Salt Water

by Josep Pla

  “What’s the weather like?” I ask.

  “A southwesterly breeze, just what we need for our trip. Up you get! And hurry up! Don’t make me suffer anymore…”

  Our local braggarts are always on edge, plagued by the discomfort others cause.

  “So where is it you want to go?”

  “We should go to France along the coast, in the Prim boys’ sailing dinghy. I’ve organized everything, and the dinghy’s all ready to launch off from El Canadell beach. Isn’t that what we agreed the last time we spoke?”

  “You do realize the war isn’t over yet?” I ask, looking serious.

  “Forget about wars. Who is going to worry about us? Do no evil, hear no evil. Besides, we’ve got to teach people a lesson, we’ve got to create a stir.”

  People spend their lives trying to create stirs.

  “What lesson are we poor souls supposed to teach? Don’t you start trying to teach people a thing or two…”

  “We have to! We have to show them you can sail and row to France. Now everybody uses motorboats, they’re all cocky daredevils. When they pass Aigua-Xelida at night, their revving disturbs me. They ruin my shut-eye…We have to show them what’s what. The Prim boys’ dinghy is small, it’s twenty-one hands, but it’s a good sailer. I’ve fitted out the boom, hoisted the sail, and nothing will hold us back.”

  “And what’s the weather forecast?”

  * * *

  —

  “I’ve got the calendar in my bag. I just bought it in the market.”

  * * *

  —

  “What earthly use is the forecast in a calendar?”

  “But if you don’t believe the calendar, what can we believe?”

  “And we’ve got the right papers?”

  “I’ve got my skipper’s…”

  “Yes, but that is a very limited permit.”

  “As limited as they come. Just for line fishing opposite where I live.”

  “So you’re intending to go to France without any papers, just because you feel like it…”

  “That’s right, as we always have…”

  “It’s really tempting to sail like that, without any papers…” I reply, as if I’m talking to myself. “It’s worth a try.”

  “I knew you’d back me…” he says gruffly, in a deeply serious tone of voice.

  By the seaside Hermós uses the informal “tu” with everyone – except for Donya Rosa Barris, whom he has waited upon all these years. A mile or so inland, he uses the formal “vostè” all the time. I note that though we’re in the latter situation, he uses “tu” with me, a sign of his trust in me.

  After lunch, we hire a cart to take my things to El Canadell: a mattress, blankets, a bag with the necessary clothing and toiletries. Hermós and I walk slowly behind the cart, as if we’re off for a spot of sunbathing. It is a gentle, sunny, delightful afternoon. The earth’s contours seem to vibrate in the warm air.

  The moment we reach the beach, we load everything on board: we carry on mattresses, blankets, a stove, a sack of coal, potatoes, demijohns of wine and oil, a crate with plates, pots and pans, cutlery and a grill. We also embark four paternoster lines and the basket with the cast net. In winter Hermós never forgets this net, which is the color of vine stalks. We also load on a sack containing two live chickens. Because they can’t keep still, there’s a danger the sack might fall into the water, Hermós loses patience. He stuns them with quick blows from the tiller. The sack goes quiet and the chickens are still.

  “You’ve probably killed them…” I say, taken aback.

  “I only gave them a clout…” he says, carrying on working. “They’ll taste even better. Don’t start crying over all the dead chickens you’ve eaten…”

  We push the boat out, and by the time we go to lock in our oars, El Canadell is completely deserted. The place is enjoying an autumnal slumber. The September sun splashes streaks of orange over the windows of its empty houses. The boat is heavily laden and floating too low in the water. As we leave the bay, old Palet’s cart crosses El Canadell. Old Palet is a fierce-looking, bearded countryman, with a vicious temper. We can see him standing over his cart: one hand scratching his beard, the other gripping his horse’s reins.

  “I wish I’d not seen him at this time of day…” says Hermós, turning away.

  “Are you superstitious?”

  “Don’t you start with them strange words…I’ve never liked men with beards…”

  “Lots of gentlemen sport beards…”

  “Lots of gentlemen aren’t worth a cent!”

  A few oar strokes and we reach Torre Point outside Calella. A miserable, moribund southeasterly is blowing. We hoist our sail and light our small lamp so as to have better visibility. Hermós mans the helm. We sail windward as much as we can and pass Llafranc Bay. When we glimpse the place our friend Mata owns on the beach there, we inevitably acknowledge that the first views on our voyage should have been from his hospitable, much-respected tavern. But that’s out of the question. Days are shortening and afternoons are simply flying by.

  Our dinghy sails perfectly round Cape Sant Sebastià, and the moment Frayre Point looms before us, Hermós grins and issues an order: “Ease the front…”

  I loosen the front cleat, Hermós loosens the sheet and we move to the stern. There’s only a light wind, but that’s helpful. The vessel sails ahead. In the stern, even the marrows are rolling around. And it cuts straight on. We leave behind the coastline of Sant Sebastià, Els Frares, Pedrosa Cove and La Musclera. It’s a spectacular sight. I’ve observed it dozens of times and am familiar with its stony indifference, but its magnetic pull remains as strong as it was the first time. That’s childhood images for you – they are uniquely irreplaceable; they stay with you throughout life. Against the light, the Pedrosa Cove cliffs are a wealth of warm, muted colors, of shimmering shadows. On La Musclera we can see Lord Islington’s house in the course of construction.

  “He is a gentleman who suffers a lot from sore throats…” says Hermós, with the air of a man who knows about these things. “Which is hard to believe, as there’s nothing like pine trees to cure a sore throat!”

  And now he tells me the story of Lord Islington he’s picked up in the taverns. It’s wild fantasy, but to make it seem more realistic, he starts giving an English twist to what he’s explaining. His English consists in giving the four French sentences he learned in Africa a lunatic nasal drawl.

  “You’ll soon get how those people speak,” he says, as if about to give me a repeat lesson. But he suddenly shuts up and straightens his back.

  “We need to do an inventory right now…” he declares gloomily. He drops the tiller, jumps and starts rummaging among the marrows we’ve loaded. Then he shouts out, as if someone had just stamped on his toes: “Just what I thought! We forgot the onions…”

  “So what…” I reply blankly.

  And then he begins on another long story: the reason why he forgot the onions. Early that morning he’d ordered onions from Marieta Batlle, as Marieta is the person in Calella who has the best onions money can buy. Moreover, Marieta is very kind; when Hermós was a young lad and went on board Big Boy’s boat to go hake fishing in far-off waters and returned home starving and shivering, she fed him. In other words, no onions can better those sold by Marieta Batlle. However, when he ordered them, Marieta was grilling a sea bream for her son-in-law’s breakfast, because it is his favorite breakfast and Marieta thinks it’s absolutely fine for her son-in-law to eat one or two grilled sea bream for breakfast. Hermós couldn’t tear her away from the embers smoldering on the grill…In the meantime, he went to the kiosk to buy a packet of fifteen-cèntim cheroots which he had to select one by one, thus relegating his obsession with onions to the back of his head. The fact is that what with the grilled sea bream, Marieta’s way of keeping her son-in-law happy, the cheroots and the hug
e amount of things you must have on your mind on such a day, the onions remained on land.

  “I reckon we can get by without onions…”

  “Oh, no we can’t!” retorts Hermós, in that imperious tone he uses on board. “We cannot proceed without onions…What on earth are you thinking?”

  We are opposite Tamariu and he steers the prow toward Aigua-Xelida. From the sea, Tamariu has the simplicity of a Japanese print. The soft, hazy contours of the expanse of land behind the beach possess a melancholy charm, a grave beat. We anchor in Aigua-Xelida. Hermós jumps onto land and heads toward his hut to fetch onions. I watch him from the boat. He can’t find his key. He nervously searches his pockets. He spends ages impatiently looking for it everywhere. He finally finds it in a pants pocket, even though it’s a large key. I hear his blood-curdling curse, which vanishes among the solitary pines. He eventually returns with half a string of onions. We’ve wasted three quarters of an hour. A few strokes of our oars and we’re out of the bay and hoisting the sail again. The wind weakens and is about to die. It takes us as far as Gavina. When we’re level with that rock, the sail flaps and we feel the first gust of the northwesterly on our faces. I tighten the cleat, Hermós the sheet, then we secure the sail and begin to sail out to sea. The aim is to reach Fornells by tacking to the wind.

  We sail in silence, as evening falls. Against the light a bright patch of green silken sky hovers over the pink cliffs of the Cabres cove. The wind rises, the waves surge, the sail ropes tighten, the canvas stiffens. From time to time our boat crashes against the sea, throwing up a curtain of water into our faces: it is cold, hard and fast. Nothing is harder than salt water: it is as hard as steel. Our boat is well ballasted and flies over the water, now with a tail wind. It slips along miraculously gently, but it’s a rather uncomfortable miracle: streams of water soak our clothes and give us goose bumps.

  We must keep the baggage we carry on board dry. Above all, our blankets, mattresses, clothes and sack of coal mustn’t get sopping wet. Hermós searches everywhere for a tarpaulin cover, with that nervous impatience he always brings to urgent tasks. But he finds nothing: no trace of a cover, not even a miserable scrap of canvas. He breaks two bowls while he’s about it. It’s all rather chaotic.

  “I wasn’t expecting such a violent wind…” he says almost shamefaced, bent double, turning his back on the streams of water flying at him from the stern.

  “It’s not your fault!”

  “They were soup bowls!”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll eat solids.”

  “Have you got any money on you?” he asks all of a sudden, changing the subject.

  “Two hundred pessetes in notes.”

  “That’s a lot of money. It could come in handy: enough to get us to Collioure and back via Figueres. We must keep our heads and, above all, make sure those notes don’t get wet! Seawater discolors them, and when they’re discolored, nobody will touch them. In any case, it would be a pity to turn back at this time of day, when there are cafés and taverns around and we have money in our pockets…”

  Darkness was falling. Sant Sebastià was right in front. We watched iridescent sheaves of light spread from the lighthouse over the cliffs and sea. To the north we could see the motionless light from the Medes Islands and farther north, like a wavering firefly, the light from Cape Creus. It was time to take down the sail, not an easy task in such a heavily laden boat. We began our return to land. From where we were, Fornells gave no signs of life: no lights, no embers, no smoke.

  It was a magnificent night: the stars shone brightly against the darkest of blue skies. Not a single cloud in sight. A typical northern sky: burnished and shiny. The cold wind whistled through the halyards. Now and then water showered over the boat or poured off our backs. Everything glistened. Our attempts to light a cheroot proved futile.

  “Where do you reckon we are?” I asked, after taking the sail down.

  “By the light of day, I think we’d see the town of Torroella…”

  “There’s no sign of Fornells…”

  “Don’t you worry. Every man jack is inside under cover, and some will be trying to spawn the baby they produce every year when this weather comes around…Everything will be drenched, that’s for sure.”

  “Everything is sopping wet.”

  “No need to worry. Nothing could be healthier in this weather than sleeping on a mattress soaked in seawater.”

  When things turned against him, Hermós put on a brave face and became larger than life. With one hand on the helm, wet as a barnacle, bloodshot eyes bulging, and full of energy, he’d have been ready to risk his life. At other times, when things eased up, he became inexplicably depressed. He was every inch a man from hereabouts.

  We barely exchanged another word. The boat was too low in the water and we had to be ready for any sudden gusts. After an hour’s sailing we reached the coast. As we slowly drew nearer, the wind blew more fiercely, but we easily rounded Mut Point. Small vessels, even the most seaworthy, are no use when it comes to sailing in a driving wind. They have no balance and the waves stop them in their tracks. When they sail, it’s in a series of stops and starts. Once in the bay we pick up our oars, and with their help and favorable gusts of wind we find shelter in El Port de Ses Orats. We make for the huge pine tree that dominates the small cove. A wonderful silence reigns in that windless place. We had sailed three hours to progress half a mile. We were weighed down by drenched clothes, and salt water irritated our eyes and skin. While we were mooring on the small beach, a viscous, vertical line of light appeared at the window of Xicu Caló’s house, which was nestled on the cliff.

  “Xicu!” shouted Hermós, in a voice that echoed off the jagged rocks.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The meager stream of light broadened out and his silhouette became visible.

  “How are you fixed for fish?”

  “We’ve got red mullet.”

  “Enough for two?”

  “More than enough…”

  “Where are they from?”

  “From Illa Negra.”

  “They’re the best! Put seven or eight on to grill, we’re on our way.” We put bread, oil, vinegar and a bottle of cognac in a basket. I carried the demijohn of wine. Hermós took the basket in one hand and with his other grabbed one of the stunned chickens by the neck.

  “When they see that we’ve brought a chicken,” he whispered, “they’ll pay us more respect…”

  Lots of people were in the kitchen. A yellow, pinewood fire was crackling in the hearth. Four magnificent, garishly red mullet lay on the embers on the grill. A carbide lamp was burning on the table with a metal shade behind the wick. Consequently, one half of the kitchen was almost in darkness; the other was bathed in a wan white glow. As we were freezing and sopping wet, that fire was a blessing, and the smell of pine resin mingling with the mullet on the embers, a deliciously sublime fact of life.

  When Hermós placed the wine, cognac and chicken on the table, it aroused the expectations of the crowd of adults gathered there, but not as much as he’d anticipated. Everyone had eaten dinner and the vague hubbub floating through the kitchen was as sweet as honey.

  Half of Fornells was there. Small fishing communities tend to be split into two enemy clans. The tinier a village and the fewer people that live there, the less they can stand each other. The idea of fraternity and mutual help is an idea that belongs to big cities. In solitary places, where contact might seem indispensable and altogether natural, people tend to be more individualistic and live more separately. One of the Fornells clans was by the fireside. I was surprised to see so many children together. Hermós laughed and asked: “This is water from Fornells, right, Tereseta?”

  “Water with a little extra…” replied a woman with a youthful, radiant face; she was blonde with sturdy legs, moist, white teeth and gleaming lips.

  Every woman had a chi
ld sleeping on her lap; others were asleep on the boxwood chairs by the fireside or on the earthen floor, on beds of dry leaves. The sparking flames from the crackling pinewood brought a pink glow to their cheeks. When they saw us come in, some of the children half opened an eye or whimpered; most slept on.

  Despite Hermós’s fame in the locality, adult interest in our presence lasted a mere couple of seconds. Then somebody yawned and other yawns followed in a chain reaction. It was too late; it was almost two o’clock. When the carbide light began spluttering its last, Xicu hung it from a hook on the wall. That increased the chatter in the kitchen and the heaviness of eyelids. For a while various people slept stiffly in their chairs, in a state of precarious equilibrium. As we sat down at the table, people said goodbye. They lit up two or three oil lanterns and departed. We were left alone with Xicu and his family.

  A thick haze hung over the kitchen and we didn’t need to get close to the fire to dry our clothes. We dined feeling a priceless hunger we wouldn’t have sold for any amount of money: we each dispatched half a dozen crisp, red mullet. The supply of rosé wine was endless. After that we ate biscuits. When Xicu put a small pan of water on the fire for coffee, we watched his wife’s nonstop yawning. Hermós looked at me as if to say: “This party’s over…”

  Hermós prepared his favorite drink: el roquill. Coffee, cognac, sugar and a few drops of lemon juice. He filled the glasses to the top. That made us even more lethargic. We lit fifteen-cèntim cheroots and, after paying our bill, bid farewell. We tiptoed silently out. I wondered whether the noisy hum and lethargy in Fornells might not represent the quintessence of happiness in this world. However, I barely had to time to think on that: the night was so pitch black that, before we ever reached the boat, we came close to cracking our skulls a couple of times.

  It was a dark, chilly, cloudless night, with a dazzling display of stars and the starkness the north wind gives to the shape of things. We transformed our sail into a tent over the dinghy. The wind blew across the sweep of the bay and whistled through the pine trees. You could hear the sea surging against the distant cliffs. In sheltered, coastal spots, the dull sound of the swell crashing against the rocks or beaches brought a pleasant feeling of safety, safety so secure it might have been won in open battle. We spread out our mattresses and blankets and I lay down under the prow. Everything was wet and freezing cold. Hermós set up on the thwart, under the stern. We left the oil lantern flickering on the side bench. It was all incredibly uncomfortable; however unlikely this might seem, the first thing you need if you want to sleep is to feel tired. By the light from the lantern I saw Hermós’s first snore come with the extinguished cheroot still in his mouth; he was already deeply asleep. As he had removed his cap, the hazy light touched his bald pate, and he seemed engaged in an intimate act, dozing in the family bed, with his wife at his side, half obscured by the shadows.