Voices of the Old Sea

by Norman Lewis

  ‘Does Don Jaime own this village now?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s left of it,’ he said. He twisted his lip into a half-smile of good-natured contempt.

  ‘And all these houses are empty?’

  ‘Put it this way, they’re no longer tenanted.’

  ‘Would the Alcalde happen to be about?’

  ‘He’s gone. This doesn’t rate as a municipality any more.’

  ‘Has everybody gone?’

  ‘Not everyone,’ the pseudo-South American said. ‘One or two of the old timers didn’t want to be moved, and we respected their wishes. We’ve settled all the rest on the model farm. It’s just over the hill. Great place. We call it El Porvenir.’

  ‘The Future,’ I thought. A good name for it.

  ‘Run you over there if you’d like to look round.’

  I could see El Porvenir in the mind’s eye, and that was enough. ‘Thanks all the same,’ I said. ‘I have to be getting back.’ The one person certain to have news of the old man was Don Ignacio, who had been out when I called earlier in the day. I found him in the church, and we strolled back to the house together. It seemed no longer important in Farol not to be seen with a priest. His servant brought glasses of rancio, and the cats, already unsteady on their feet, followed on her heels for their share. One or two new pieces had appeared on the bench top that Don Ignacio used to clean and restore his archaeological finds; a blackened crisp of leather – once part of a belt, Don Ignacio said – and real treasure in the form of a small, corroded spoon. It seemed that Muga had relented in the matter of the celebration of Mass, at least to the extent of fixing up someone to act as stand-in when Don Ignacio went off to recover the past from the salty wilderness of Ampurias.

  Don Alberto, Don Ignacio said, had taken his aged girlfriend back to Madrid, where, she announced, she was determined to die. The circumstances surrounding her departure had been a little theatrical. Don Alberto, he said, had gone off to Figueras to address a meeting of diehard landlords determined to put a stop to progress and development of almost every kind, and above all the encroachments of tourism, when Gloria, who had not appeared in public for at least twenty years, walked out of the house. She walked two miles to Sort, sat in the little square there and ordered a drink of a kind no one had heard of, but accepted the inevitable palo in its place. Her appearance caused astonishment, and in the case of young children alarm, for she had dressed herself in a purple silk gown, wore a great deal of jewellery including a tiara, although almost bald, and had coated her face, arms and hands with stark-white powder.

  The name Gloria, as applied to the aged creature I had only seen hunched in a corner over her gramophone, startled me. Don Alberto had always referred to her – even when speaking English – as La Vieja. How old was she? I asked. Don Ignacio said eighty, perhaps eighty-five. Having downed the palo, he said, the question of payment came up. She had no money, but offered the tavern-keeper a ruby ring. Someone fetched the Alcalde, and he came running to introduce himself. One of the onlookers told Don Ignacio that he went down on one knee, but Don Ignacio said that was a version he rejected. He invited her to his house where she shook hands with his goats. After that she went round the village with all the children trailing after her at a safe distance, picking the flowers in the gardens.

  When Don Alberto got back she was waiting for him with an armful of roses. ‘Alberto,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of this place, and I’ve decided to go back to Madrid. Please take me.’

  ‘Well, of course, my dear,’ he told her. ‘But what are we going to do when we get there?’

  ‘I’m going to die,’ she said. ‘What you do is your own affair.’

  ‘I went to the station to see them off,’ Don Ignacio said. ‘She was wearing a hat with plumes of the kind women must have worn at Ascot in the time of your Queen Victoria. Just before they went, she pushed a packet into my hands. “Take these and rebuild your church,” she said. They were Imperial Russian Bonds. In 1916 we could have rebuilt it twice over with all those thousands of roubles. She was a beautiful woman in her day, and a witty one they say. I saw a picture of her in a gallery myself when I was in Madrid. They even say our late King had a brief relationship with her. Sic transit gloria mundi,’ he said. I hoped it was not intended as a pun.

  Chapter Three

  SLOWLY FAROL BEGAN TO ADAPT to the foreign presence, to do its best to accept the tribal customs of others and to cultivate a kind of holy indifference to endless assaults by foreigners on its own taboos. Police chiefs recalled the plain-clothes vigilantes with their tape-measures and told the rank and file of the Guardia Civil to look in the other direction when they saw a woman with a plunging neckline or split skirt. Soon there was a law for foreigners and another for Spaniards, just as in most places there is one for the rich and another for the poor. By and large communication remained a matter of gestures, smiles or frowns, and each side remained mysterious to the other, made what allowances they had to, and got on as best they could in that way.

  Muga, steadfastly advancing the frontiers of his dominion, made a great leap forward by his purchase at a very low price of twelve thousand square metres of what was quickly becoming valuable land between his hotel and the sea. This had long been used as a rubbish dump and was cluttered as well with the remains of an old cork-processing plant; it was now overgrown with morning glory and offered sanctuary to numerous cats. Nobody had any idea in Farol who this land belonged to, but Muga eventually traced the legal owners, an aged brother and sister, to Figueras where the family had emigrated some fifty years earlier.

  They were astounded to learn that they were property-owners, but coming from a background in which the conception of numbers above 100 was often vague, they were totally unable to conceive of the figure of 50,000 pesetas Muga offered. The problem was to present wealth not in terms of intellectual abstraction but reality, and Muga solved it by collecting 2,000 brand new 25-peseta notes from his bank, and covering the floor of the single room in which the old couple lived with several layers of them. The offer was then readily accepted, bulldozers moved in to clear the debris covering the land, and plans were submitted within the month for another hotel having a swimming pool and a complex of shops.

  Muga now owned or controlled about two-thirds of Farol and manipulated the lives of nine out of ten of its inhabitants. His one conspicuous failure had been his inability to acquire and demolish Cabezas’ hideous house. This stark, barracks-like building was more of an eyesore than ever in the context of its newly prettified surroundings. Worse than that, Cabezas, in his half-witted fashion, had given shelter in it to the gypsies and their performing bear, who failed to please the hotel guests overlooking Cabezas’ patio with their demonstrations of the art of animal training, and kept them awake with their raucous singing that went on far into the night.

  To Muga’s amazement his planning application was turned down. An objection had been raised that it contravened a recent regulation by which in a coastal development area no building in excess of two stories could be erected in such a way as to deprive an existing habitation of its view of the sea. He was even more astonished when the author of the objection turned out to be the supposedly feeble-minded Cabezas, the habitation being his own house.

  At the end of August there was more astonishing news: Mitzi was back, installed, alone, in Muga’s hotel, and a day or two later I observed her, gold-sandalled and white-gowned, palely loitering along the beach. Distantly, all eyes were on her, and a small clique of young fishermen with too much time now on their hands were trailing along fifty yards in the rear. Legends had sprung up, for example that Muga, in preparation for a trip to Reno to divorce his wife, had invited her to join him. The Alcalde assured me that this was not so. He had stopped to welcome her back, then asked her where Klaus was, and had received a cold but penetrating look, and the reply, ‘Ich weiss nicht.’ She was a person, the Alcalde said, who seemed to say the first thing that came into her head. The receptionist at the hotel re
ported her as replying to the same question, ‘I doubt we will be seeing him again.’ Talking to her had a strange effect on him, the Alcalde said. It was something about her eyes. Trying to describe the feeling he used the word conjurado, spellbound. The Civil Guards asked to see her and her story to them was that Klaus had turned up again in Germany and they had spent a few days together, after which they had finally gone their separate ways.

  Mitzi kept strictly to herself, avoiding all social gatherings and excursions, the gala dinner, sardanas at Sort, barbecues and boat trips. She had adopted a collection of abandoned kittens and was to be seen sometimes, carrying these in a bag slung from her shoulder, as she paced softly along the beach down by the water’s edge before the tourists took up their morning positions, and after they had left at the end of the day.

  Any approach by a male was vigorously repelled. When Pujols offered to take her to a secluded beach, she quelled him with a glance. If one of the boys who followed her wherever she went got too close, she swung round suddenly to swear at him in German, ‘Du bist ein Arschloch’, making it a matter of simple statement. Faces appeared at windows and heads turned discreetly whenever she passed with her squeaking bagful of kittens. Her effect on the village came close to being hypnotic. My own feeling was that she was a little stupid, and whatever power she possessed stemmed from her inordinate self-confidence.

  About the Sunday following her arrival there was a sudden flare-up in the village interest in Mitzi’s affairs. Something had happened or was about to happen, but there was as yet no solid fact to be discovered among the muffled voices of rumour and hearsay. On the Sunday evening I settled in my usual place outside the Alcalde’s bar, ordered a palo and watched the beginnings of the ritual promenade. Most of the foreigners were out of the village, away on excursions, and this was a nostalgic hour when Farol returned briefly to the past. According to custom the promenade began in a desultory and unplanned fashion, with the appearance of strolling groups of young people, and it would be a half-hour before the Grandmother and the butcher’s wife made their entry on the scene like matadors in the ring after the preliminary cape-waving when the serious business was about to begin.

  Almost immediately the white flash of Mitzi’s Grecian gown caught my eye, and she came into view with Cabezas’ son Pedro at her side. The promenaders following the couple had fallen back, and in distancing themselves in this way, Mitzi and Pedro were left to occupy the village stage.

  I had never bothered to study Pedro, ‘daddy’s boy’, closely before, but now I did in earnest. He was good looking in an oafish way, with thick lips, curly hair, and a vacant expression that matched Mitzi’s. The couple walked past, looking straight ahead, and without exchanging a word or glance. They turned round by the church, walked the length of the street – over which a kind of hush had fallen – once again, then disappeared. Someone went for Cabezas, but by the time he reached the scene they had gone.

  Next morning Mitzi and Pedro left Farol together for an unknown destination. Tiberio Lara, Pedro’s only acquaintance, accompanied Cabezas – dressed in mourning – to the Alcalde’s house to make a statement concerning the circumstances of the departure. Cabezas told the Alcalde of a heated and somewhat one-sided altercation with his son on the previous night when he had accused him of associating with a foreign prostitute, about whom there were strong doubts over the mystery of Klaus’ disappearance. Asked what he proposed to do, Pedro told his father he was going – he had no idea where. Cabezas appealed to him, ‘How can you go anywhere without money? I’ve got no money to give you. The house is all I’ve got, and it’s yours. I’ll call in the lawyer and sign it over to you tomorrow.’ Pedro said he was going away with Mitzi whatever happened, and as he couldn’t take the house with him he didn’t want it. He would only take his guitar. Cabezas told the Alcalde that the gypsies had taught Pedro to play the guitar, and he believed it to have been the undoing of him. All Lara could add to this was that Pedro had told him that the German girl had come back for him, and that they were going away together, and would never be parted again.

  Having finished his statement Cabezas, who seemed to the Alcalde strangely calm and resigned, asked the Alcalde if he had a fire, and the Alcalde took him through to the kitchen where two or three lumps of charcoal in the usual cocina económica were smouldering under a pot.

  Cabezas asked if the Alcalde had any objection if he burned certain personal papers, and the Alcalde said, none at all. He lifted the pot off the fire, and Cabezas took a number of documents out of his pocket, including his birth certificate, his marriage certificate and his will and burned them one by one. The Alcalde got him a glass of brandy and he knocked it back. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said when the burning was over. ‘Now I’m officially dead.’

  ‘Not quite,’ the Alcalde said, ‘but I can see you’re making difficulties for us. What are we going to do with the house when you go?’

  ‘Whatever you like,’ Cabezas said. ‘I shan’t be needing it any more. I lived in a cave for thirty years and I’ve never really got used to the place. Too hot in summer, and too cold in winter. I think I’m better off where I came from.’

  Chapter Four

  I SETTLED TO AN INTERLUDE OF FISHING, but there was less scope, variety or reward in it than in the past. Since nowadays so many of my friends were busied elsewhere I often spear-fished alone, an arduous business entailing a long swim from the beach out to a suitable fishing ground, and the difficulty in the rare instance of a sizeable fish being taken of getting it back to shore. Nevertheless, constant swimming and diving practice was essential to avoid loss of form. Compared to some of the Spaniards who now, in the third season, were beginning to arrive as holidaymakers, I was never better than a mediocre diver. Many of these could easily, without an aqualung, reach a depth of twenty metres, and a few far more, whereas when one day in pursuit of a splendid mero I tried to exceed my limit of fifteen metres I suffered a ruptured ear-drum. The pain, although momentary, was intense, and the injury put me out of action as a diver for the rest of the year.

  It was an accident that led to my first encounter with the cheerful and sprightly Dr Seduction. He had come a long way since the days when any youngish woman requiring his advice sent her mother to him, who would say, before hoisting up her skirts to subside on the fateful couch, ‘Sorry, but you’ll have to be content with a squint at my tripes. I’ll tell you all about her symptoms and where the trouble is, and you can let me know what to do.’

  Since then the doctor had made a fortune out of the visitors’ stomach troubles and sunburn and invested part of it in a course in Barcelona, permitting him to display a sign: Especialidad En Venercas, Sifilis, Vias Urinarias. It was largely a matter of prestige since the merest sprinkling of foreigners took venereal diseases with them on holiday, but it enormously impressed the natives, who credited him with the possession of secrets conferring a species of awful power. Few of the villagers would have disputed the existence in Barcelona of a hospital called La Merced (Mercy), in which terminal sufferers, whom Dr Seduction might well have saved if given the chance, were put out of their misery by stifling them under their pillows.

  The doctor saw me in the breeze-block addition, acting as a surgery, to the windowless peasant house in Sort in which he lived, and he skipped about like a friendly kitten, kicked aside a shopping bag with a chicken’s head lolling with eyes closed from among the purchases, snatched up a few tufts of bloodied cotton wool and dropped them into the wastepaper basket before attending to my injury. He shone an inspection lamp into my ear, and what he saw there clearly delighted him. A boy of about ten sat in a chair clutching his abdomen and groaning. He had been sent for something to ease his stomach ache, and the doctor called him over, handed him the auroscope and invited him to inspect my ruined eardrum. It was effective psychotherapy, for the child’s groans instantly gave way to exclamations of astonishment and delight, and soon after he ran off whistling.

  Although we had never spoken before
, the doctor knew all about me, treated me as an old friend and was quite prepared, after telling me there was nothing whatever to be done about the ear, to settle to a chat about our common interest in the local scene. We were like Stanley and Livingstone meeting in darkest Africa, he said, among pigmies and people who still practised trial by ordeal, and believed they could turn themselves into leopards.

  ‘They can will themselves to die here,’ he said.

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ I told him.

  ‘I can tell you of a case of a man who’s doing it at this very moment. Fellow called Cabezas. He was born in this very house. After that trouble with his son he decided he didn’t want to go on living. The neighbours asked me to talk to him, but he wouldn’t see me. So now he’s dying. Of no disease known to medicine – unless you include a broken heart. I give him a month at most. Did you know Pablo Fons?’

  ‘Don Alberto took me to see him last year,’ I said. ‘The great family man.’

  ‘I signed his death certificate on Monday,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s something that could only happen here.’

  ‘He was the kind of man you’d expect to live for ever. What did he die of?’

  ‘His wife polished him off. He treated her like an animal, and she just took it quietly and waited her time. She used to be a nymphomaniac and he kept her locked up in an outhouse at night for twenty years. I can tell you this as a positive fact. You know they lost everything?’

  ‘I knew Muga took over the farm.’

  ‘He had to find something to do, so he took up dynamiting wells. It’s risky work, but the pay’s good. She used to go with him and carry the gear.’

  ‘And she pushed him down a well, I suppose. The usual thing.’