Even if the monkey dresses in silk,

  She’s a monkey, and monkey remains.

  The time came for the visitors to go home, but to the villagers’ surprise it turned out that two of them had decided to stay on. These were a young German couple of whom little had been seen hitherto, and who had absented themselves from beach trips and such entertainments as Muga’s gala supper and the sardanas at Sort. They were both in their early twenties and made a strikingly handsome pair. The girl, Mitzi, possessed a kind of pale, withdrawn, pre-Raphaelite beauty that left the fishermen stunned. I shared a table with them at the bar one evening, and we exchanged a few words in Spanish. The girl had little to say, and rarely smiled. She was almost over-endowed with the quality of serenity – something the Spanish much admired. For my personal taste the sparkle and the vivacity of both Sa Cordovesa and Maria Cabritas were to be preferred. The girl ran her fingers through the fine silk of her hair and her eyes roved from side to side, like those of an Indian dancer, to take in her surroundings. Klaus, the husband, or boyfriend – I was never sure which – watched her continually. By this time in the evening the gypsy guitarist had started his strumming, and at the end of each piece Klaus clapped twice. Shortly before midnight the couple got up and slipped away.

  It was evident that they had intended to stay on in Spain because they had brought a small tent with them. This they pitched on a triangle of beach wedged in the rocks about two miles from the village, and settled to a life which filled the villagers – who had hardly heard of camping before – with utmost curiosity. By this time most of the young fishermen were deeply in love with Mitzi and consumed with jealous hatred for Klaus, and several of them got into the bad habit of hanging about the shore, or lurking in the woods in the vicinity of the tent, in the hope perhaps of the occasional glimpse of the couple’s domestic life. The Alcalde made it quite clear in a discussion with the senior fishermen at which I was present that this was a situation he disapproved of, although he didn’t see what could be done about it. In his own words, it put wrong ideas into the lads’ heads.

  The general opinion was that the couple were short of money. Once in a while they came into the village, sat speechlessly in the bar and drank a palo between them. When the fishermen wanted to buy them drinks they shook their heads, but an offer of fish was accepted with gratitude. There were several isolated farmhouses in the vicinity of the beach, and it was learned that they occasionally visited one or other of these to buy food. The farmers, who were always dying of loneliness and boredom, would have been overjoyed to see fresh faces, and, people assumed, would have charged little or nothing for whatever they were able to supply.

  The two Civil Guards, walking side by side, rifles slung, patrolled most of the village and the neighbouring beaches every day, and whenever they passed the Germans’ tent they made a habit of stopping to exchange a few words with them, on one occasion warning the girl that her habit of wearing a two-piece swimsuit would have to stop.

  About a week after the tent had gone up they decided to check on the Germans’ visas. Only the girl was there, and they looked through her passport and told her they’d call back next day to see the man. Next day there was no sign of Klaus. Mitzi, who seemed in no way alarmed, said that he had been away for a day and a half, and that he must have had his passport with him. She invited them into the tent and they went over its contents. They were shown Klaus’ rucksack stacked with his gear, a wallet with family photographs and a few pesetas which she said belonged to him. She told them that at some time on the previous night Klaus had got up and gone out, she assumed to pass water. She went back to sleep and awakened in the morning to find him gone. Was she surprised? they asked her. Quite surprised, she said. But not really worried? No, not really worried. Klaus went in for impulses. And did she expect him to come back? He might. Spanish are brave but emotional people. The guards told the Alcalde later they had never before run into such calm. Had they quarrelled? the guards asked. No, she said, they never quarrelled. They had a tiff once in a while. No more than that. Later she told them she seemed to remember hearing voices in the night after Klaus had gone out, but this, she said, might have been a dream.

  The Civil Guards told Mitzi to pack her things up and move back to the village, which she did, and Muga, who had never been able to keep his eyes off her, put her up free of charge in the hotel. A search was then mounted of the area where the couple had camped, in which the Alcalde and a number of volunteers assisted the guards. No one seemed quite to know what they were looking for. The guards showed interest in the marks indicating that a boat had recently been dragged up on the beach, and a few meaningless rags were found in the fairly dense pine and juniper trees at the back of the beach, but nothing more.

  Later in the week a senior Civil Guard NCO was sent down from Figueras to ask Mitzi more questions. They visited the beach together and he made a drawing to illustrate his report. What concerned the police was the possibility of foul play but the sergeant ruled this out. He handed Mitzi her passport back, and next day Muga drove her in to Figueras to take the train home.

  Later that week it was Muga’s saint’s day, in celebration of which he presented the village with a cask of A
licante wine, leaving it to the Alcalde to effect a distribution. The wine was full-bodied and aromatic, with a faint flavour of almonds, and the fishermen, accustomed to thick, cloying palo and the near-vinegar produced in Sort, had never tasted anything to equal it. Each family was offered a litre, and free wine was served in the bar to all comers on the great day. The senior fishermen and a few of their resolute followers rejected Muga’s gift, but many of the lesser fry allowed themselves to be persuaded, and a number of young men got thoroughly drunk before the evening was out.

  A day or two after this, an extraordinary rumour began to circulate in the village to the effect that Mitzi had been the victim of a sexual attack on the night of Klaus’ disappearance. Much alarmed, and to pre-empt action by the police, the Alcalde tracked this down to its source – a young man called Tiberio Lara, only notable in any way up till now as the first village boy to have a name imposed upon him by the Grandmother, an admirer at the time of his birth of the Emperor Tiberius.

  The Alcalde sent for Tiberio and questioned him, and after a threat to call in the Civil Guard, the story was out. Tiberio told the Alcalde that on the evening of Muga’s party he had got drunk in the bar with Cabezas’ son Pedro, commonly known for his dependence on his father as Hijito de Papa (‘daddy’s boy’). Pedro, a nineteen-year-old loafer who preferred to do without money rather than work, could not afford in the ordinary way to drink, and two glasses of free wine had been enough to send him staggering. Reeling out into the night together Pedro had boasted to Tiberio of the attack, saying that he had spent three nights in the woods watching the tent, and finally, as he had expected she would, the girl came out with a torch. He had tied a scarf over his face, followed and overpowered her. After the first attack he was prepared, as soon as released, for her to get up and run away, but she had not done so, so he had had intercourse with her for the second time, meeting with no resistance. While they were lying there among the juniper scrub, a torch was shone on them, and Pedro jumped up and found himself face to face with Klaus. He drew the knife he was carrying and Klaus said, ‘Don’t hurt me. You can take her. She’s yours.’

  At first the Alcalde found this story improbable, describing it as a typical teenage fantasy on Lara’s part, based on repression. However, he felt obliged to call Lara senior, a man said to rule his family like a biblical patriarch, who arrived wearing a hat borrowed for the occasion and his son walking two paces to the rear. ‘Your honour, if you believe what this fellow tells you, you’ll believe anything,’ Lara said. ‘He’s a hysteric and a liar.’ The Alcalde sent for a Bible and told Tiberio to take it in his right hand, and testify on oath. Tiberio immediately broke down and retracted, saying that he’d made the story up because he was bored, and enjoyed causing a bit of a stir. His father struck him across the face with the back of his hand, and they went off home.

  By this time I was on good terms with the Alcalde. A typically Mediterranean relationship had developed, in which we were able to help each other out in small ways, and he frequently took me into his confidence. It transpired that he’d had second thoughts about the case and now suspected that Tiberio might have been telling the truth after all, but had been frightened out of his wits by old Lara. We lived in a strange world, he said, but whatever had happened, the thing was settled as far as he was concerned. Like most men in his position, he asked nothing better than to be left in peace, and he was inclined to let sleeping dogs lie. He saw nothing to be gained in questioning Hijito de Papa. He had acted to put a stop to the spread of a dangerous rumour and head off the police, and now he hoped to be able to let the thing drop.

  He confided in me that he had been able to find out that Hijito de Papa had been one of the numerous lovers of both Sa Cordovesa and Maria Cabritas. Otherwise he was a quiet boy, unobtrusive, fond of his own company. We exchanged glances as the warning shadow of Barros fell across us, and the Alcalde quoted, ‘I mistrust men that are silent, and dogs that don’t bark.’ He poured a glass apiece from what was left of the Alicante wine. ‘Let’s talk of other things,’ he said. ‘I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE REST OF THE YEAR went roughly as foreseen. The large-scale repairs to one of the big boats smashed in the storm of the previous October were completed, but not in time for the autumn sardine fishing, which produced the meagre harvest generally expected. Boga shoals were thinning now, and certain varieties of fish common in the past were no longer seen. The incursions of amateurs from Sort became a regular thing. They caught little but greatly disturbed such fish as red mullet which grazed in a slow and ruminative fashion on minute organisms in shallow water, and were scared away from the vicinity. There were cases, too, of nets being plundered, of fish being unhooked from standing lines, and taken from the vivéros in which they were kept alive in the sea. Such incidents led to several affrays, in one of which the Civil Guards had to intervene.

  No marriage took place in that year, and there were signs that a dangerous loss of able-bodied males might have begun. One man emigrated to Argentina, another engaged himself on a trawler operating in the Atlantic, and two more moved to Palamos, where it was believed they had joined a gang of cigarette smugglers.

  Two more parties of foreign tourists arrived, the second being so large that both the hotel and its annexe were full, and the overflow had to be accommodated in the two cork mansions, hastily adapted to their needs. Each party was submitted to the established pattern of entertainment; the gala supper, the folklore expedition to Sort, the beach trips when in both cases the official boat from Palamos received blackleg assistance from local fishermen, for which they later came under the bitter attack of supporters of the boycott.

  A small social problem arose out of the relationship between the tourists and the village, due to the fact that one or two unattached foreign ladies seemed over-willing to cultivate the acquaintance of young fishermen. When Tiberio Lara presented himself in the bar one evening in the company of a French woman probably twice his age, the Alcalde served the woman, but refused to take Tiberio’s order.

  Very slowly the village was adapting itself to the foreigners’ requirements, as my neighbour Juan found to his amazement. Juan fished for preference in deep water and had developed special skills in order to be able to do this. The fish he caught, such as pollas and mollas – there is no name for them in English – were notable for their firm, exquisitely flavoured flesh, allied to a somewhat grotesque appearance. In my first season’s fishing with Juan we were never able to catch enough of them even to satisfy local demand, but by the end of the second year the Grandmother advised him to change his fishing methods and concentrate on the better-looking fish, dorados, brill and bream, to be taken in shallower waters. All Juan’s fish now passed through the Grandmother into Muga’s kitchens, and his customers put cosmetic appeal before taste. By the time Muga’s third group were installed frozen hake, extremely insipid in flavour by comparison with fresh Mediterranean fish, was being shipped in from the Atlantic coast.

  Such changes – mostly for the worse in Farol – were paralleled by a major upheaval in Sort.

  Pablo Fons’ world had fallen about his ears since his effeminate second son had sneaked off to Figueras, where he had worked as a barmaid before his arrest by the police for wearing female attire. The shock had brought on a mild heart attack, following which Fons decided to pass over to Muga what remained of his property, and take up light work involving the use of dynamite – at which he was considered an expert – in the excavation and improvement of wells.

  Don Alberto planned a rearguard action, choosing as allies Don Ignacio and the ultra-conservative senior fishermen of Farol.

  Don Ignacio had never forgiven Muga for insisting on rigidity in the matter of the hours set for the celebration of Mass, which deprived him of his weekend archaeological trips. He agreed, too, with Don Alberto that the foreign influence was on the whole pernicious. In a matter of weeks, as he had pointed out to me, money values had
become wholly distorted, so that women scrubbing floors and washing bed-linen for Muga gained far more than skilful and dedicated fishermen who had spent their best years at an exacting trade. Don Ignacio believed that the democracy of foreigners was misunderstood by a people who had never encountered it before and were encouraged by it to presumption and lack of respect. A small nucleus of hangers-on, of which Tiberio Lara was an example, was beginning to form, who treated the visitors with a kind of contemptuous over-familiarity. Don Ignacio had to admit that there was a lack of dignity and restraint on both sides, and that French and German holidaymakers who came to Farol probably behaved in a more subdued fashion on their home-ground.

  This viewpoint was strongly supported by the senior fishermen, who vowed to do everything in their power to stop the Muga advance and to see to it that he did not get away with more flagrant abuses such as the building of the pseudo-Moorish café, recently inaugurated with a noisy and drunken party for foreigners and a number of Muga’s kinsmen, which had gone on half the night. The senior fishermen promised effective sanctions against the increasing number of their juniors who had, on one pretext or another, broken ranks and carried foreigners in their boats. They proposed, also, to order the Palamos boat to stay away in future from Farol.