by Josep Pla
Skipper Lill from Begur, who now captains a longboat in L’Escala, walks in: a tall, thin, fair-haired man with gray eyes and the neatest of pointy mustaches, one of those men who, the moment they drop their guard, look as if they’re in their Sunday best. He’s a good friend of Hermós’s, and in no time they start singing. Lill is a wonderful singer of tavern songs. They immediately get into the swing…Friends of Lill’s soon arrive and the camaraderie is fired up. Someone sends for Grandad Xaixo; he walks in shortly, skin leathered by the wind, a guitar under his arm.
“I thought,” he whispers tremulously, “it would blow me through the air…”
Xaixo is a small fellow, dressed in black, with very long white hair, a dandruff-dusted jacket and a well-preserved mustache. Famously he wears someone else’s shoes. He is slightly humpbacked and seems plagued by poverty and hunger.
When they’re all there, they set up in the back corner, Xaixo tunes his guitar and the program commences. Al pie de un jardín florido – lloraba una colombiana…The tavern rapidly fills up. Hermós is beaming.
“What a wonderful country…” he says to me from afar, glass of wine in hand.
When the door to the road opens, you can hear the wind whistle and blast, and clouds of tobacco smoke billow out.
When it’s lunchtime, we grab a quick bite. Arquímedes serves us homegrown rabbit with peppers and tomatoes. Hermós complains about the homegrown nature of the rabbit. Everyone else finds it delicious. Clasping his guitar between his knees, old Xaixo scours the bones with his small, white, famished, bohemian hands. Then we each eat a dry fig, a raisin, two nuts and four roasted almonds. The singing leaves such a pleasant taste in the mouths of these folk that they can’t resist striking up again between one dry fig and another raisin. Then it’s time for coffee and rum. Now that they’ve eaten, the singing becomes more full throated and tuneful. By seven, their repertoire is going from strength to strength. Wine has lit up most faces. Some regulars are asleep, heads on arms folded on the marble-topped tables. I feel exhausted and have a headache that’s not going away.
I finally make my escape. Arquímedes’s Francisqueta takes pity on me and leads me to one of their bedrooms. The cool sheets, the silence and the feeling that I am totally alone work wonders. As my thumping heart won’t let me sleep, I use the time to pen these lines. For a good long while I can hear their singing, as if from another world.
* * *
—
First of October. When I get up in the morning, I feel wearier than the previous day. My mouth is dry and my tongue even drier. The top of my head aches. My legs feel weak. The mistral continues to blast away furiously: it sometimes moans like a distant clap of thunder. Very fine sand from the gulf raps against the windows as if a cat’s claws were scraping them. The sky is limpid and pure, a metallic blue. The strong, dry air has an enervating effect on my whole body – I’m peculiarly edgy. My vocal chords don’t seem to be responding: I’ve almost lost my voice.
Hermós is eating breakfast at the table. He tells me he’s slept on our boat and has had a very bad night, and that he didn’t take his pants off, something he’d not done for many years, so he would be ready for any eventuality, and that at times he’d felt the wind was blowing him up and away.
I spend the day in Arquímedes’s kitchen, by the fireside, not speaking or eating, lethargic and weary, drinking glasses of cold water, listening to the wind wail down the chimney. I see no sign of the people we were fraternizing with yesterday. Even Hermós seems to have vanished. Nothing strange about that: he doesn’t want to see me and I’m in no hurry to talk to him. I ask Francisqueta how much wine was consumed. First she looks at me and laughs and then seems bewildered. If you think about it, quite frankly, it was a stupid question. Everything flees, is more or less eliminated, everything passes…
I sleep in the same bedroom where I slept yesterday. Now my head is clearer, I can see that the room is spick and span and contains a bed, a chair, a wardrobe and a washbowl. Such simplicity – it is a seventy-five- céntim bedroom – quickly and efficiently helps me to recover.
* * *
—
2 October. Hermós wakes me up midmorning and tells me he has bumped into Ramon Pins, a fisherman from Begur who skippers a longboat here, and that he has offered to tow us as far as Jònculs. Ramon wants to go to Jònculs tonight to see whether he can land forty or fifty boxes of mackerel. The combination enthuses Hermós. To be honest, he thinks the gulf is frightening rather than exhilarating. As he tells me all this, he praises Ramon to the skies.
“Just imagine, he is even an anarchist!” he whispers into my ear, rounding off the series of qualities he has praised in Ramon.
Hermós is like that. Everything is either heavenly or hellish.
“And doth the north wind still blow?” I ask.
“It’s dropped a lot. And will drop even more. All will be calm come sunset…”
By the time we begin lunch, we are incredibly hungry. L’Escala wines are light and delicious. We prepare to embark in the afternoon. Ramon Pins comes over to our boat. He’s thirtyish, tall, strong, fair haired, blue eyed, straight-backed and a man of very few words. He helps us to clear the sand the wind has deposited on our boat and tackle. We have to ditch some of our food supplies because they are full of sand. In the meantime, he gives us instructions on how to hitch up. He doesn’t want to pull us behind the skiff with the light. Instead, he wants to carry the light on the portside, with our dinghy on the starboard. He speaks clearly and precisely, reminding me sometimes of a Norwegian sailor.
The sea is placid at sunset. After the whiplashes of the mistral, nature seems to be convalescing at dusk. Everything feels faint. The harbor livens up and is full of chatter. The mountains are haloed in a delicate, altarpiece light. The gulf’s choppy waters are a hazy green and suffused by a wan, murky inner glow. We push our boat out and approach the large longboat. Standing in the stern, Ramon throws us the end of a rope and starts the engine. In the distance, the Roses lighthouse glimmers at water level. When a strong pull on the rope moves our boat off, a sudden rush of air hits me and makes me shiver with cold. Cap tilted over his ear, Hermós is at the helm smoking a cheroot, seemingly the happiest man in the world; he notices that I’m scowling.
“Take my word for it!” he shouts. “You won’t feel any breeze under the prow…”
I don’t hang around. When I crawl into my cot, I find it is lovely and warm. Now that I’m lying under a blanket, I’m gripped by an ineffable feeling of safety. I can hear the boat’s engine chugging far off. Strong tugs on the towrope make the sides of our boat creak and speed it along as if it were in free fall, as if its prow were being dragged down into the sea. At first these sudden jerks make my heart miss a beat, but when I realize nothing is amiss, I sense I’m beyond harm. In my cot, with my head on the pillow adjacent to the top of the stern, I can hear the water glugging against the timber behind my head. When there’s a yank and the sea crashes against the stern, it feels as if the water is flooding me out; when it’s an average tug, the water slips along the wood as smooth as silk, curling endlessly, as if wavy shapes were sliding between the nape of my neck and head. I have no time to smoke. Sleep takes over, irresistibly.
When Hermós taps me on the back, after an indeterminate period of time, I feel an unease I find difficult to conceal. Ideally, I’d have liked to be towed to the bottom of the Mediterranean in my sleep. I reluctantly abandon my warm berth and, once on deck, drowsily light up a foul-tasting cigarette. I dither, trying to find my bearings. I feel cold. The sea is calm. It is a pitch-black night, a blackness that seems embedded in the silent air. No hint of a breeze. The panorama is one of deepest solitude.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Ramon towed us as far as Figuera Point.”
“And where’s his longboat?”
“Can you see that light near the coast?” asks Hermós, poin
ting to a patch of white light bobbling by the rocky coast. “He’s sailed right over there.”
“He looks very close to land…”
“That’s where the mackerel are…”
“So is this what night fishing is like, Hermós? None of this holds any mystery for you…You’re a past master…”
“Come on now…” he says, apparently indignant, but preening himself at the same time.
Then he revives the wick of the oil lamp, which only serves to intensify the surrounding darkness. It’s like being inside a cavern floating over the water.
“What do you expect me to say?” he says after a while. “Set up the oars and let’s take it slowly.”
“How far is it to Cadaqués?”
“A good hour’s row to Farmàcia.”
We start rowing, quite mechanically. I soon feel perfectly in shape; I’m no longer cold, and my muscles are firm. We hug the coast. Rowing behind me, Hermós acts as if he knows where he is going. The Calanans lighthouse appears: a yellow, rather anemic glow. Seen from within that haze, our boat must look like a fly trapped in cobweb that’s hanging in the air. We enter Cadaqués Bay.
“How did the crossing of the gulf go?” I ask, to pass the time.
“We crossed it as if it were Llafranc Bay…”
“Ramon is a terrific skipper…”
“A truly great skipper! Do you know what he told me when you were still under the prow…? He said that when it’s the mushroom season, which will soon be upon us, he wants to come to Sa Tuna to see his family, and if we meet up, he’ll tow us…”
“Hermós, you’re always wanting to be towed by someone or other…That betrays a servant’s temperament…”
“So what? It makes no difference if you’re master to a servant or servant to a master. Both positions are equally bothersome. But you can’t do any different, just as you can’t eat two dinners or smoke two cheroots at the same time…”
As I know one can’t challenge Hermós’s fixed ideas about society, I let it go.
“Do you know,” I say, “I think the water here is blacker than ours?”
“Cadaqués is as black as a wolf’s maw. You’ll see…”
It’s a pitch-black night. By the light of the stars the water is so blue and shiny it looks like dark syrup. When our oars hit the water, they scatter small spongy lights like fireflies and the wood gleams.
“It will soon be the Day of the Dead…” says Hermós, in a gruff, rather theatrical voice that pitches lower and lower.
“Why do you say that? What’s the connection between a phosphorescent sea and the Day of the Dead?”
“That’s what Big Boy used to say when we went paternostering and were starving…”
There is a lull.
“Don’t raise your hopes,” he continues. “We found it thus and will leave it ever thus.”
At times this fierce, elemental fellow is unbearable and odious. He’s like a geological sediment set unchangingly in granite.
As I’m rowing in the prow, I occasionally swing round to see where we are. But the darkness is impenetrable. All I can see is the shore silhouetted against the starry, luminous sky. After what seems a long, long time, white blotches appear out of the black: the houses in El Baluard. From where I’m sitting, I can see dismal, greasy lights appear, as if suspended in the air; they look like a vessel’s signal lights.
“I’ve seen them…” says Hermós quickly. “They are three-masters or mizzen boats on their way to France…”
He speaks sententiously and confidently, as he does when speaking of marine matters.
With that my companion puts down his oars and takes out his cigarette case.
“Have we reached Farmàcia?”
“We’re by El Poal, which is the same thing. Row for a while and then we’ll cast out the grappling hook. We’ll anchor with the prow to the wind and that will keep the flies at bay.”
We each eat a slice of cold sausage with a hunk of bread and drink a half liter of wine, then we have a smoke and tidy our mattresses. Rowing is a delightful sport: it never exhausts you too much and leaves the body in just the right state to rest. We think bed is wonderful. Sleeping in a small boat is like returning to life in the womb for a few seconds. It’s nice, though hardly easy to get used to.
* * *
—
3 October. When I wake up and poke my head out on deck, I feel agreeably secure: I am surrounded by houses. We are in the back of the egg that is Cadaqués Bay. When one is living out to sea, it can be comforting now and then not to see the horizon as just a thin line between the ocean and the sky. The infinite can be draining. It’s easy not to see the horizon from Cadaqués. A telling detail.
I am struck by the silence over the town and intrigued by the contrast between the white of the houses, the bull’s blood of the grand front doors and the mysterious dark green of olive trees against the gleaming black of slate and rock.
I yawn nonstop for almost a quarter of an hour. Then I spot a relaxed Hermós gesticulating on the quay while lecturing a venerable old gentleman. From time to time, this gentleman guffaws loudly.
I disembark and walk over, and Hermós introduces me to Don Víctor Rahola, who welcomes me in a way I shall never forget. Straight away we are invited to be his guests. While we walk at a leisurely pace toward his house, enjoying the sun and gulping on northwesterly gusts that shiver and shake us, Don Víctor tells us most amiably: “I’m so happy you’re here. I’ve known Hermós my whole life: from when he came here for the first time with Joan Vergés and his friends, who were mine too. You’ll keep me company. One needs company in Cadaqués. After lunch I like to play a game of tresillo. I have always relied on the cleric in town to vouchsafe my session. It never failed me…Now can you believe that the rector they’ve just appointed doesn’t know how to play? Can you imagine anything more ridiculous or unthinkable? How on earth will we fill our afternoons in Cadaqués from now on? Try to grasp the importance of what I’m saying. If this rector is visited one day by his superiors in the hierarchy, if the bishop or the vicar-general appears, what will he do to relax them, so they can while away their time pleasantly at the rectory? Please tell me. Small-town life becomes unbearable if one can’t enjoy a minimum of social life. A town priest who is ignorant of the rules of tresillo is an absurdity, an aberration, a huge error of judgment. I have asked the rector to come to my home tomorrow. I will teach him how the cards go. It is an urgent matter that cannot be deferred, especially when one thinks of his career in the church. I feel sorry for defenseless chaplains to an extent I am unable to conceal.”
Don Víctor is a gentleman who has passed the fifty-year mark. He dresses like a rentier, with a South American touch; in the summer season: a peaked cap, blue-and-white-striped clothes, a white shirt with a perfectly ironed collar and sturdy, comfortable espadrilles. However, Don Víctor’s rather anachronistic bourgeois features, his distinguished apparel, cannot camouflage his most marked trait: Don Víctor looks poor, absolutely, undeniably poor.
“I am sure,” he himself says, “that the day I decide to sit on a stool in Carrer Petritxol with a hat on my knees, every passerby will give me a céntim or two.”
His face is full of lumps and he sports a large salt-and-pepper beard. His lugubrious, bulging eyes carry a yellowish lymph where the pupils float amid a web of red veins, and his moist lips droop in a weary, unpleasant, sensual fashion. When these features take on a serious air, Don Víctor looks depressed. When they are animated, a mixture of irony, insight, subtlety and sensuousness lights up his face.
As I can see he has a slight limp, I ask him if he is in pain.
“I’ve been able to do next to nothing about my rheumatism this summer,” he replies. “I’ve been very busy. I expect you are aware that I am a doctor…”
Hermós titters. Don Víctor says, “I see that Hermós doesn’t
have much faith in medicine…I have even less…Rheumatism is like so many other illnesses: we don’t know the cause and there is no treatment. However, I use a remedy that really helps in my case. I have observed that sweat eases the pain. And now I have found a way to sweat at home. By dancing…”
“Dancing with a lady, naturally…”
“Forgive me, that might be taking it too far…I simply dance the polka with a chair for an hour every day…”
We drink espressos in the Casino and then visit the church. The old town of Cadaqués, with its narrow, sloping streets, vines spreading over house façades and fishing tackle everywhere, is stunningly picturesque. The main altar in the elevated church is flaming, baroque, full of movement.
“I know you have a very pretty altar in Palafrugell,” he says. “I’ve seen it…”
“It’s larger than the one here…”
“Yes, but this is subtler.”
“That’s quite possible.”
Don Víctor stands and stares at me with an air of surprise.
“I see that you have a tendency to accept someone else’s…That’s not very common.”
“Thank you! No need to exaggerate. It’s hard to throw off preferences, especially when they’re homegrown.”
As we leave the church, he suggests a visit to the Sant Baldiri hermitage, the cemetery and Port Lligat. I’m astonished by his generosity and tell him so.
“Oh, please! Can’t you see I have nothing else to do?”
I don’t think you could find a better guide in Cadaqués. The smallest detail becomes a pretext for him to speak vividly and at length, drawing on his prodigious memory, about this fascinating, remote place. His words flow with curiosity, emotion and love.
On the path to Port Lligat we meet a woman carrying a basket of fish who greets Don Víctor with a stream of strange, extravagant compliments. She is evidently a villager, but her attire hints at overblown ladylike pretensions: she wears an elaborate hairdo, a garish blouse covered in ribbons and bows, a skirt that went out of fashion five years ago and poor, sad-looking shoes with twisted heels. This getup makes her look a mixture of a bawd and a lady down on her luck.