by Josep Pla
* * *
—
27 September. I’m writing this at ten p.m., on Sa Riera Beach, by the light from the boat’s lantern. We have just bid farewell to Florià Pi and his crowd.
We set sail from Fornells midmorning and rounded Cape Begur with a becalmed sea, a low, cobwebby sky, and a dingy, damp breeze. We had rowed and reached Sa Riera by hugging the coast. Hermós talked tirelessly almost the whole way. I felt I’d been given a comprehensive lecture on the coast and its place-names. The appearance of Pals Beach from the waters of Ses Negres – a sudden opening out of horizons – is an unforgettable sight. Hermós knows every inch of that terrain.
“Do you think I’m afraid of rain?”
“Not now we’re close to port…In any case, I couldn’t care less whether or not it rains…”
“There’s nothing worse than rain when you’re traveling like this…I’m afraid you’ll get bored.”
“No, I won’t. If it rains, we can go up to Begur and play canari. Perhaps our most pressing need now is to get a bite of lunch. Morning coffee was…”
“What do you mean ‘morning coffee’? It couldn’t have tasted better in Maison Dorée…”
Hermós has a weakness for the French names of some establishments. He affectionately remembers a number.
Our friend Florià Pi was waiting for us on the beach. He is a large, imposing man with a Muslim air: a tall giant, with dark marble skin, gleaming white teeth and shiny black pupils in pools of yellow lymph. He welcomes us noisily and I find his affability overwhelming. He is a widower and always lives in the cove, surrounded by a large family that includes lots of women. They all work nonstop carrying out his orders. His is the household that eats the best in the area. He has all the necessary tackle, owns boats and buys fish; he is never short of a hunting gun or dog. He always has one dog or another – a good one – to give away. The first thing he did when we reached his house was to show us the telephone he’d just had installed.
Frankly, I’m not at all interested in his telephone. Luckily, he immediately offered us half a box of freshly caught sea bass and three wild rabbits that were hanging on the back of the kitchen door.
“How shall we cook the bass?” asks Florià.
“A la marinera!” Hermós replies emphatically.
“And the wild rabbit?”
“Roasted with aioli?”
Reparada, the patriarch’s daughter-in-law, starts cooking the fish. We help her. Hermós peels the garlic. I finely chop onion and parsley, and prepare tomatoes for a hash. The boys go to the fountain with pitchers. The women prepare the rabbit.
Sensible, with foresight, Florià is in charge. The kitchen is soon filled with the smell from the strong sauces.
Lunch and the subsequent table talk lasted from three to well past nine o’clock. Everything was tasty and in abundance. The aioli was solid and consistent, quite remarkable: the handle of the pestle held itself erect. We ate grapes for dessert and spent the evening drinking roquills. Nothing makes you long for this liquid like the aftertaste aioli leaves in the mouth. There was a lot of lively singing: it wasn’t a moment for self-restraint. We ran through the supplies of our cognac and the house’s. People are inexhaustible and go into a spin: tell stories, eat, drink, smoke, sit down and leave the table, nonstop. In his element, Hermós enjoys moments of Dionysian energy.
“For how many centuries,” I wonder, “have people around here been leading this kind of life? Can it last forever? Won’t this primitive, decadent lunacy ever come to an end? Sometimes jollity in these parts scares me. It is so exuberant it must be fated to disappear.”
It started raining at dusk, and as nobody around here does anything when it rains, the people from the cove headed to the kitchen. Not everybody – because the word “everybody” doesn’t exist here – only friends. It was drizzling gently, as it does, to borrow a phrase from Hermós, and that makes you thirsty. Through the grayness framed by the window, you could see rain falling on the becalmed sea, on the white, soporific water and the small, fish-eyed bubbles the spitting rain throws up on the surface. On that solitary, dreary evening, backwoods male cavortings seem completely futile, inexplicable and gratuitous. And, in the end, physical exhaustion brings everything to a conclusion.
The moment I go out, the cool air and small drops of rain revive me and clear my head. Our sailing dinghy is moored right on the beach. The sea is totally still: a deep, pearl-colored silence. I make it to my mattress under the prow; the dampness brings out the dank stink of the wool. I’m as restless as usual, the usual nerves. Rain beats down on the boards and awning, streams down the canvas. Now and then I vaguely hear a drop of rain falling on my bed, as if there’s a leak somewhere. It’s miserable to think my mattress will slowly become drenched.
* * *
—
28 September. I’m still writing, as I was yesterday, by the light of the boat’s lantern, on Sa Riera Beach. We were unable to sail this morning. It rained all day – till four p.m. – a gray, meandering drizzle. When I glanced outside, I saw Hermós plucking a chicken under the canopy. A skinny, starving old black cat was sitting by his side – a local cat.
He’d made a brown stew and boiled up some meat and vegetables. The stove had been lit the whole day under the awning. It sometimes created a thick fug. The sound of rain on the wet sail, the monotonous pitter-patter of raindrops on the sea lulled you to sleep. I spent the whole day smoking and watching the rain. There was very little movement in Sa Riera. People must have been sleeping off their hangover from yesterday’s binge.
It’s been a delightful day with that frothy haze and marvelous silence. Now and then I stuck my head outside. Everything was gray and muted: if the sky ever cleared, everything seemed a rusty-tin blue. The sea seemed somnolent all day, as it was yesterday, becalmed in eternal indifference. Water streamed down the pines and the foliage was sometimes so green it seemed to dissolve into pure color, into pristine pictorial tints – like the pearl of the inlet’s waters, like the opaline air. In the drowse, mineral veins swelled on the rocks and the beach fell into a crimson faint. The silence was intense, as if cotton wool had been plugged into our ears. The sound of clogs and distant wailing of an invisible child seemed like failed attempts to break it.
Hermós spoke more moderately now. He’s afraid I will tire of this life. I’ve caught him scowling furiously at the low sky and sinister rain. He cannot imagine how I could like days like this. He is a man wedded to the sun and eternal pepper and tomato salads. I’m feebler. I wouldn’t change today’s rain-swept placidity for yesterday’s vociferous hubbub.
“We’ll set sail at daybreak tomorrow!” he shouts imperiously, grabbing his mattress.
By the dim light from the lantern, I observe him in his warrior’s white, ghostly, buffoonish long johns.
* * *
—
29 September. We set off at seven a.m., with a breeze from inland as fresh as a rose. Out of the inlet, by Torre de Pals, we encounter the boat of Pepet, Florià’s eldest son, who’s been out doing some early morning fishing. He hands us a basket of magnificent plump sardines.
Hermós hands me the tiller and immediately lights up the stove. It is a delightful wind to close haul, with the sheet loosened; the lively sea ripples gracefully. When the embers glow, he lays out the sardines. The fumes from the fish fill the air with splendid sweet-scented expectations. The sun shines ever more fiercely and takes the bite out of the breeze. The land above Pals Beach glistens with yesterday’s rain like a blessing from heaven. Our boat scythes through the water. The sky becomes astonishingly luminous, a luminosity that seems to make everything it touches light and weightless. I feel I too am about to levitate, but that’s probably down to the pangs of hunger aroused by the smoke drifting from the grilling sardines.
Hermós slices the bread and places a huge plate of sardines on the starboard quarter. He generous
ly sprinkles on oil and vinegar. As the gentle breeze is dying, we secure the tiller and start eating as if we were in a tavern. My traveling companion takes a fish head between the fingers of one hand and the fish tail in the other and eats his sardines as if he were playing the ocarina. He devours them in a sucking process. Their spines emerge clean and tidy from the operation. The spectacle of avid hunger becomes this antique sea. There are corners of this sea where you can smell the stench of Homeric hecatombs. Modesty aside, I eat them more primly: on bread, though with my fingers.
After we have each eaten our first twenty, washed down with the requisite wine, Hermós makes a pepper and tomato salad. The sun glints on the scales of the fish and the oil, glitters off the skin of the peppers and the bottle of wine. It is a glorious morning. The sun shines brightly. The dazzling blue sky is like a cushion of delights. The wind drops slowly.
“This accompaniment,” says Hermós, “will help us do the deed…”
After eating half a dozen more, we look into each other’s eyes. Enough is enough! Nothing in excess. The right amount. We have a smoke. I immediately feel my body reacting to the sardines: they produce a sense of debilitation, fraying at the edges and lethargy. We decide to boil up some coffee.
We are approaching L’Estartit. We can see the town’s white walls, and cobs of maize hung up to dry in windows. The sunlight cascades down the mauve, turtle-colored rocks above the roofs and cavorts over the Medes Islands, which are reflected in the still, cobalt sea, in the most outrageous shapes rocks can assume.
“We should find out what the current is…” says Hermós. “Get close to the first inlet or boat you see…”
I sail slightly away from the wind and our boat slips toward a paternoster boat fishing by Cavall Bernat. Hermós shouts: “What’s the current?”
“Southwesterly…” answer the fishermen.
That’s the one for us.
The sea is becalmed. We hoist the sheet up the mast, and the boat is now rudderless. The current pulls us slowly across the Medes straits into Roses Bay at an almost imperceptible rate. Our sailing dinghy groans gently. Hermós lies down in the side of the boat and falls asleep. I still feel quite frayed. An iridescent nap. But I’m not that drowsy, and don’t in fact fall asleep. Slouched in the stern, I smoke endlessly, looking sleepily at the sky. The Torroella coastline slowly fades; we sail into the gulf, a magnificent spectacle of expanding horizons. There’s not a cloud in sight: the sky is a soft, gentle blue. Light pours over the low ground in a flood of bright gold. Rising above the plain, the jagged contours of the mountains shimmer. We spend two or three hours wandering freely. The limp sail flaps at the top of the mast. Our boat drifts.
“What’s the time?” asks Hermós, suddenly sitting up, his eyes streaked red and yellow.
“How do you expect me to tell you, if we’re not carrying a clock?” “First it was onions, then the tarpaulin, and now the clock…” he says bad-temperedly. “You know, we’re both a waste of time…We always mess up!”
Then he looks at the sun for a while, blinks several times and solemnly declares: “It’s exactly twenty-five to three. And anyone who doesn’t believe that is an idiot.”
Then he stood up: “What’s the weather like? Where are we?”
We had made little progress. We were opposite Ferriol Cove, opposite L’Escala floating on the water to the west. We discussed the weather. There was a very light, southeasterly breeze. We loosened the sheet, stood aft and pointed the boat toward L’Escala. The sky was still pure and clean, but all of a sudden, a thin, streaky expanse of dark-copper cloud appeared above the Portús col. Hermós scowled in its direction.
“That could be a north wind, you know?” he said, instinctively raising his oars.
Smoking, rowing hard, making the most of a backwind, we sailed on for quite a time. Hermós said very little. His eyes were locked on that distant bank of cloud, which grew and darkened as evening fell. What’s more, those sardines were weighing him down. We reached L’Escala at dusk. He didn’t want to anchor the boat, insisting on dragging it up the beach. I was surprised so few people were in the harbor, especially where we moored, opposite the carpentry workshop of Senyor Tassis, who makes the best oars in the country and whose workshop is usually crowded out.
“People are frightened of a north wind…Can’t you see that? They’ve hauled their boats up…You can be sure not even a rat will leave harbor tonight!”
We made up our canopy, and by the time we’d erected it and our beds were in place, it was pitch dark.
“We should go for a drink,” said Hermós straight away.
We went into Maurici’s tavern and drank a glass of beer. The café was empty. The street was deserted. You could see small yellow lights through the cracks in doors and windows.
“And what if we hit the hay…What do you reckon?” Hermós asked, almost pleading.
“That’s an excellent idea.”
We were both on our respective mattresses by eight p.m. Sardines can be tricky.
* * *
—
30 September. I’m writing at eleven p.m. in Arquímedes’s tavern. It’s been an extremely hectic day.
A mistral settled in mercilessly at five a.m. First, we heard the sea crashing on the sand, monotonous waves in a crescendo of noise; then the initial, wild gusts of the northwesterly. It was soon blowing violently, impetuously and without letting up. We immediately felt it was sweeping our canopy away. We got up and secured it with ropes on the four sides. The sky was full of stars that faded in the cool, green brightness of dawn. Blown from the Pyrenees, a bank of clouds had spread unchecked, towers billowing dark and menacing. Now and then an expanse of black cloud broke away and flew off in vertiginous disorder. By daybreak, the gulf had become visible, a mass of white foam and high murky waves under a livid light. We fixed the boat down with a couple more staves and went back to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. The violent wind and sea battered my brain.
“When the wind is like this,” I heard Hermós say, as he pulled his pants on, “it’s best not to do anything stupid.”
“What do you suggest?”
“We should settle down in the tavern. You can see what other people are doing…Here we’ll get wiser rather than wealthier…”
“What are your thoughts on the weather? That mistral is blasting like a cannon.”
“I’ll tell you the evening after next.”
It was almost impossible to hear one another talk. The wind blew our words away. A cloud of spray hovered over the beach.
We secured our things on the boat as best we could and headed to the tavern. First to Senyora Neus’s tavern, also known as Can Gelada, though it wasn’t icy, and then, we hardly need add, Arquímedes’s tavern – the owner’s surname is Ballester, though he had no crossbows – is down a street by the harbor. The wind gusts us there, almost without touching the ground, you could say. It’s open – it’s seven a.m. – and we go through the door and into the kitchen. The stoves are on and the people who live there are already sat around the table, forking up breakfast. It’s a promising start.
Hermós is renowned in the area. He’s given a cordial, boisterous welcome. I benefit from the overspill of hospitality. A few seconds after we arrive, at a loss to know how or why I’ve gotten into this position, I’m sitting at the table, surrounded by the family, facing a plate of food and an amazing array of wine. It’s home-produced wine. In L’Escala they make a dry white from Macabeo grapes and a dry cherry pink from Carinyena grapes. Both are wonderfully easy and light to drink. Who could resist them?
Meanwhile, the tavern regulars start to arrive and I look at them as I eat and drink. They are real regulars, no doubt about it, fishermen who have been coming here for years and years; nevertheless, the privileged position I enjoy leads me to think that as a tavern customer, I am as stalwart as they are. Sitting and drinking at that table, I feel
like an ancient, fabled, preeminent parishioner. One who would defend his rights tooth and nail against these other folk…
This kind of reflection, which isn’t typical of me, leads me to think – once I’ve a cup of coffee in front of me – that it might be the effect of the copious amounts I have drunk. Nothing to worry about, naturally! These wines are so light! But perhaps it’s premature to be acting with such arrogance. Outside, in the meantime, the mistral is still gusting ferociously. Through the tavern windows you can see very few people walking by, stooping, hands in pockets, furiously battered by the wind.
A wooden bench goes right round the wall of the saloon. The locals like to recline there: fishermen lolling back like Romans on a triclinium, as they say, without a care in the world. On the small table in the entrance stands a water jug with a curved spout and two demijohns of wine that look as if they’ll never run dry. People go over to the table with a glass or their own little wine jar, open the tap and the wine flows remarkably quickly and surely. It’s the ideal tavern for thirsty people.