by Norman Lewis
Don Alberto, who had seemed a little jaded for some days after the arduous journey to San Pedro Manrique, had now recovered and, eager to give battle, kicked his Levis into action and dashed hither and thither in his efforts to drum up new support. The Grandmother, knowing by this time on which side her bread was buttered, could offer nothing better than lukewarm approval, and the Alcalde was favourably disposed to his cause, but prepared to do absolutely nothing. For the first time Don Alberto, who usually settled for his morning drink and a glance at the obituaries outsite the bar, saw the curtain over the mermaid, and he was furious. ‘Let’s face it, this man can make or break me,’ the Alcalde said. ‘I have to toe the line in certain small ways.’
I visited Don Alberto at his house for the last time that year to say goodbye, and happened by purest chance to be there when the seven peons, who had stuck with him through thick and thin until then, called to discuss a problem.
We were on the roof, savouring the crystalline, razor-edged beauty of a day hovering in the sweet limbo between summer and autumn. The sun had crisped away the last of the stubble from Don Alberto’s land, covering the naked earth with a faint patina, like rust, in which sparse details, a horse trough, a stile, a well-head, were engraved with extreme clarity. The atmosphere had an alpine thinness. We could have almost counted the leaves on a tree a half-mile away, and the intensely dry clicking of a water-wheel turned by a donkey sounded like the solemn tick-tock of a grandfather clock deep in the ears. A hard line drawn clean across the middle distance marked the frontier with the dark and featureless acres of Muga’s land, newly turned by the plough.
We saw the seven peons coming like Indians, single-file up the path. The scene was so sharply defined, I could see the grain of the log dragged by the dog they had with them. We went down the steps into the main room. Don Alberto’s aged mistress was playing La Violetera on the gramophone and he signed to her to go to the door. ‘I’m afraid her mental processes are beginning to fail,’ Don Alberto said sadly. Although they had long since left their nests on the beams and ledges, swallows were still twittering in and out through a shutter which would be left open until they went. Someone called ‘Ave Maria purisima’ at the door, and a moment later the peons were let in.
They stood in a line among the swallows’ droppings, twisting their hats in their hands. They had thick, sensitive aboriginal features, and under the shiftiness and ingratiation of their expressions I sensed a closely guarded hostility, and was reminded of Giovanni Verga’s Sicilian peasants, sickle in hand, ready for a jacquerie.
‘Well, what is it?’ Don Alberto asked.
‘We’ve come to talk to you about Don Jaime,’ one of the peons said.
‘Do you mean Muga? What about him?’
‘He’s asked us to give him a hand.’
‘In other words, work for him. You work for me.’
‘There’s not much to be done at this time of the year.’
‘Surely that’s a good thing, when you get paid just the same. What’s Muga asking you to do?’
‘He’d like us to take down a few trees. So he can get a plough in.’
‘My dear friends,’ Don Alberto said. ‘Don’t stand on ceremony.’ His smile reminded me of a skull. ‘Put on your hats and sit down. In this world every man is ruled by his own interests, and I expect you to be by yours. Just tell me one thing. What do you expect to eat when you sit down to a meal?’
The peons sat awkwardly on the edges of Don Alberto’s throne-like chairs. ‘Bread and beans. Rice on Sundays,’ it was agreed.
‘I feed you, don’t I?’
‘Yes, sir. That’s true.’
‘If you work for Muga you’ll eat cow that was killed ten years ago before it went into the can. I say killed, but it probably died of disease. How do you like the idea of that?’
‘Not much, your honour, if that’s the truth of the matter.’
‘Of course it’s the truth of the matter. Tell me another thing. How do you spend most of the winter?’
‘We sleep it off, sir.’
‘Of course you do, and so do I. We have a proverb, “December, fire and bed.” You only get up to eat and relieve yourselves, if the truth be known, but I keep forking out money just the same. Work for Muga and you’ll find you’ll be working up to twelve hours a day spring, summer, autumn and winter. You may have heard he’s put a stop to siestas for the people on his payroll … Do you like the idea of your sister or your daughter wearing trousers?’
‘It doesn’t appeal to us at all, sir.’
‘If they work in Muga’s hotel they will. It’s supposed to stop the men they’ll have to work with from looking up their skirts. What the real reason is I’ll leave to your imagination. If you take a job with Muga he’ll find some way of getting his hands on your womenfolk, too. My advice to you is keep them at home.’
‘We certainly intend to do that.’
‘I’ve big things planned for the future. Something it wouldn’t be wise to talk about at this stage, but leave it to me. We’ll storm new heights together. The law, as you know, doesn’t allow me to pay you more than 19 pesetas a day, but I’m going to find some way of getting round it and putting your wages up to 25. Is that all clear then?’
There was an exchange of glances, and a half-hearted muttering of assent. The peons got up, and Don Alberto brushed aside their thanks and shooed them out of the door. It was a victory of a kind, but I could see battles ahead.
Sebastian came with me to Figueras in the taxi to see me off. We did our best to turn it into a jovial occasion, plastering a little foolery over the cracks of the sorrow of leave-taking. It was a time for the hasty mustering of reminiscence, of which our fishing trips offered so rich a supply. We had caught many fish together, and suspected that few people in the years to come would see what the sea had shown us off these remote shores, hardly more troubled, I suspected, by human interference than in the days of the voyages of Odysseus. The high spot had been the great fishing of escarmalans back in the spring, and we promised each other that we would repeat the success in the coming year.
A little fun had gone out of life, Sebastian said, since that memorable episode. The adventure had set too high a standard for the rest of the year. His work had become boring, demanding much patience of him but little skill. He was now building chalets for a contractor that were delivered on site as an assembly kit, so many doors, so many windows, so many lavatory fittings, all of them identical, merely requiring to be put together. It produced a boredom of a rabid kind, entirely different from the benign monotony, the dulcet withdrawal of the mind experienced in calamar fishing, which remained his favourite pastime.
We passed through a salient of forest with the trees sloughing their bark like snakeskin and showing white, leached-out wood beneath. Further on the bad corner round a shallow ravine, once dynamited by the landlords to keep outsiders away, was being widened again for the second time in two years, a danger sign had been put up, and concrete blocks striped with black and white paint marked the edge of the road.
The talk was of change and the future. For all his efforts Sebastian remained as hard-up as ever. Elvira had given up her job at the hotel after a German had slipped into a room behind her as she was making up the bed and waved a 100-peseta note at her, accompanying the offer with unmistakeable gestures. The incident had sparked off a major row with the Grandmother, present when Elvira ran weeping back to the house, who accused him (once again) of impotence and sterility, and of readiness to live off her daughter’s immoral earnings.
However, there was no way of getting away from her while the prospects remained uncertain. All the construction workers were employed by a contractor who paid the regulation wage. In order to break out of the economic straitjacket, he would have to change his job and this, he hinted, he was prepared to do. It was a big decision to make, and he preferred to say no more about it at this stage. He promised to write and keep me posted.
He was cautiously optimistic, he
said. We had put the bad year behind us. Things couldn’t get worse, and the general feeling was that they would now improve. Elvira would certainly never go back to the hotel, but he had no objection to her taking in laundry as suggested by the housekeeper. Most of the fishermen held the view that next year would prove to be the first of a cycle of good years, and they awaited it in confidence with the second of the three smashed-up boats now fully repaired and ready for the sardine shoals in March. He suspected that the Grandmother’s ill-humour of late had been to some extent the result of falling fish sales, and that any substantial increase in catches might help to make life easier for him. The possibility of the change of job came up again, and he remained evasive. Should something happen in this direction, he said, he would make the change at such a time as to be able to take a week or two off in April. He hoped we might go escarmalan fishing again.
It was on this determinedly cheerful note that we parted for that year. The tranvía, an hour late and glutted with nursing mothers, incontinent children, and countrymen carrying chickens in wickerwork baskets, came crashing over the points in Figueras station. It was instantly stormed by sellers of lottery tickets, stale sandwiches, and soda water the colour of diluted blood. There were twenty or thirty heads at every window of the train, and hands reached out as if to grasp at salvation. Half the people who crowded the platform would not be travelling but were there for the excitement of watching the trains come and go, and anxious to strike up friendships with passengers that would be terminated in a matter of minutes with the departure of the train.
This was Spain as I knew it and had come to terms with it, just as I had grown to know and appreciate Sebastian, who typified in so many ways the country of his birth; this thin man with a bold but melancholic eye and a head full of poetic fancies, this passive but successful resister of despots, living on little more than air, and with no demands upon the future other than that it should show some slight improvement on the present.
The guard, a huge watch in hand, bore down on us. ‘Sorry to butt in, gentlemen, but we have to be going. I wouldn’t want to leave anyone behind.’
I boarded the train, struggled through to a compartment and then to the window, to wave.
‘Till next year, then.’
‘If God’s willing.’
‘Of course he’ll be willing.’ We had begun to copy the Grandmother’s habit of making up God’s mind for him.
The peasants waited for me to sit down, ready to thrust their food into my mouth.
SEASON THREE
Chapter One
THAT WINTER BROUGHT A BRIEF NOTE from Sebastian in which he said he had changed his job, but the nature of the new one remained unspecified. No mention was made of the projected escarmalan trip, so I assumed he had dropped the idea, probably through pressure of work.
At the end of the summer I had struck up an acquaintance with a middle-class Spanish visitor to Farol, interested in spear-fishing, but more so in underwater archaeological exploration, and I spent some weeks of the opening season with him in the area of Ampurias – within a mile or two of Don Ignacio’s hunting ground – where we collected a large quantity of broken Roman pottery, none of it of importance. Later we visited the islands of Espardell and Espalmador, near Ibiza, out of reach at that time of local fishermen, where enormous untroubled meros were still to be seen, mooching through the shallows within yards of the beach.
It was early June before I returned to Farol, where it was instantly obvious that drastic changes had taken place. The Grandmother received me with undiminished affability, but she too had changed with the village. Where she had been slow and stately she was now brisk. The dignified near-widow’s weeds had been replaced by a utilitarian jumper and skirt, and the coarse grey hair had been ruthlessly cropped back to reveal more of a scraggy nape of the neck. I was astonished to note that the ultimate village taboo had been ruptured by the black leather shoes she wore, with their gaudy buckles.
She had kept my room for me, but I could count myself lucky, she said, because for the first time Farol was to have what she called a ‘high season’, comprising the months of July and August, when it had been announced that all prices were to go up, and there would not be a room to be found at any price. An agent carrying a briefcase wherever he went, and wearing the first tinted glasses to be seen in Farol, had established himself in the village and gone from house to house in a search for accommodation, offering to pay 15 pesetas per day on a seasonal basis for a room whether occupied or not. It was an offer people found hard to refuse, especially after the catastrophic failure once again of the sardines to appear in March.
The agent had stipulated that any household wishing to qualify for inclusion would have to fall into line in one essential matter. Toilets providing no more than a hole in the floor and usually ceramic footprints in indication of where the feet should be placed were out, and pedestals were in. The Grandmother led me into the cubicle in which her artistic floral tiles had been scrapped and the contractual fitment installed in readiness for my successor. She flushed the cistern, peered down at the swirl of water and nodded with calm pride. ‘Just the thing,’ she said, ‘if you want to relax and reflect on life in general. I wouldn’t call it hygienic.’
Carmela was still about, she said, but was too busy elsewhere to be able to do much for me. The Grandmother hinted that Carmela had access to sources of prepared food, and was in no doubt that at a push we could come to an arrangement with her. Failing that, a stall had been set up near the church selling perros calientes. From this information I understood that the hot dog had begun its conquest of Spain. Also, said the Grandmother, hamburguesas – both of them excellent. All in all, there was little fear of starving. My cat, she announced, had mysteriously disappeared, and if I wanted another I should have to feed it, because the village had been cleaned up, leaving not a scrap of edible rubbish to be found anywhere, which was hard on the pig Mercedes.
The Grandmother’s own business, she told me, had gone with the fish, so naturally enough she had been obliged to look in other directions. She hoped to receive building permission for another room to be added to the house, and showed me the plans with some diffidence. It was clear that the addition of a breeze-block cube would wreck the natural, unplanned charm of the building and convert it into a blot on the landscape. The agent had been repelled by the austerity of the houses of Farol and hoped to inject a little cosiness by insisting that each room let to a visitor contain at least one framed picture, to be chosen from a stock in his office. The choice was of the London Houses of Parliament, the Eiffel Tower, St Mark’s Square, Venice, and the Château of Chillon.
Her final piece of news was that Sebastian and Elvira had left her house. She made the announcement with a mixture of acrimony and relief for, with a faint smirk, and clutching suddenly with a huge paw at her belly, she gestured that Elvira was pregnant.
She directed me to Sebastian’s place of work. By now I was ready for anything, and it came as no great surprise to find him sitting at a desk in the restaurant of the Brisas Del Mar hotel, taking slips of paper from a spike on which they had been stuck, and entering the information written on them in a book. It was about ten in the morning, hours before the restaurant opened, and for a few moments Sebastian did not register my presence, and when he looked up and saw me he seemed startled. He jumped up and we embraced. He was wearing black trousers and a black bow tie, managing to look at once jaunty and sheepish. Physically he looked in better shape than when I’d last seen him, and had put on several pounds, but was still thin, and there were slight shadows under his eyes.
We sat down together, and he explained, like a man in a confessional, the processes that had led to surrender. ‘It happened before you went off, but I decided to say nothing about it. The head waiter who was here before was an old friend from the Figueras days, and I helped him out when he was ill. You know how much they paid me on the building site? Twenty-eight pesetas for eight hours. Every time you served a par
ty in the restaurant you got up to 20 pesetas. There was no question of leaving the money because the tips went into a pool. The other waiter said, “If you don’t want your share, don’t worry, I’ll have it.” What was I expected to do? This year my friend was too ill with tuberculosis to start again and they asked me to take over.’
‘And are you happy? That’s the main thing.’
‘In a way. You’ve got to give up the idea of standing on your dignity, that’s all. At least we’ve got away from the Grandmother. We’re in one of the chalets and we’ve been able to furnish a couple of rooms. You can’t have everything. I miss the fishing. There’s no time for it any more. I start making up the accounts at about eight in the morning and we don’t knock off until midnight. I get tired of having to smile at people. You have to smile all the time. It’s part of the tariff – that’s our joke. We get a peseta a smile, and five pesetas for saying, “Good evening sir, good evening madam. It’s nice to see you again.” If a party orders a meal costing over 25 pesetas a head, we’re allowed to give them a drink on the house, which usually means another 10 pesetas on the tip. You can safely say we’ve sold ourselves.’
‘Let’s talk about happier things,’ I said. ‘I was in Espalmador last week. You wouldn’t believe anything like it existed. The water’s so clear you get vertigo. It’s like swimming through air. How’s your diving these days?’
‘I could get down to eighteen metres last September when we went out. I haven’t tried since then.’
