Voices of the Old Sea

by Norman Lewis

  ‘No, she threw a stick of dynamite down while he was working. Or so they say. These things can never be proved.’

  ‘What did you put on the certificate?’

  The doctor spread his hands and twinkled. ‘Accidental death,’ he said. ‘The police don’t like to be bothered with borderline cases. Who can blame them?’

  Apart from token sorties by the big boats undertaken to reaffirm the fishermen’s belief in their true purpose and destiny, little fishing was done now except by one or two hard-core specialists, working singly or in pairs. Men such as my neighbour Juan, and the crab-eating Pujols – with whom I worked from this time on – not only fished for a living, but were addicts and enthusiasts of their profession, and the many skills it drew upon. When they were tired of the routine with the palangres or the nets, they took days off to fish with the raï, or illegally at night with the trident and a torch. Accompanying them on such expeditions, I learned something, caught nothing, but shared to the full in their excitement.

  Juan and Pujols were adventurers, full of curiosity. They could always have rowed out and fished within a mile or two of shore and left it at that, but something lured them on to explore the deep and uncharted waters which yielded surprises in plenty, but little in the way of extra profit. The sea had its sierras, its ravines and its great divides, and Juan and Pujols explored its secret geography just as their forebears had explored new continents, sounding great depths with their nets and hooks, never exhausting their capacity for wonder at the deep-sea monsters they occasionally caught.

  There had never been much money in fishing of this kind, and now there was less. A number of fish, as the Grandmother had made clear – including such innocent varieties as rays of all kinds (skate) and eels – came under some taboo or other, and could not be sold at any price, and nothing was regarded as edible in Farol if it was not recognisable. Many of the fish taken in expeditions with Juan or with Pujols were not – they were strange goggle-eyed scowling creatures, some with heads like the fronts of the very first motor cars, that had come to the end of their evolutionary journey millions of years ago, perfectly adapted now to a crevice in near-darkness at the bottom of the ocean. The flesh of such fish, able to withstand pressure that bruised and dented wooden components in Pujols’ nets, was almost incredibly tough, but made exquisite soup, as I had learned from Carmela, who possessed no reservations of any kind where food was concerned.

  Pujols was glad of my company and my assistance because his brother was one of those who had gone off to join the Palamos smuggling fleet, and he could not handle his large net without assistance. The recent changes in the lifestyle of the village had brought its compensations for Pujols. His diet of raw crabs, originally prescribed by the Curandero who believed him to be suffering from tuberculosis, had had the side effect – or so he thought – of increasing his libido, with its attendant problems following the loss of Sa Cordovesa and Maria Cabritas. Now, with the advent of several lively and unattached ladies from the north, things were beginning to look up again. Although cadaverous and hollow-chested, Pujols remained an imposing man, and shortly after my return, a relationship developed with a buxom Swede who had accompanied him on several trips to secluded beaches.

  While telling me of this success he groped in his pocket, and pulled out a small crab, tore off a leg and began to chew, inadvertently bespattering both of us a moment later with its fragments as he was racked by a fit of coughing.

  ‘Do you do that when she’s with you?’ I asked, as Pujols replaced the lost leg with another. ‘I mean chew raw crabs?’

  ‘Why? Shouldn’t I?’

  ‘You never know with women,’ I said. ‘They can be funny creatures.’

  ‘She doesn’t object,’ Pujols said. ‘I explained to her I have to eat crabs for my health, and she was very understanding. Foreign ladies seem to be about the bodily needs.’

  Chapter Five

  A T SIX-THIRTY EVERY MORNING the Alcalde put out a couple of tables for the early risers, and by a quarter to seven, as usual, I was seated and ready for the exquisite experience of coffee from the finest of newly ground black-market beans on the fresh, morning palate.

  The first days of autumn had begun to pour colour back into the surroundings, speckling the greyish glitter of the beach with soft, yellow highlights, and revarnishing the purple of the boats. Green and indigo medallions the sun could no longer burn away floated on the sea’s surface, marking the presence of weed or a twist of currents in the depths.

  The coffee came, unfolding its perfume against the Farol background odour of mature sewage. The old chairs set out in the morning for such regulars as myself sent their spindly, noble shadows down the street. A few villagers appeared, walking and talking very softly as if still overshadowed by the experience of sleep. The canary cages were being put out, each shaded by a canopy woven from grass. The seafront was quieter than it had been in the early morning. A year before, Maria Cabritas would have passed at this hour, prodding her goats along with one of her many umbrellas on their way to the scrawny pasturage offered by the cliff ledges. A year before, the boats would have been coming in, and the nets spread out to be mended on the beach. Now the fishermen slept through the barren nights, and their work by day, they said, deprived them of the bodily rhythm of exhaustion and recovery to which they had become accustomed. On this morning I noticed for the first time that there appeared to be far fewer cats about than in the past, then I remembered the sinister rumours of death squads at work at night.

  At seven-fifteen or thereabouts, the church bell clanked a half-dozen times, and a few minutes later I saw Don Ignacio sneak out of a side door of the building and make off, having done his duty for the day. There followed a short interval of silence broken only by the sound of the pebbles shifted by the tide, then I heard the unmistakeable puttering of Don Alberto’s Levis, and in a moment, turning the corner at the far end of the street, he came into view, perched, as it always seemed, precariously on his machine, looking at that distance like a simple Meccano model.

  He stopped a few yards away, dismounted, put his motorcycle on the stand, and joined me at the table. ‘I felt sure I’d find you here,’ he said. ‘I got in yesterday.’ He was trembling as he always did for the first few moments from the vibration of the worn two-stroke engine, but clearly in excellent form.

  ‘What news of Gloria, Don Alberto?’

  The Alcalde brought his coffee and Don Alberto took a sip, leaving a small, vivacious stain on the cup’s rim. He gasped his appreciation, then rearranged the cup, saucer and spoon for a better display of the treacly morning reflections.

  ‘We went to Madrid,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It was her idea, but it turned out a success. Took us out of ourselves. I was going stale in this place. She was too. Do you know Madrid?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

  ‘You should go there. It’s not to be missed. The air’s different. The climate’s different. The people are different. It’s a civilised place where you can have a drink and listen to good music. Madrid refreshes the soul. It did us a world of good.’

  ‘Don Ignacio mentioned that Gloria hadn’t been well. I imagine she’s her old self again.’

  ‘No, she died last month. We went out for a night on the town, and she had a heart attack in the cab on her way home.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Very sorry indeed.’

  ‘She was rather under the weather when we left, but she brightened up as soon as we got there. The fact of the matter is, we both overdid it. One tends to overestimate one’s powers. It was as good a way to go as any.’

  I nodded, remembering with sorrow the terrible delay the long dark years of waiting death had imposed on the old woman.

  ‘It was impossible to imagine La Vieja would ever depart this world,’ Don Alberto said. ‘I found it hard to get used to the fact that she was no longer there. It made me take stock of my life and come to a decision as to what was ess
ential and what could be done without. All this land of mine, for example, I thought. I only hold it in trust. I don’t really own it. How can anyone own mountains, rivers, trees? If anything it owns me. I decided it was about time that the people I spent most of my life looking after stood on their own feet. Let them carry the responsibility, I said to myself. I made a decision on the spot. Remember those seven peons of mine who came to see me that day you were there?’

  ‘Very well indeed.’

  ‘They were the ones who’d stood by me, I thought. Why not turn the land over to them? They’d probably be just as happy to have it as I would be to get rid of it. I went to one of Madrid’s best lawyers to discuss with him how these things are best done, and we got the preliminaries under way. You’d be astonished if I told you how complicated it is to stop being a landowner. Have you by any chance been anywhere near my house in the past few months?’

  ‘I called over there to see if anyone had news of you a couple of weeks ago. There didn’t seem to be much going on.’

  ‘There wasn’t,’ Don Alberto said. ‘I left a steward in charge of the place but he never bothered to go there. My peons charged up their wages for clearing and ditching, ploughing, sowing the crops, pruning and spraying the vines, and the steward paid out. He paid out for the seed that wasn’t sown, a pump for a well that had dried out, and for veterinary treatment for animals I never possessed. They must have vaccinated every cow in the province and put it down to my account.’

  ‘In other words you were taken for a ride.’

  ‘For some reason or other my peons took it into their heads I wasn’t coming back. Perhaps someone told them I wasn’t. I happened to arrive at the very moment when two of them were busily taking down one of the outhouses and carting the stones away. When I asked them what they were doing they said, “The place was falling down, anyhow.”’

  ‘What are you going to do about it, Don Alberto?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘and they know it. Corruption doesn’t come naturally to the poor, as it does to the rich. The people hereabouts have always been cruel, mean and litigious, but they were never corrupt until those they looked to for an example set them one. You see corruption wherever you look these days. You breathe it in with the air. It’s not something you whisper about any more. It’s accepted. Respectable. How can I really blame my peons for cheating me, when cheating’s become a game everybody plays at? At the moment they’re picking up potatoes for Muga, and I’m left with 200 caballerías of land I don’t want, and no one to give it to.’

  ‘You could make a fresh start. Hire labour in Figueras and go in for mechanisation.’

  ‘I wouldn’t even dream of it,’ Don Alberto said. ‘I prefer to let it go. When my ancestors got their hands on this land by whatever means they did, it was a beautiful place. It may take a decade to recover, more, because they cut down too many trees – but in the end it will. They can turn it into a national park if they like, but no one will ever grow potatoes on it. There used to be wild goats up in the hills in my father’s day. Perhaps they’ll come back.’

  Some scrounging sparrows alighted on the table and Don Alberto watched with affection as they pecked at the husk he broke up for them. Suddenly the day had begun in earnest. The shopkeeper a few yards further on unbolted his door with a great rattling of iron and lumbered into sight carrying the table on which he would set out his newly acquired display of stuffed Pyrenean weasels, believed everywhere in Spain to be irresistible as tourist souvenirs. Each weasel was rapped sharply on the wooden edge to dislodge the tiny silverfish moths its fur harboured, then wired to a length of branch nailed to the table top in a characteristically aggressive posture. Next door on our left, the butcher’s wife took down the shutters on a window display of plaster piglets, hygienic little pseudo-corpses, each throat slashed and reddened with a simulated wound. Someone had suggested to her that she should change the title of her business – Carnicería – to make it more comprehensible to foreigners, and her signboard now read ‘Carnage’. Juan’s Francesca, her face sharpened, as it seemed to me, with new purpose, pedalled past on a brand-new bicycle garnished with all the trimmings that could be bought for it. As a result of a Figueras schooling she was the only person in the village apart from the Alcalde able to cope with simple arithmetic, and had been appointed bookkeeper to the Muga enterprises. Sebastian followed her almost at a trot. He stopped to reach for our hands, sat to gulp down a coffee, got up again and pulled me after him, and we walked a few yards together out of earshot of Don Alberto. ‘I need your advice,’ he said. ‘I’ve been asked to sign a contract. Everybody has.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s for a year from the first of September. It puts paid to our plans. Muga says he’s invested money in our training, and he wants to be sure he gets it back.’

  ‘You could say no, I suppose.’

  ‘I’d be back on 28 pesetas a day. At the moment I average 150. Our furniture’s on credit, and if we leave the chalet we’ve nowhere to go.’

  ‘Then you’ve no alternative. You have to sign.’

  ‘I can see that,’ Sebastian said. ‘I just wanted to talk to someone. One more year. It’s a bit like facing a prison stretch.’

  I clapped him on the back. ‘We’ll go to Espalmador the year after next. The fish will still be there.’

  ‘You really mean it, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll be something to look forward to.’

  He broke off for a moment, and we listened to the sweet solemn hooting of a conch shell blown twice, distantly. ‘Someone bringing in fish,’ Sebastian said. ‘That’s something I haven’t heard for weeks.’

  ‘Do they give you any time off?’ I asked.

  ‘Sunday afternoons, if I ask.’

  ‘Let’s go calamar fishing,’ I said, ‘and talk about old times.’

  We clasped each other’s shoulders, and Sebastian dashed off, nearly colliding with Don Ignacio who had been hurrying to join us. He and Don Alberto had spent the previous evening together, locked in discussions largely concerned with the past, but a bright morning steered them back to present times. Barros was inevitably dragged in to support the new line both had taken. ‘Don’t force me to listen to people who tell you yesterday was better than today,’ Don Alberto said, and Don Ignacio nodded his agreement.

  ‘Does it ever occur to you that we’re dinosaurs?’ Don Alberto asked him. ‘Creatures of the past? Could we be so soaked in prejudice that we can’t accept the virtue of change of any kind?’

  Don Ignacio smiled. ‘When you and I are gone people may look back on this as a golden age. As Barros says, “Why speak of truth or lies? It all depends on the colour of the glass we look through.” I must apologise for quoting a heretic once again.’

  We had shifted our chairs so that the village and its invasive barbarities were at our back. The sea view was as it always had been at the beginning of any good autumn day, full of the tricks of light and of substance, the semblance of fire in the rocks, the pines tufting sashes of morning mist, the slow leaden curl of water on the grey beach. ‘Here comes Juan with his boat,’ Don Alberto said. ‘Let’s go and see what he’s caught.’

  Don Ignacio got up to join us, then sat down again, regretfully. ‘I was forgetting I wouldn’t be welcome,’ he said. ‘Tell me all about it.’

  Don Alberto and I walked down to the beach. By the time we had surmounted the obstacles of Muga’s road and wall Juan had pulled up the boat and lifted out his catch. He looked up and waved. ‘You didn’t show up this morning,’ he said to me.

  ‘Sorry, I overslept. I’ll come tomorrow.’

  The fish were arranged like over-elaborate, watery jewels in the shallow baskets. He had caught them in a spirit of adventure at great depth, in what he called a hole in the sea. Their colours were strong and dark, the deepest of blues and yellows and reds. They had morose, distraught expressions, and the heads of dogs and bulls. Eyes, r
eleased from the pressure of the depths, bulged hugely, and a few mouths still opened and closed in a thin frothing of black blood.

  ‘No sale for them any more,’ Juan said. ‘The foreigners run away when they see them.’

  ‘What do you do with them, then?’ Don Alberto asked.

  ‘Give them away to my friends. Help yourself.’

  ‘Thank you, but I eat very little. Why go on fishing at all if there’s nothing in it for you?’

  ‘I have to keep my hand in for the better times to come,’ Juan told him.

  A few minutes later we rejoined Don Ignacio, and Don Alberto reported what had been said. ‘When he began to talk about good times ahead, I could hardly stop myself from telling him, “Make the best of it, these are the good times.”’

  ‘I’m glad you restrained yourself,’ the priest said. ‘Sometimes it is necessary to believe things that are absurd. When an illusion dies, a hope is born. He has as much right to his hope as we to our resignation.’

  About the Author

  Norman Lewis’s early childhood, as recalled in Jackdaw Cake (1985), was spent partly with his Welsh spiritualist parents in Enfield, North London, and partly with his eccentric aunts in Wales. Forgoing a place at university for lack of funds, he used the income from wedding photography and various petty trading to finance travels to Spain, Italy and the Balkans, before being approached by the Colonial Office to spy for them with his camera in Yemen.

  He moved to Cuba in 1939, but was recalled for duty in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War. It was from this that Norman Lewis’s masterpiece, Naples ’44, emerged, a resurrection of his wartime diary only finally published in 1978.

  Before that came a number of novels and travel books, notably A Dragon Apparent (1951) and Golden Earth (1952), both of which were best sellers in their day. His novel The Volcanoes Above Us, based on personal experiences in Central America, sold six million copies in paperback in Russia and The Honoured Society (1964), a non-fiction study of the Sicilian Mafia, was serialised in six instalments by the New Yorker.