by Norman Lewis
Apart from a reluctance to meddle with the workings of destiny, as in the case of the lepers, I came to see the Burmese as possibly the most generous people on earth, and indeed liberality ranks first among the ‘ten shining enlightenments’ of their beliefs. Constantly I was the beneficiary of their open-handedness. In the beginning it may have been a matter of shrewd investment in the incarnation stakes, but by now I was convinced it had become a national habit. As my friend with the beautiful sister had assured me, ‘If you are hungry you may go up to the first man you meet and tell him that you have not eaten, and he will give you food.’ It was inevitable that he should add the rider, ‘Thus he will be acquiring virtue,’ but I brushed the excuse aside. Who, unless he has visited Burma, can ever have had a taxi-driver smilingly return a tip? Once in my case this renunciation was followed by the gift of an edible bird’s nest—a sought-after product of the particular area.
In the matter of hospitality there was the case of Tin Maung with whom I travelled by lorry to Lashio, close to the Chinese frontier. There was an aroma about him of mysterious power, and, piecing together biographical snippets, I suspected him of having been involved with a Shan separatist movement backed by the Japanese. In Lashio there was nowhere to stay, so he took me to his family house in which his old father, his mother and two younger brothers lived in two rooms. Like most of the Burmese I met, Tin Maung was imperturbable. He had been away from home for a year, and when the lorry delivered us at his garden gate, the first news he was given after the calm ritual of his reception, was that the third brother had been killed by bandits. This was delivered by his father, U Thein Zan, while the two surviving brothers took up a kowtowing position, and the old mother, covering her face, retired into the doorway of the house. Tin Maung listened in silence, nodded twice than took off one of the four silver rings he wore on his right hand and placed it on the left. A minute passed slowly and no-one spoke. Tin Maung then asked, ‘Have you put up a tablet for him in the shrine?’ U Thein Zan said, ‘You are now of age. We were waiting for you.’ We then went into the house together.
They all slept in the same bed, which would be required now to accommodate five persons—six if I were to be included, as they insisted. Tin Maung, a man of the world, would have none of this and, managing to borrow a camp bed from a neighbour, installed me in the second room. It was a solution the dear old mother completely failed to understand and she complained at length at the family’s affront to good manners, and the decadence of the times. Even more impressive in the sphere of Buddhist tolerance was the example of U Thein Zan, who was a lay preacher at all the Lashio pagodas. The drinking of alcohol came close to a deadly sin in such an environment, but the old man trudged down to the nearest stall-owner’s house and came back with a pint of country spirits. ‘For your friend, who has now become my son,’ he said to Tin Maung, handing it over. ‘He is a foreigner so he may drink. I know that you will drink too, but I still do not despair of your salvation.’
Tin Maung thought I should see something of the Shan country while I stayed in their house, and paid daily visits to the market in search of a lorry leaving for Nam Hkam. He first offered as a typical local curiosity a pious old man who had willed his body to the vultures. We drank tea with him and we were then introduced to his legatees. Having been a wood carver, he had fitted up perches for them carved with legendary figures in his garden, where he said they could conveniently keep an eye on him while waiting for their inheritance to come through.
Our next trip was a sentimental visit to the spot where, having captured and condemned him to death, the Chinese tried unsuccessfully to hang Tin Maung from a tree. The executioners were so weak from starvation and sickness that although they could haul him off his feet they could not keep him in the air, and he eventually tore the rope out of their hands and escaped.
I spent a week with these people and grew much attached to them, and when I left them it was with regret.
I returned in early 1952 to depressing news. To cross the Burmese frontier was to pass behind a curtain excluding all news of the outside world. In Rangoon a letter had been waiting for a month to inform me that, although I had left her in fairly good health and in good hands, my mother had suddenly died. In other directions, too, the news was not good. Ernesto Corvaja, taxed probably with the problem of coping with life in his ruined house, had suffered a fatal heart attack. Eugene had married a wife for whom Maria did not care and the couple had moved away, leaving her alone.
Although the journeys in Indo-China had little physical ill-effect, Burma had taken its toll, for I was compelled sometimes to eat what a western stomach hardly recognised as food, and a routine attack of malaria left its debilitating effect. On my return to Rangoon I found I had lost a stone in weight and, taking a room in the Strand Hotel, I went to bed for a week before tackling the journey home. Medical advice back in England called for a process of recuperation. For this I decided to look for an unspoiled village on the Spanish coast where I could establish a summer headquarters, to which I would return to write books after my winter travels, as well as to fish, swim and settle in tranquillity in the mild, Mediterranean sun.
Having shaken off the malaria, I took a train to the South of France, followed by a succession of local buses through Catalonia down what is now known as the Costa Brava, and over roads left unrepaired for nearly a decade. The Riviera-style development of the Mediterranean coasts of France and Italy had not taken place here. The beaches were empty and the holiday crowds were still to arrive. Tiny fishing villages remained roughly as they had been for centuries in full possession of the charm of the past.
In the semi-medieval town of Figueras I discussed with a hotel owner the project I had in mind. At Figueras main roads came to an end and those that took over, leading down to the sea, hardly improved on cart tracks as they wound their precipitous way through the hills. The owner, a student of local history and customs, was excited by my plan to pick the least accessible of the coastal villages and live in it for a year or two. A wonderful experience, he thought, and one he would dearly have loved to share with me. All five villages in the vicinity maintained minimal contact not only with the outside world, but also with each other, and all their customs were different. In his father’s day, he said, most of the people who were born, lived and died in the five villages by the sea had never set foot outside them, and there were still quite a few who took little interest in anything beyond the view from their narrow windows over the sea. He could see one possible obstacle to my proposed investigation into the life of the Spanish past, which was the villagers’ notorious mistrust, if not dislike, of strangers. He feared that even if I could find somewhere to live I could expect to be kept at arm’s length. All these people were Catalan speakers, too, and they resented being spoken to in Spanish. Did I feel like tackling the language? Not quite yet, at least, I told him.
With the Burma book under way I left England in early spring heading for Farol, described by my hotel-owner friend as the most isolated, self-sufficient and custom-bound of the five villages. I drove a hired car down the excruciating road to the coast, round twenty or thirty hairpin bends, and within a half mile of my objective was obliged to leave it at a bridge that had collapsed.
Farol was what a gifted child with paintbox and chalks and the fresh vision of childhood would make of such a fishing village; a gap in the cliffs with a line-up of almost windowless houses, coloured washing on flat roofs, a scattering of black goats, a church tower with a stork’s nest, yellow boats pulled up on the beach, and pairs of women in bright frocks mending nets. Far from suggesting any hostility to the outside world, there was a subdued gaiety in this scene. I found a bar tended by a brown-faced, lively girl who might even have been happy at the sight of a new face, and, Catalan or not, chatted pleasantly enough in Spanish. I risked asking her if there was anywhere to stay, and she told me there was a fonda, making dear by her expression that she didn’t think much of the place. I went there and stayed for a
few days. It was kept by two silent brothers and I was the first guest for a month. They kept sixteen cats under the room in which I slept, and after exposure to the odours that seeped through the floor, I went back to Lola in the bar, explained my plight and she promised to do what she could to find a room in one of the village houses.
My friend in Figueras had been wholly wrong about the attitudes of the people of Farol, for I was handled from the beginning with polished courtesy. By this time I was on easy speaking terms with the fishermen who frequented the bar; they astounded me by their habit of breaking into bland verse after a glass or two of coarse wine. Although no comment was made on the subject I believe that they were mystified by the purpose of my visit, and by my ability to live—as they saw it—without work.
Life, through the shortages inherited from the war, was hard although evidently satisfying. Rationing was severe, and applied even to the basic diet of bread and olive oil. There was no meat, and the normally edible parts of a chicken were reserved for the young, the old, and the sick, the head, innards and feet going into Sunday stews. All marketable fish went to Figueras but certain kinds that lived off seaweed, for which there was no commercial demand, were eaten by the villagers, as were the heads and the tails of the larger fish.
Apart from a part-time schoolmaster, the shopkeeper, a priest and the Civil Guard, the whole of this community was engaged directly or indirectly in fishing, and most of the menfolk in strenuous and often dangerous activities at sea. My hope was to come closer to these people, persuading them to exchange the courtesies owing to a guest for the relaxed rough and tumble of a relationship between friends. The approach to this end, I thought, might be through making myself in some way useful, and an opportunity arose when I noticed how difficult for them the normal transactions of daily life could be through an inability to cope with arithmetic. Since nobody could add up or multiply, shopping for a number of small purchases became a complex and time-consuming process. I therefore made visits to the village shop in the busy morning hours and was available to tot up sums. Following this, one of the senior fishermen asked me to check the agreed figures paid by the wholesaler of their fish, and I was able to put an end to certain irregularities, to the general satisfaction. It was possibly by sheer chance that within days of this success Lola announced that she had found a room for me in a village house. From this time on I felt entitled to consider myself an honorary villager, and retained this status during the summer months I spent in Farol over the next two years.
To be absorbed in the life of an old-style Spanish fishing village called for unquestioning respect for a catalogue of engrained customs and superstitions. Chief of these were certain prohibitions, including the wearing of leather shoes or any other article made of leather in a boat. The superstitions could sometimes seem absurd. In Farol, for example, great stress was laid by line-fishermen on the type of hook they employed, which in design resembled exactly those found in graves excavated at the ancient Roman colony of Ampurias. The only difference between the Roman hook and the modern one was that in the first case the hook was fastened to the line by tying it round a neck in the haft, whereas in the latter an eye-hole replaced the neck, and the line was tied through this. About the time of my arrival supplies of the Roman-style hooks had run out. Only the modern kind were to be had, and the fishermen were quick to attribute to this a decline in their catches. It was of much relief to them when I made the fairly short trip across the French frontier and loaded up with the old-style hook, still to be found in France.
With the distribution of the hooks all the tests of acceptability had been passed. The inhibitions of respect had been put aside and I could be lightly mocked, for example, for an excessive esteem for punctuality, seen in southern countries as a nervous disorder to which the British are susceptible. Especially after a heavy day with the nets followed by a porón of scarifying wine, the fishermen used grand language, sometimes pillaging lines from such bards as Luis de Gongora, which in translation carried once in a while an even Shakespearian twist. When the great moment came for the invitation to join the crew of a fishing boat, a small ceremony was to be expected. All those concerned downed a glass of palo, the sickly local equivalent of champagne, and there was some boasting about the size of past catches and those to come. My neighbour Francisco then took my arm and we made for the boats. With a sweeping gesture of dismissal he threw down a challenge to a notably stiffening breeze, ‘Let us confront the sea together.’
What was on offer was an apprenticeship in the long and tedious processes of preparing a boat for a night’s fishing, to be followed at dawn by anticlimax, or at most the small and erratic triumphs of the catch. Nevertheless I could think of no honour and no prospect that had ever delighted me more.
The days spent in Farol were among the best in my life, and it seemed to me that I had stumbled upon a little community that in its geographical isolation had arrived at one of the most pleasant forms of development. Its enclosure in an opening in low cliffs had helped to exclude the village from the violent incursions of the past, and dense cork-oak forests in the rear added to this protection. A fast-running river under the collapsed bridge on the village outskirts contained many trout in which the villagers showed not the slightest interest. The sea in the vicinity was of extreme clarity, and with a face-mask in use large and uncommon fish were to be seen, while an old cannon that must have fallen from a ship lay thirty yards or so from the beach in twenty feet of water and remarkably free from marine encrustation.
Life in Farol was both strenuous and calm. Imperturbably the fishermen rowed their boats in light or heavy seas. Hardly any could swim and on average one a year was drowned (apart from the occasional man alone in his boat carried away by a storm to be seen no more). There was a single policeman and a purely nominal alcalde, but otherwise Farol was free of state control. A charming physician known as Doctor Seduction looked in from time to time with a supply of ‘lung syrup’ for coughs and strong disinfectant for suppurating wounds. The village maintained its aged poor in a state of dignity, spending more on their funerals than on the cost of their upkeep for a year. Once a year, at the height of the tunny fishing season, a clairvoyant known as the curandero arrived from the Pyrenees to settle inheritance disputes and provide wives with birth-control devices made from sponges. His main service was to direct the activities of the fishing fleet which, as he explained to me in a most agreeable fashion, he did by the use of astral charts and ‘intimations’. He was always successful, and suddenly and briefly the village was awash with money, to be squandered with all possible speed in readiness for a return to the spartan living and the drives of necessity to be accepted as normal in the life of this village.
I filled notebooks with jottings about the life of a community, seen at first as so deceptively simple but which under the skin was complicated and subtle. Years later I went back to the contents of the Farol notebooks and published an account of the happy adventures of those days. The title was taken from something like a statement of faith made by an old fisherman when news filtered through that a great part of the village of Farol was about to be developed. I asked this man how these changes and others that had already taken place were likely to affect his future. To this he replied, ‘How can anyone say? One thing is certain, we have always been here, and whatever happens, we shall remain, listening to the Voices of the Old Sea.’
While still unaware of these unfortunate encroachments, I had begun to form a vision of arranging my life so as to be able to spend every summer in Farol. I had my eye on a splendid shack which had once been occupied by an aristocratic hermit and now mouldered peacefully within feet of the high tide, and I spoke about this to Don Federigo, the part-time schoolmaster who spouted Lope de Vega at every opportunity, although he was weak on simple arithmetic.
‘You’re too late, he said. ‘It’s to be pulled down.’
‘But why?’
‘They’re clearing up the village before the development.’
‘I don’t understand. There’s nothing to be developed here,’ I said. ‘Only the sea.’
‘That’s just the point. There’s big money in the sea. I’ve had a sneak view of the plans for the urbanisation they’ve just passed.
A Barcelona firm has bought half the village. They’re building a resort with forty villas and a golf course, five hotels, possibly a go-kart track, and a marine promenade with eucalyptus trees.’
‘So the shack has to go?’
‘They’re putting a car park there.’
‘How long will it be before this happens?’ I asked.
‘They start work in the autumn. It’s to be finished in about two years.’
‘What’s to happen to the fishermen?’ I asked.
‘There won’t be any,’ Don Federigo said. ‘The trawlers from Barcelona will fish here next year. They use radar. Our fishermen will be rehoused. They’ll make ten times the money taking foreigners on boat trips.’
‘You know my problem,’ I said. ‘I need peace and quiet to work. Anywhere else you can recommend if the worst comes to the worst?’
‘Not along this coast,’ he said. ‘Everything is out. What you have to do is look for a place where there’s no electricity and the water from the river plus frogs is brought round in a tank on a cart. I’m thinking about Ibiza. I was offered a job there once, but I changed my mind when I saw the place. At this moment it’s just what you’re looking for, but you’ll have to hurry. They’re building an airport, and as soon as that’s opened it will go the same way as this. Anyway, why not give it a try? They’re like Africans. Some of the women up in the mountains still wear veils. The plane will soon put a stop to all that.’
‘When you say they start work here in the autumn, what exactly will they be doing?’ I asked.
‘Logically they’d be making up the road and rebuilding the bridge which has to come first.’
