by Norman Lewis
We took a taxi out to the farm, which was situated about five miles from Ibiza town. It was decided that I would spend the day exploring the vicinity and that we would meet again that evening.
The farm had a double door like that of a fortress, a single window, but most notably a roof composed of pine-trunks layered with earth that might have been six feet thick—a typical feature of local architecture where plundering incursions from North Africa had been commonplace down the centuries. The house was in a stony field in which nothing but the occasional almond tree grew. There was something a little gimcrack and skeletal about these trees, in the branches of which in each case a single motionless crow perched on watch for lizards, although I never saw one take its prey. All the shapes in this landscape were different; even the air itself carried a dry, spiced scent. Screwing up my eyes to peer into this flinty wilderness, I tried to reconcile any part of these surroundings with my memories of Farol. Ribas was right. This was Africa. This was a different world.
In a way it would be a good place to write in, because there were no distractions apart from those you made for yourself. At intervals of an hour or two a farm cart would pass with the squeal of an axle and the crackle of the wheels over the flints. Towards sundown, cream-coloured coursers came sprinting into sight, running over the stones at speed in pursuit of flying beetles, with desolate cries of hark! hark!, before disappearing into a purple mist. I had understood that these birds only thrived in desert surroundings, but they had evidently decided that Ibiza was the next best thing.
Night fell, and Ribas was back to pick me up.
‘Did you like it?’ he asked.
‘I did. There were bats hanging from the rafters, but as it happens I’m fond of animals.’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘Solitude is all very well if stimulation exists. Now I remember that your friend said you would have liked to be near the sea, but where would you have stayed?’
‘In a fisherman’s house, I was hoping. As I did in Farol.’
‘In Farol the twentieth century has arrived. Here they are still afraid of foreigners. If you were staying a year or two you might get an old couple to adopt you. The priest would splash holy water over you and turn you into one of us.’
‘The schoolmaster in Farol thought there were villages here where the women still wore the veil.’
‘They did when I was a child,’ Ribas said, ‘but I haven’t seen one for years. They still call on Allah if anything surprises them.’
It was a dark night, brilliant with stars, and the flints in the path crunched under the rope-soled alpargatas I had taken the precaution to bring. The high-pitched barking of watch-dogs came distantly, and closer to us the nightjars rang their small bells. An oasis of light was provided by San Felipe, where there was a white church with lamps all over its façade. A flight of steps descended to the small square, and on these many motionless black cats had seated themselves. The square was enclosed by about thirty small white houses, none possessing windows. It was the scene of a local version of the paseo, with files of youths and girls of marriageable age encircling the square in opposite directions, with the girls walking on the inside.
Ribas led the way to a bar where, under an oil lamp suspended on massive chains, I found myself in an interior from Zurbarán. The Spanish painters have always revelled in the drama of still-life. This place might have been furnished for our admiration by a master of the seventeenth century with its assemblage of great-bellied pitchers, fire-scarred pots and cauldrons, a cleaver hanging on the wall and the sinister black amputations of mountain ham suspended from the beams. Above all there was the proprietor himself, half-ferocious, half-foolish, his brawny arms thrust through the sleeves of a leather jerkin, despite the softness of the night. He shuffled towards us to slide the plates of beans down the table and splash the wine into the thick glasses. Outside in the square the youth of San Felipe continued to circle. The boys were now shining torches in the faces of the girls, and there were outbursts of laughter. The priest had come out of the church and stood looking down from the top of the steps. Ribas said, ‘He’s a member of the Fascist Falange. He carries a pistol under that cassock.’ Ribas had already mentioned that he had been brought up in a Catholic orphanage, and was no lover of the church.
‘How long do you expect to be staying with us?’ Ribas asked.
‘Five years, perhaps more if all goes well. I’d spend the summers here and travel in winter. This is a trial run.’
The man who owned the bar stood close to us, and there was a touch of insanity in his grin. When I glanced in his direction he held up invitingly the flagon of bluish, local wine. ‘Think about it carefully,’ Ribas said. ‘If you stayed in this village, for example, this would await you every night after your work. This man’s beans and his wine and the paseo, in which you cannot join. Soon the priest will put the lights out and they will all go home, and only you and the cats will remain. Tomorrow we will go to look at a place I know near the sea.’
The Casa Ses Estaques Ribas found for me was some ten miles from the town of Ibiza up the eastern shore of the island. The name means House of the Mooring Posts, for part of its garden was included in the port of Santa Eulalia, but it was generally known as the House of the Turkish Princess after an oriental notability who had occupied it until six months before my arrival. This woman had lived in a state of feud with the local fishermen who used a flight of steps leading down to the water to dry their nets, and strung up their catch to be sun-dried on posts in her garden. In retaliation she had frequently bombarded them with empty gin bottles hurled from the flat roof, and in certain lights the garden still glistened, as if with a variety of gems, with the fragments of these embedded in a carpet of pine needles.
Ses Estaques had ten rooms in none of which it was possible to live with any comfort, for they were crammed with the ruins of superfluous furniture brought there by the Princess although never put to use. These included chandeliers, although electricity had not reached this part of the island, and illumination was by oil lamps like those of the Foolish Virgins in children’s illustrated bibles. The principal salon was choked with lengths of piping and there were cracked wash-basins and a demolished bath, but the only water to reach Ses Estaques was the few gravelled inches that accumulated nightly in the bottom of a well, or a supplement, complete with a frog or two, from the water-delivery tank carried on a cart. The only intact object in this limitless confusion was a huge gilt mirror. This possessed the amazing knack of shifting the human expression from elation to gloom, in an arbitrary and inexplicable way according to the angle of view.
In these surroundings I camped with enthusiasm but slowly diminishing hope in my attempts to duplicate with my new neighbours the easy familiarities of the fishermen of Farol. Although Santa Eulalia was in some ways more primitive than Farol, arithmetic was unaccountably better, so I could be of no help in totting up purchases, and I was soon to discover, as warned, that the temperament of the people of Ibiza was poles apart from the mainland of Spain. The resources of the sea here, too, were of a different kind. The forms of fishing of which I had gained some slight knowledge were little practised in this community, and the great seasonal windfalls of tunny and sardines upon which dearth or prosperity turned, did not exist. Here fishing was on a small scale and largely carried out by individuals. This was the cardinal fact that highlighted the difference in the lifestyles in the two communities. In Farol the arrival of the tunny or sardines was the prelude to spontaneous fiestas far outdoing the celebrations of Christmas and Easter. Suddenly there was surplus cash to be mopped up and the fishermen dashed off to Figueras to buy new dresses and cheap jewellery for their wives, and new outfits of all kinds for their children, although spending nothing on themselves. These were the occasions both of marriages and conceptions, although the latter were rare, and few couples produced more than a single child. In Ibiza there was no excuse for such joyous irresponsibilities, and, apart from impetuous killings
and emotional funerals, life was conducted on a relatively even plane.
The attitude towards women had hardly changed in Ibiza since the long presence on the island of the Moors. In Farol smartly dressed women sat on the beach in the cool of the mornings and evenings mending the nets. In Santa Eulalia they were not allowed to do so. The fashionable girls of Farol wore dresses copied from those of the French tourists they had seen. By contrast the country women of Ibiza had hardly arrived at the Middle Ages, and bundled in their black clothing, wore up to fourteen underskirts. Some of them carried lace handkerchiefs with which they flicked casually at their face as if to dislodge a passing male’s gaze. They were supposed, as I later learned, to dose their men with aphrodisiacs made from the innards of crawling animals. According to local gossip, in which I was soon included, the peasant women (although not the fisherfolk, who were more honourable in such matters) disposed of unwanted husbands by poisoning or other methods. A local beauty who ran a bar a few miles away was said to have got rid of hers by throwing a stick of dynamite down the well in which the man was at work.
Ribas called on me. I tunnelled into one of the rooms, dragged partially dismembered chairs into the garden and we sat at the top of the marble staircase which led down to the water. The three lowest steps were draped with nets, and boats were tied up to the pilasters at the bottom, one of which still carried a disfigured head in the Greek style. Two fishermen who paid not the slightest attention to us were baiting their hooks. A boat painted in the old illegal yellow (a colour associated with superstitious practices) flopped at anchor on the wavelets, and an enormous cat contemplated the water from its bows.
‘Is this more to your liking?’ he asked.
‘I have to admit it.’
‘This is a good place for work. Output depends on barometric pressure. Here it is always high. In the town I take a week to finish a picture. Here I may take as little as two days. Only Formentera is better.’
‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘I seem to be turning out more than usual, too.’
‘Why do you come to places like this?’
‘It used to be doctor’s orders. I had to lead an active life. Now it’s a habit.’
‘Are you making any progress with the fishermen?’
‘A little. I put up a notice in the garden saying “This place is yours to do what you like with”, but so far no result.’
‘I think they took it for sarcasm,’ he said, ‘They are conservative. Next week they’ll say bon dia, and after that who knows?’
‘One of their kids made an evil eye sign at me yesterday.’
‘It’s to be expected. This is an interesting place. They’re all members of a clan. If a girl wants to marry some nice-looking outsider she’s taken a fancy to, he has to put his case to the heads of the families. Intelligence, strength and good looks don’t come into it. The only thing he has to do is solve the riddle they set. If he fails and still insists, they’ll stone him.’
He was in a hurry to go. There was only one bus back to Ibiza town that day and there were no taxis to be had.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘the prisoner who was going to be garrotted has been given a last-minute reprieve.’ He thought over this, shaking his head. ‘Here only the innocent suffer,’ he said.
Two days later Pepa Boix came to work for me. She was a small, grey, shapeless, furiously energetic woman in her fifties, who was under supervision by the police. This was due to imprudent curiosity shown at the beginning of the Civil War when within days of the outbreak of hostilities Nationalist planes swept down to bomb civilian promenaders on the town’s sea-front one Sunday afternoon. By way of reprisal, several supporters of the fascist cause were taken to the castle to be executed by being shot through the eyes by firing squad. Spectators were allowed in to watch the spectacle, among them Pepa. All those who accepted this macabre invitation had been subjected to police harassment ever since.
Her husband had been killed in the war and now she worked in a kind of grim and fatalistic way to support a daughter and an old father who had never quite recovered from a terrible beating by fishermen who accused him of stealing fish from their pots. To add to her miseries a large area of woodland between Ses Estaques and her own village was haunted by what was accepted at all levels of society as a Carthaginian ghost, forcing her to take local advice as to sightings before making detours of a mile or two on her way to or from work.
The existence of Carthaginian tombs locally was well-known, and Carthaginian ghosts were relatively frequent in the area, regularly appearing to scare the wits out of villagers in this coastal strip. It was normal for them to take shape silently among the trees, human in form, taller than average and smiling in a way that those who came face to face with one found exceptionally terrifying. Pep Salvador, owner of the local shop, and probably the first man in Ibiza to wear gold-framed mirror spectacles, was the authority on this subject. When digging lower than usual in his cabbage patch, Salvador had discovered a tomb and taken the trouble of measuring the skeleton it contained, finding it to be the equivalent of 6 feet 3½ inches in length. He then carefully replaced the earth and replanted it with his seedling potatoes. I did not presume to ask what became of the grave-furniture such burials could be expected to include. It was an episode and a subject that would have entranced Oliver Myers, who was by this time lecturing in Nigeria. I wrote to urge him to come to Ibiza, but for one reason or another the visit had to be put off and never took place.
Ribas showed no surprise at my mention of the ghosts. ‘There are a number in the town in the neighbourhood of the Carthaginian necropolis,’ he said, ‘but what with the traffic and the building that goes on these days they tend to be overlooked.’ We sat on our ruined chairs watching the sea. Thirty yards away a flying fish glittered briefly in space before splashing back. In the distance the unearthly sound of a conch shell being blown announced the landing of a new catch. An old woman, sepulchral in black, waved her arms and shrilled high-pitched, birdlike sounds calling her chickens to be fed.
Now that the Carthaginians had come up, Ribas thought we should lose no time in making a trip to Cala San Vicente, to the cave-shrine Es Cuyerám which had been rediscovered then ransacked by a German a matter of weeks before my arrival. ‘They were peddling statuettes of the goddess in the streets of Ibiza town for two hundred pesetas a time,’ Ribas said. ‘Eighteen times the price of a bottle of beer. We ought to see the place before more damage is done. We could make an early start and get there in the day.’
We set out on our walk next morning soon after dawn with three hours’ easy going along the coast before the turn-off inland to San Carlos. The easy part was very beautiful and enlightening, too; in the presence of Ribas, I was almost able to borrow the vision of a painter, and I saw the most alluring of all seas as never before. I realised that, in some settings, it could be even wine-red, as in antiquity. Inland the landscape was faded and sun-sapped, with bleak, windowless houses, the wind ripping at scarecrows nailed to crosses, the scorched remnants of crops, and then hunting dogs with pink eyes and snouts dragging at the heavy logs that frustrated them in their attacks on chickens and cats.
‘Here’, said Ribas, ‘the sickness from which all people suffer is boredom. There is nothing in their heads. They bring up a single child, then they settle to await death. In uneventful lives they will go to any extreme to create an incident. The husband murders a stranger. The wife seduces the priest.’ He shook his head. ‘Fourteen black petticoats hide the most sensual of all bodies.’
San Carlos, capital of the region, was at this time in a state of feud with its neighbours, including Santa Eulalia. It was the home-town of the vendetta, and in consequence a regular supplier, as Pepa Boix had assured me, of sacrificial victims for the garrotte on the football field of Ibiza town. San Carlos was a tidy place: clean streets, white cubic houses with closely barred windows, and a patch of municipal garden in which the heads of sunflowers slowly gyrated. Ribas pointed out a tall building wit
h a flat roof in its centre from which in the last month a young man on the run had sniped at and wounded three guardias before making his escape.
This being a Sunday, the youth and beauty of the town were parading in the square, the young men in freshly laundered cottons and the girls in country-style outfits covering them from their throats to their toes. I was steered into the village bar, which had a picture of Christ at one end and a picture of Franco at the other. It was bisected by a long counter on which were ranged about thirty tumblers filled with a milky fluid. One at a time in orderly fashion, spruce young men of the kind we had seen in the square passed down the counter, took up a glass in the left hand and emptied it quickly and in silence. In each case the shirt sleeve of the right arm had been rolled up, and the arm extended across the bar. This was taken in the grasp of a young woman behind the counter with a hypodermic syringe who administered an injection, waved the man on and gestured to the next in line to come forward. No-one spoke.
Ribas, who had been contentedly sketching this scene, was now at my elbow with his explanation. Male strength was achieved and preserved in this manner, he said. ‘In this way they protect their virility and sense of aggression.’
‘And what’s in the syringes?’ I asked.
‘Ah, that now. Nothing more than vitamins.’
The girl who had plunged the needle with apparent indifference into a couple of dozen arms had dismissed the last of her customers, and now pointed the syringe invitingly in our direction and smiled tolerantly when we shook our heads.
