Voices of the Old Sea

by Norman Lewis

  ‘In Espalmador you have a flat rock-bottom in about fifteen metres, with deep grooves in the rock and fish by the thousand in the grooves. No sand. No weed. Just great big fish following each other nose to tail along corridors of rock. I couldn’t believe my eyes. What was funny was this sensation brought on by the clearness of the water. It was like walking along the top of a wall. I was really dizzy, and the feeling only passed when some big fish came up to take a look at me.’

  He grabbed at my hand. ‘We’ll have to go there together. That’s decided it. As a matter of fact I’d already made up my mind. I was going to turn this job in anyway. Some heavy expenses coming up. Elvira’s having a baby.’

  ‘I know. The Grandmother just told me.’

  ‘As soon as we’ve put that behind us I’ll be free. Perhaps we could go to Espalmador this autumn.’

  ‘Would they keep you on through the winter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you’d be making a mistake to leave this year. Let’s be realistic. You can’t afford it.’

  ‘Right then, I will be realistic. I’ll work on here until April, pay everything off, and get a bit of capital together. After that I’ll be my own master. We’ll go to Espalmador, right?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘It’s agreed then. That’s definite. In April, eh?’

  ‘In April. It’s a deal.’

  He was suddenly overbrimming with enthusiasm. Miraculously the shadows under his eyes had vanished. I had even succeeded in convincing myself that he meant what he said.

  A few foreigners were in the Alcalde’s bar, talking in loud voices and gesturing in a way that Latins were supposed to, although only a small minority did. One of the foreigners was drinking from a porón, a vessel never seen in Farol until this time. There was a great variety of bottles on the shelf at the back of the new counter, and the old broken-backed, patched-up chairs that cast such wonderful shadows when put out in the sun had been replaced by new ones upholstered in starkly grained leatherette. The mermaid had gone, and so had the fishermen, and the foolish, giggling boy who had helped out behind the bar had given place to a sharp-eyed, unsmiling barman I had never seen before. Prices had been increased three-fold since the last year.

  The local lad with the gift for mimicry, in particular of the cater-waulings of mating cats, chose that moment to come in. The original performance had failed to inspire the visitors’ enthusiasm, so he had quickly taught himself to cluck like a hen, so convincingly that he was rarely free from the attentions of eager young cockerels, one of which followed him into the bar on this occasion. It was clear that this went down well, for he was greeted with shouts of delight and invitations to drink, but I could see that the Alcalde hated to have him in the place.

  The Alcalde came over with two glasses drawn secretly from the Alicante cask. ‘Muga has to be accepted as a fact of life,’ he said. ‘Something you have to learn to live with. If you go along with him you can keep him under some sort of control. If you start a fight you’re done for. He came up with this offer: “Here’s my money, take me in as a partner, or I’ll open up in opposition.” What would you have done? I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. By saying yes and giving him a 49 per cent holding at least I have some say in the policy. I can insist on what we sell here being the real thing. Have you seen Sebastian?’

  ‘I just came from the hotel.’

  ‘Let me tell you how it works there. They buy casks of wine made up from what we call the ends, the dregs if you like, at one fifty a litre, put it in bottles with fancy labels and sell it for twenty. The brandy’s the same. It says Jaime Primero on the label, but neither you nor I would want to drink what’s inside.’

  ‘Does Sebastian know about this?’

  ‘Of course he does. He has to do what he’s told. They serve up dogfish with sauce in the restaurant and call it merluza.’

  ‘He told me he’d leave after this year.’

  ‘Sebastian lives in Muga’s house. How long do you imagine it’s going to take him to pay back what he owes? When you come back next year you’ll find him right where he is now. After that? Well, that’s another story. I have my own personal theories about what’s going to happen – but at this particular moment he’s in a trap. The more money Sebastian can make the sooner he’s going to be able to pay Muga off, and the way to make money fast is to go along with Muga’s rackets. He pays a commission on all that terrible liquor they sell for him, and even if Sebastian wanted to say no, he couldn’t.’

  A brief quarrel had flared among some Germans who had been drinking steadily at the back of the bar. One man was on his feet, shouting, and his friends got up, imprisoned his arms, and dragged him back into his chair. Instant reconciliation was followed by laughter and urgent cries for more vino to be brought.

  ‘How do you get on with them?’ I asked, knowing the Alcalde’s reputation for being a poor mixer.

  ‘I think about mathematical problems. It takes my mind off them. Some of them are drunk all the time. The women are worse than the men – real animals. Never believe it to look at them, would you?’

  ‘Do they give you a lot of trouble?’

  ‘Not in here. I’m not talking about the drink now. Our problem is the way they go after the village lads. The night-watchman up at the hotel fixes them up. Remember Lara? I had some trouble with him last year. He’s always hanging around the foreigners. They say he’s exceptionally well endowed and has better than average staying powers. It’s been officially reported to me that the night-watchman charges his fee then passes on 25 pesetas to Lara. Last year it used to be four pesetas for taking on some old French woman. Everything’s gone up. I can’t make up my mind whether or not to bring the police into it. It’s something that goes against the grain, and in any case, what’s the point? If Lara went they’d find somebody else.’

  A German snapped his fingers to pay and the Alcalde’s sharp-faced waiter sauntered over, took the money and counted out the change. He waited in expectation while the Alcalde clicked his tongue, then used one hand to scoop the coins left on the table into the other. His expression was aloof, almost one of distaste. ‘Notice,’ the Alcalde said, ‘not only does he take the money as something due to him, but there’s no question of thanks. This is the measure of our moral decline. Although we’ve come to live off these people, we intensely dislike them. Why do we dislike them? Because we resent what they’re doing to us. I have only one consolation.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘That this won’t last. It’s a kind of sickness, an infection. In the past we suffered from the plague. Now we suffer from tourists, but like any other sickness it dies out in the end. We have these people for a year, and they corrupt us. Next year things are going to be better – I’m told the bookings are down by 50 per cent. The year after it’ll be all over. A thing of the past. This is only a passing fad with Muga too – like raising pigs. Next year or the year after he’ll have had enough of it, and be looking for something else to turn his attention to. They’ll all go and we’ll be back where we were before. Do you know what I propose to do?’

  ‘Put this place back to what it was before all this started, I would say.’

  ‘You read my thoughts,’ the Alcalde said. ‘After that I’m going to live out the rest of my days in peace.’

  ‘Where’s the mermaid?’ I asked.

  ‘Very carefully stored away,’ the Alcalde said. ‘I’m looking after it, you can be sure of that. The day Muga comes to me and says he’s pulling out, the mermaid will be back, and there it will stay.’

  Chapter Two

  THERE WERE AT THAT TIME as many foreigners as natives in Farol. Most of them were French, but there was a sprinkling of Germans and Scandinavians, and the first of the English had arrived. They had the loudest voices and the most forceful manner of all the visitors and, despite the never-ending, bustling activity of all those natives who had to do with them, they continued firm in their belief in the Spanish addiction to pr
ocrastination and sleep. All tourist accommodation was booked for the summer, and workmen were already digging out the foundations of two new hotels. It was impossible to find a seat in the Alcalde’s bar or the Moorish folly at the end of the coast road after seven in the evening. A third bar, with restaurant, was about to be opened on the site of the old boathouse, from which I found Carmela had been ousted. Despite the unenchanting view from the hotel’s verandah of Cabezas’ house and the rubbish piled round it, it was thronged nightly with visitors who danced there until the small hours.

  Muga watched over the tourists like a hen clucking after its brood. He opened all doors for them, and responded to every whim. A number of narrow-minded Spanish regulations relating to the conduct of the individual in public places were still in force and, single-handed, Muga tore them away. It was illegal to embrace or kiss publicly, but in the second year of the tourists it was not possible to go out on a moonlight night without seeing couples locked in each other’s arms in the nooks and corners of the village, or in or under the boats pulled up on the beach. A professional bigot in plain clothes arrived with a tape-measure to spearhead a police campaign against off-the-shoulder dresses, but Muga soon got rid of him. In 1950 a male tourist was still not permitted in theory to go about in shorts unless he tied handkerchiefs over his kneecaps, but Muga had a Civil Guard who tried to enforce this regulation shifted to another area. In the same year a local girl was sent to a correctional institution run by nuns for wearing a two-piece bathing dress, but foreigners could wear what they liked, and even undress on the beach, although the spectacle could draw wondering crowds.

  Down by the sea front Don Jaime, having battered down all opposition, reigned supreme. The narrow breaches opened in the fishermen’s defences back in the autumn had widened through the surrender of more of the weaker elements, until the front had collapsed. Almost all the boats were now available for hire. Some foreigners had objected to the fact that the effort of climbing into a boat from a steeply sloping beach was too great, and that trippers invariably got wet, so government resources allocated for the promotion of tourism were provided at Muga’s urgent request for the building of a jetty, to which the boats were now tied up. Of all changes this was the one the fishermen most deplored, and they discussed with relish the probability of its being carried away by the next severe storm, due, according to past experience, in two years’ time.

  One outbuilding of the old slaughterhouse had been converted at Muga’s expense to serve as a bar for the fishermen, and it was there that I discussed the fishermen’s predicament with Simon, the survivor of the storm of January 1922, still believed to have retained through thick and thin some small residue of his communicable luck. Boredom, he said, was the enemy in this life. They took parties up and down the coast on picnic excursions, or to visit sites that might be expected to interest them, although they were all of them places that filled the fishermen with the profoundest of tedium. A few episodes had been good for a laugh. The tourists had insisted on being landed on an island and had been chased off by famished and cannibalistic dogs dumped there by the peasants of Sort. A girl had gone swimming in her pants and been stung across the bottom by a jellyfish. ‘Do you take them to the famous cave?’ I asked. Simon thought about this then nodded. ‘They renamed it Sa Gruta Azul,’ he said. ‘The tourists go there because of the colour of the water. Personally I haven’t and I wouldn’t, but others do. The idea of it gives me the creeps.’

  ‘And do they fish at all these days?’

  ‘In a token fashion,’ Simon said. Just to show they were still fishermen. The people from Palamos seemed to have the best of both worlds, but it didn’t work out that way at Farol, owing to the irreconcilable timetables of tourists and fish.

  But seen in the perspective of years, he insisted that what they were going through was no more than a temporary and unimportant phase. They were born fishermen, from innumerable generations of fishermen and seafaring forebears, and this they would remain. Through the ungovernable forces of nature they had suffered a dislocation, but eventually the tide would turn again. In the meanwhile the easy money brought in by the foreigners should be taken, but only as a means to an honourable end. It was agreed by all that the cash windfall should be invested in the future, on the purchase of new gear, the rehabilitation of aged engines, and the major repairs necessary to the last of the three storm-damaged boats. Everyone proclaimed their faith that, re-equipped by the chance foreign bounty, the little fishing armada would sail again in a rejuvenated form, prepared – in their own words – to ‘overwhelm the sea’ and wrest from it those great harvests of fish, those miraculous catches awaiting them when the shoals returned.

  I ran into Carmela in the butcher’s where I found myself standing beside her in the queue. She wore her bottle-green suit, carried her handbag, and I was amazed to see that she was attended by an errand-running girl holding the string bags into which her many purchases were dropped. The butcher’s had undergone a spectacular facelift. Gone were the bloodstains, the flowers stuck into jam jars, the artistic display of giblets, the beribboned tripes, and the severed heads presented on paper ruffs. The shop was as impersonal as a tax office. The customers no longer sneaked in carrying secret packages with which to bribe the butcher’s wife, but formed an orderly queue to be served from a refrigeration room by a dispassionate young man in a surgeon’s coat with well-cared-for hands. The remembered smell of meat had been replaced by that of a perfumed disinfectant, called Floralia.

  We left the shop together and Carmela gave me her news. She was now cook at the Brisas del Mar, and I could see for myself what had happened to the boathouse, where in any case it would not have been possible to stay on through the winter storms. She had a room of her own with running water and someone to do the donkey work in the preparation of the food, but it was a job that gave her small satisfaction. There were two problems, the first being the necessity to make the food sufficiently tasteless for foreign palates, and the second the camouflage of unattractive basic materials in order to make them acceptable. She found that the latter task came easier.

  The small girl trundled at our side laden with the dubious bagfuls, while Carmela enlarged on her dislike of the people for whom she cooked. ‘I’ll say this for you, sir. You’re prepared to have a try and you’re not easily put off. If you had to, you closed your eyes, but you still went on eating. I got the impression that all foreigners like a good, strong flavour. I’d like someone to tell me how I’m supposed to cook an innard stew when they say, don’t use herbs, and no garlic, eh?’ The foreigners at the hotel were inhuman, she said, mere animals, devoid of moral sense. They infuriated her by sending food back to be reheated, or because something had surfaced from underneath the gravy they didn’t like the look of, and if this happened she sometimes punished the offender by spitting in the dish before returning it, and if it happened a second time she called in one of the girls who helped out to contribute to the spittle.

  Otherwise her news was good, above all the news of Rosa, whose continued progress amazed all who saw her.

  Was she at the hotel? I asked.

  Well no, that wouldn’t have been possible, but they had reached a much happier and better arrangement for all concerned. Rosa was in a home – well, not even a home, a sanatorium having all the necessary facilities for her treatment. It couldn’t possibly have been a better arrangement. Mr Muga, who had been generosity itself, was paying, and he arranged for someone to take her over to Figueras to see the little girl once a fortnight.

  ‘Is she walking normally now?’

  ‘The slightest limp, that’s all. Otherwise, apart from a little trouble with her teeth that most people don’t even notice, everything’s cleared up. The doctor told me in some ways she’s above average intelligence for her age.’

  ‘Will she be coming out soon?’

  ‘A year. Eighteen months at most. The time will fly. I tell you, sir, next time you see Rosa she’ll be on the arm of her first boyfrien
d. I get down on my knees to thank God for such a miracle.’

  I remembered the goat. ‘What news of the goat?’

  ‘The goat? Well that’s a sad story. Mr Muga’s been kindness itself to us but we couldn’t expect him to have her here, so we invited a few friends round and had her for the feast of San Firmín. We all miss her, but it couldn’t be helped. A pity you couldn’t have been there, sir.’

  No one could tell me anything of Don Alberto, so I trudged across the fields to his house in search of him. The windows were shuttered, with sparrows nesting between the wood and the glass, and there was no reply to ‘Ave Maria purisima’ shouted at the top of my voice through the substantial opening where the double doors failed to meet. None of the peons was in sight and I made a note of the gigantic thistles growing up all over the place.

  I made a small detour through the dog village on the way back and found it looking like an old film set from the American dust bowl of The Grapes of Wrath. Sort was suddenly fragile and spent, and purposeless, waiting to be broken up. Its gates hung askew and its doors were nailed up, and tiles had slid from roofs to shatter into pink fragments in the rock-hard, grey earth. Some feather-duster chickens were scuffling in desperate hope through ancient refuse, but there was no sign of the dogs. The bar was closed, as was the church, with a notice posted over its doors. Huge piles of expertly stacked logs – all that remained of the oaks – overtopped the low houses, and phantoms of wind and grit moved up and down the empty street.

  A man appeared from nowhere, wearing a military-style jacket, Texan boots, a big hat and, underneath the hat, a blue eyeshade of the kind some journalists wear when at work in strong light.

  He came towards me, then held out his hand. ‘Julio Baeza, at your service. I’m Don Jaime Muga’s number one. Can I be of assistance?’ His voice held a faint transatlantic resonance, and he had rid himself of the ceceo – the famous Spanish lisp. A Spaniard, in fact, who preferred to sound and look like a South American.