by Josep Pla
“Are you thinking we might sleep in Sant Pere?” I ask Hermós.
“No. We’ll wait until the wind from inland can carry us downstream. In the meantime, we should go to the barber’s…”
Hermós is sporting a five- or six-day-old beard and looks like a bandit. I must be a tubercular shade of gray. We make for the village. The streets are full of fat, moribund flies that buzz between the patches of sun, awaiting the cold lash of death. It must be lunch time, because there’s a cow mooing behind every front door. There is a great amount of dung and piss, or something of the sort, in the streets. We have swapped the distilled purity of sea air for that horrendous stench. People exude pungent vapors. The smell of the Latin race.
The barbershop – where small yellowish plates dangle over the door – is filthy. The wallpaper is covered in fly shit. A dense, dank fug floats in the air: a smell of poor families, cheap perfumes and the effluvia of domestic animals. The barber is the chatty, cheerful local sort, wearing a dingy, almost mourning-black apron that hangs down to his feet. He has an iron hand – and this epithet, usually reserved for presidents – must have its origins in barbershops. He scrapes stubble with a razor as if he were using his nails. We inevitably suffer for a while, but when we leave, at any rate, we must look quite different and probably much more presentable. The barber’s hand has given Hermós the air of a thinker of the anarchist variety. My expertly clipped fringe makes me look clownish.
We wait for a decent wind to blow, and roam the elegant banks of the Fluvià. We stretch out in the sun for a while on the cool grass. We listen to the distant noise of the bells of cows who are slowly chewing their cud. As soon as dusk descends, the sad, muted song of crickets reaches us.
The wind doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to blow up, so we embark in our boat and row downriver. The current helps us along. The belfry in Sant Pere, orange in the sunset, is silhouetted above the smoke. We hear the sound of carts wearily returning to the village from the surrounding fields, the clatter of a flock of tired mares and the weary monotone of crickets.
We reach the quayside as darkness falls and slip out without any difficulty. The becalmed sea is a great help. When we are past the sandbanks and in the open sea, we hoist our sail and a cold, light wind blows up. The wind from inland allows us to tack our way to L’Escala. It takes us three hours, as smooth as could be. In the course of the silent, uneventful crossing, I ask Hermós: “Why did you decide to go upriver to Sant Pere?”
“To give us something to talk about in the café…” he responds, after giving it a moment’s thought, decisively, as if he were being totally sincere.
Despite the new moon, it is too dark to see his face when he makes that statement. I wouldn’t want to bear false witness, but I reckon those words don’t come at all easily.
* * *
—
7 October. We spent an unremarkable day in L’Escala. Autumn is advancing, like a slow-paced convalescent. Everything is turning more fragile. It’s been a gray day: an opaque, pearl-white day, with the sea a wan blue, almost green, its surface tracked by huge, dead waves. Roses Bay, in gray and pearl, is an exquisitely gentle, ineffably beautiful sight. Horizons dissolve in a pale-blue haze where the contours of mountains are ever shifting, weightless, purple and mauve. Autumnal smoke floats languidly above the plains. White, wispy trails rise up from the town’s chimneys, slowly and morosely fading in the pallid sky.
I walk a roundabout route, unhurriedly, along the streets to the Casa Gran, close to which Vadoret Sala, the ship carpenter, has his workshop. L’Escala is an earthen, brown-stew-colored town. It has few amenities and seems neglected. Its population is a mixture of fishermen and country folk. Next to a woman mending a net sits another hulling broad beans. It’s all rather charmless, dreary, gray and dusty.
Vadoret has left two or three skiffs out in the street. There’s a pulley between the skiffs. He wants to bend this pulley slightly. He lights a small fire next to the timber. It is resinous pinewood and fills the air with a delightful smell. It crackles and flames cheerfully. A couple of feet from the master carpenter, a young lad with a brush is applying hot tar to the old keel of a boat. The mixture of the smell of tar and the scent of pinewood is marvelous. The air is thick with that scent, which seems to impregnate everything. Herring gulls keep flying over the workshop yard.
Vadoret works in silence. He is a most laconic man, today more than ever. I’m grateful for the silence. This is a day for being distracted rather than talking. I can’t concentrate: I feel aimless and at a loss. I’ve been exhausted by an excess of fresh air.
On the way back to the port, I bump into Donya Caterina Albert. I greet her respectfully. With her hair cut à la garçonne, her sparkling, velvety eyes, her pallor (which comes from working at night), her simple attire – a jewel on her chest – and petiteness, I find her more alert than ever. I don’t attempt to speak about literary matters: whenever I’ve tried, I have had to desist because it is impossible to break through this lady’s unassailable modesty. Víctor Català is the most modest writer there is. She brings a most pleasant femininity and volubility to the conversation, but I’ve often wondered whether her chatter wasn’t a deliberate façade. I have always thought that façade hides an unusual tenacity and gentle firmness. She is a woman who cuts her own path in life, who is absolutely on her own, hermetic and inured to any kind of “uncontrolled” influences. She makes a most striking impression on me: human frailty that is constantly and consciously being overcome.
Laughing loudly, she tells me how some days ago a huge herring gull with a broken wing fell into her garden and that the big wild bird, rather than dying – as she and everybody initially thought it would – began adapting to a domesticated life, with few problems.
“What do you think?” she asks me. “Perhaps this magnificent bird could get used to living in my flat on Carrer València in Barcelona…Wouldn’t that be a great pity!”
She says all this with a mixture of candor and irony that acts ineffably, mysteriously upon the listener. And when we are saying our goodbyes: “Come and take a look!” she says. “It’s not a highly stimulating sight for a young writer, but it’s not without interest…”
Hermós, whom I haven’t seen since the start of the day, comes back in the evening and tells me that tomorrow morning, whatever the weather, Ramon Pins will tow us to Sa Tuna behind his boat.
“Whatever the weather?” I ask.
“Ramon has heard what people are saying…”
When I take to my boat bed that night, I feel yet again that the mattress is as uncomfortable and horrible as it was on that first day. It’s absolutely hopeless: I can’t adapt. I am a man corrupted by creature comforts, pleasing surfaces and the good life.
In the early morning – after an extremely sleepless night – I hear the wind whistling. Yet again the mistral has its sights on us.
* * *
—
8 October. By eight a.m., it’s a brisk mistral, but Ramon says he’s hoping it will drop when the sun warms up. He gives the order to set sail immediately. Ramon takes two or three men from his usual crew and suggests I join them in his longboat. Our sailing dinghy is carrying too much weight. That way Hermós will be on his own and can organize the rudder to ensure the best tow possible. Everything’s agreed.
As we leave harbor, the wind and sea hit us in the stern, making us sway violently. Our boat leaps over the sea like a kid goat. At times, the boat leaps too high, it’s speeding dangerously and Ramon orders them to reduce speed. And that’s how we sail along the rugged Torroella coast. We turn with Cape Salines and the coast gives us fair shelter as far as L’Estartit, but when we sail past Pals Beach, the wind and sea turn rough once again.
After reaching this point, Ramon would have clearly preferred to head directly to Sa Tuna, but he discontinues this strategy due to the foul weather. He does so without flapping or moving a single
muscle of his face. In effect, he decides to skirt the beach’s sandbanks, an operation that only someone really familiar with the local sea could do. This allows him to sail – given the way the wind is blowing from the beach across his stern– along the strip of water that is being punished least by the gusts and is, as a result, considerably calmer. We cut close to the underwater sandbanks that are visible from the side of the ship, under turbulent but transparent water, and don’t hit a single one.
Seated next to Ramon, I glance now and then at Hermós, who is controlling his boat’s rudder, his gaze fixed on our stern. When we turn to sail along the beach, he seems edgy and apprehensive for a second and can’t hide the fact, but then Ramon’s confident, agile command of the tiller brings a smile back to his face.
Once we reach Torre de Pals, the boat moves away from the beach and Ramon points his prow toward Ses Negres. We have a tail wind as we did along the Torroella coast, perhaps blowing even more fiercely now. We make a glorious entry into Sa Tuna Bay.
“That’s what you call sailing, Ramon!” says Hermós, greeting his approach to land with an enthusiasm he can barely repress. “You’re a champion…”
“That was the only way to do it…” says Ramon shyly, but confidently. “If I’d gone too far out to sea, your dinghy could have been in trouble…”
Those were the only words I heard him utter on the whole trip. He then anchored his longboat, said goodbye and scampered up the path to Begur.
Hermós is welcomed enthusiastically by the inhabitants of Sa Tuna, three or four families and two single men. Everybody knows him. When he says we’ve come from France, people’s eyes bulge out of their sockets. Pere d’En Lor, a fisherman, also known as Pere Pagell, offers us his kitchen range to make lunch. We go to his house. The kitchen fills up with people. It’s a bright, sunny, radiant day, but not one to be outside: the wind is blustery, cold and unsettling.
We buy a magnificent wreckfish from Pagell. Hermós suggests making a stew with a spoonful of aioli. Everyone offers to help. He likes that. He likes to order people about. According to him, the two most pleasant things in this world are knowing how to play the guitar and knowing how to get people to work. Meanwhile, we prepare a succulent repast.
As I’d heard a story years ago concerning Pere Pagell – to be precise, the story of a box of pound sterling – when we’re on our coffees, I ask him if he can tell us about that incident, if in fact there ever was one.
“There’s no question about there being an incident…!” says the fisherman, rather shamefaced.
Pagell is a middle-aged man of middling height, with a face covered in red freckles and a salt-and-pepper mustache and beard. He’s slim and has a stoop. He looks every inch a tireless toiler and is very poor, very fatalistic, and extraordinarily good-natured.
“Just imagine,” he says, “I was out with two other men from Begur, who have since died, fishing for lobster in the Llims’ reefs, the most distant part of the Llims. One morning, when we were raising the creels, we saw a small box floating over the sea. We gathered it up, and once we’d finished work, we broke the lock. The box was very well made from fine wood, and although it had been in the water for many a day, it hadn’t let in a single drop. There was a bundle of papers inside. We read them but couldn’t understand a word. They were pieces of white paper with beautifully shaped letters. The three of us in the boat agreed they were worthless. We threw them into the sea as if they were newspaper cuttings. But we did like the little box. We reckoned it would soon fetch ten pessetes in Begur. We threw all the bits of paper away, except for two or three that happened to drop in the bilge.
“When we reached Sa Tuna, Senyor Nap came over to the boat to see what we had caught and buy the odd fish. As we were haggling, we showed him the little box and told him about the bits of paper. ‘The papers were like this…’ I said, showing him one that was half-wet, which I rescued from under the stern seat.
“Nap gave the paper a long, hard look. He looked at it back and front and against the light. He was a man who knew about the commercial world. He did the books for the cooperative. He finally said: ‘Were all the bits of paper you threw away like these?’
“We said we thought they were. In fact, they were exactly the same. Nap looked at us sadly and very oddly: I’d never seen him give a look like that before.
“ ‘So what is that bit of paper, Senyor Nap?’ I asked.
“ ‘It’s a sterling five-pound note…’ ”
Hermós, who listened to the story spellbound, cannot contain himself: “That’s what I call playing the burro…”
“You might well say that, Hermós, yes, you might…” says Pagell’s wife blankly, as if she were talking about the weather.
When he finishes telling his story, Pagell is as dumbstruck as he was on the day that Nap made that revelation. His face becomes angelic when he says, a moment later: “In any case we’ll cock our toes up all the same…They gave us three duros for the box…”
“Three burros!” snaps Hermós furiously, his cap on the tilt.
A painful silence follows. Everyone looks at Pagell, who simply sits and stares into the bottom of his empty glass. To clear the air once and for all, I ask him: “So, Pere, what did you think of the incident? What do you think now?”
“What do you expect a poor wretch like me to think? That money…and there was a lot of it…wasn’t ours. It came from a shipwrecked vessel or someone who’d lost it! God knows!”
“And that’s all?”
“Sometimes I’ve also thought that frankly there’s no merit to being poor. Anyone, however quiet he keeps it, can be…”
After spending the afternoon with those good people, we join them for supper. When it’s time for bed, they offer us a spot by the fireside. Hermós declines.
“Pagell, there are too many rats in Sa Tuna, too many rats to be sleeping on the floor.”
“Yes, there is the odd one, Hermós, there is the odd one…” says the fisherman’s poor wife, resignedly, respectfully, routinely.
* * *
—
9 October. The wind blew briskly throughout the night, but by midday calm was restored and we set off. Ramon Pins has come down from Begur with a basket of mushrooms. He boards his longboat, starts the engine and sets out for L’Escala. We row out later. We meet a choppy sea round Cape Begur but survive. Fornells Bay gives us a light inland wind. We hoist our sail, and thus, with the help of that breeze and a placid sea, reach Port Bo in Calella by sunset. We have supper on board: a fry up of fresh fish.
After supper, Hermós goes to Can Batlle, the tavern. I imagine the warm welcomes he will receive. I try to shave by the ship’s light, which is so weak it’s a real struggle. Then I put on clean clothes and jump on land.
Through the half-open tavern door, I watch Hermós holding forth to twenty or twenty-five gawping fishermen. Marieta is looking at him – she is a tall, sturdy, stout woman, with a small mustache and a bovine stare – as if she were contemplating her own son. His speechifying must have begun some time ago, because I can see three or four empty wine glasses lined up in front of him. From the doorway – the street is deserted – I hear him recounting, in minute, childish detail our adventures in Banyuls, Port-Vendres and Collioure.
To avoid any unpleasant arguments over his version of events, I decide to go back to bed and sleep.
Early the next morning Hermós returns with a gutful of wine, clearly happy with himself and in a petulant mood. When he sees I am awake, he comes over and whispers in a hoarse, aphonic voice: “If they only knew! I really fooled them…You’d have enjoyed it!”
* * *
—
10 October. I get up thinking that our excursion must be at an end, but Hermós suggests we go to Palamós for the day in our sailing dinghy.
* * *
—
“So what do you want to do in Palamós?�
�� I ask.
“I’ve so many friends there. We’ll have a good time!”
He pauses and then, plucking up courage, though always a touch timidly, he says: “What’s more, that rascal En Gilet told me there’s a blonde around with a hairdo and fair skin to cause an earthquake…”
“You like fair skin?”
“If it’s not fair, it’s not worth a thing!”
“But Naval Command is there…How will we manage without papers?”
“No worries in Palamós. One gentleman there deals with all that, you know?”
“And who might that gentleman be?”
“Senyor Gaspar Matas, whom you’ve met already.”
We unload part of our tackle and set off midmorning with a wind from inland. However, by the Formigues strait it’s all calm and we have no choice but to pick up our oars. It’s almost a winter’s day, bright, chilly and biting.
It’s a hellish row from the Formigues strait to the port of Palamós. To make matters worse, a southwesterly wind blows up opposite Els Canyers and doesn’t go away. Fortunately, it too is light. When we reach the end of the breakwater, I feel exhausted. We make for Sa Catifa and when we’re close we see a man smoking a cigarette in the stern of a large coal barge. He is middle aged and the whitest of mustaches stands out against his coffee-colored face. His eyes are bloodshot and his ears, big, fleshy and purple. He’s wearing a black silk cap. He looks surprised the moment he spots Hermós.