by Josep Pla
*“Buc” can also mean a swarm of bees, the belly, or the hull of a ship.
OUT TO SEA
We set sail from Port de Sóller in Rufí, a small six-yard-long yacht; it was very early on a September day in 1920…the sixteenth or seventeenth, if I’m not mistaken. We were planning to reach Barcelona after dusk. There are roughly some ninety miles from Sóller to Barcelona, as a bird flies. Nothing extraordinary. Perhaps the boat was marginally on the small side.
Before we set off, Martinet, our skipper, offered us black coffee of the highest quality. Unless you’re truly exhausted, you usually sleep very uncomfortably in these small craft. Everything is narrow, poky and unyielding. Out at sea, only breezes blowing over the stern are gentle; if there are head winds, they’re most unpleasant. Apart from which, everything, especially the water, is impenetrably hard. That coffee stiffened our backbones and put to rights our aching, empty stomachs.
How wonderful coffee is at sea! It’s one of the finest discoveries of seafaring folk: starting the day drinking a cup of strong, barely sweetened black coffee on an empty belly. That beverage makes an almost immediate impact: your mind projects itself onto the outside world, you are fascinated by everything around and a gleam comes to your eyes. It’s quite the opposite of the sickly, palsied depression generated by milky coffee. Your heartbeat accelerates, your senses are fired up. You go from that limp, tottering murk when you climbed out of bed to a vigorous state, feeling ready for anything. You stop wondering whether life is wearisome, meaningless and a total waste of time. As you look out to sea, those two mouthfuls of coffee encourage you to start the new day – a mysterious new day.
The sun had yet to mount Puig Major. A predawn light in the tiny harbor glimmered over the circle of houses around that liquid shell, a gentle, tender, limpid light outlining everything in delicate colors, as if projected through the most subdued magnifying glass. Things had an infantile freshness, a quiet, passive presence that was nevertheless full of life. All was calm. A profound silence floated in the air, melded into the light, hanging there, waiting for the sun to break, the mute hum of things about to enter the flux of life. The port waters were a greenish purple flecked with red and blessed with the stillness of paradise. It was a palette reflecting the arid terrain around the harbor – rock faces the color of thyme. Fishing smacks anchored by the shore seemed so drowsy they could have been inside a glass cabinet. A brushstroke of vegetation splashed in front of the houses added a dense, moist green verging on black. To the east, above the high mountains, the sun’s invading glow echoed across the clean, gleaming sky. But it wasn’t yet a summer sun. It didn’t yet have the shimmering blue heat of a summer sky. It was brighter and greenish.
The water opposite the town was so flatironed, one image hovered above another: the real port, the cadaverously white houses, the trees, pines and encircling rocks, the rigging of the smacks at anchor, the wave of movement of the early risers – which seemed robotic from a distance – and the port reflected in the waters of the mineral gulf, a wealth of detail in a liquid film that seemed oily, morose, and static, the reflected image sometimes (just for a moment) drawn on tremulous water and then immediately given material form in that strident calm, livelier than the tangible image, more elegant, more seductive, purer than the reality – perhaps because of its very own extreme transience. It was truly bewitching, and there we were, all those on board Rufí, holding our cups, gawping at the wonders offered by Port de Sóller. Panxito, the cat sailing with us, put its front paws on the side of the boat and joined us in observing those fine things. For some spirits – and I mean mine, not the cat’s – the mere presence of the sea is enough to sink into the deliquescent bliss of the contemplative life. What are you contemplating? Nothing, in the end. Shapes that come and go, are made and unmade, are won and lost, transform and change. Everything at sea is fleeting, except the fascination generated by its resident instability.
So we drank our coffee and set sail. It was six thirtyish. In the narrow harbor mouth the soft buzz of crickets on the coast thrilled our ears for a second. We’d heard so many crickets in Majorca these seemed more like the spontaneous surfacing of a half-faded memory – memories of summer that return in winter. It was a fine day, but September is not the time for crickets. We negotiated the harbor mouth and entered a white, becalmed sea – oily, foaming waters the color of molten silver. A breeze blew from inland but was almost imperceptible. In any case, we were suddenly hit by a delicious, warm breath of air from the island’s soil, tasting of toast suffused with an intense aroma of dried herbs. Pure delight that lasted only a moment, because once the engine was switched on, we were hit by the acrid smell of burnt gas – and the vista of garages, inhospitable streets, elegant ladies and gentlemen, the miserable tedium of routine life passed before our eyes, evoked by the pituitary, like something bordering on the malevolent.
We decided to head straight on. Using chart and compass, we turned our prow toward Barcelona. We hoisted the mainsail and jib. The breeze was so slight the sails merely fluttered as we picked up speed. As the sun invaded land and sea, the calm turned stiller and duller. Joanot, Martinet’s son (an eighteen-year-old lad who had worked on trawlers out of Barcelona) took the helm. The rest of us were absorbed by the weather. Deep down we were all quite unsure: we had lingered too long on the Majorcan coast, we were behind schedule, it was late to be crossing in such a flimsy craft. In September you can take nothing for granted at sea. The autumn equinox is implacable. It can hit ten days before or ten days after you were expecting it. Those ninety miles, which at the beginning of August you could sail as easily as eating a peach, were now a huge conundrum. We sailed in silence. Only the engine chugged loudly. Martinet was sitting on the stern side of the boat and when he saw me approaching he grinned.
“For the moment, the weather is on our side. It’s calm…” he said.
“So I see.”
“We can only wait. The day’s not got going yet…”
“Outlook uncertain…”
“Right! We’ll have to see how the day turns out…We can’t say anything for sure.”
Martinet wasn’t in the mood to talk. He lit a cigarette, got up and walked toward the prow. A short while after, I saw he’d lit our small cooking stove and was about to gut a dentex we’d bought in Sóller. He threw its innards into the sea and then something unexpected happened: although we were two or three miles from the coast by now, we saw a small band of herring gulls flying behind Rufí like an aerial escort. Martinet smiled as he saw them approach. He threw some guts into the sea and the birds dived down as eagerly as ever. Their main occupation must be tailing ships. They followed us for ages. They came close to the boat’s side, apparently keeping us company.
A herring gull is not a pretty animal. A white-headed gull, even less so. It’s a powerful, ravenous bird, which I personally like because it gives me a feeling of freedom – a feeling of freedom I would have liked to experience firsthand and never could.
I was spellbound by those birds. They followed us, flying slowly, sometimes gliding, staring hard in case a tidbit fell into the sea. When that happened, or when Martinet simply looked as if he was about to throw something, they all dove frantically toward the water. If there was prey, they eagerly fought over it amid swirling, frothing waters. Almost always, the prize was carried off by the wiliest bird, the one who had only watched the skirmish engaged in by two others. The wiliest would retreat and fly away in order to eat in a more relaxed fashion. But often another swooped down from behind and forced the morsel to drop from its complacent beak. It wasn’t an edifying spectacle. When the birds dove as a result of a gesture that led to nothing, they emerged from the water resignedly. The deceit hadn’t discouraged them. They continued to follow Rufí as if one had to rely on mere appearances.
I looked at the herring gulls and thought of the huge literary trail those birds had inspired. They may not have filled as many sheets of
paper as nightingales, because the nightingale has been sung by every literary school, and the gull only by the Romantics, but the gull has been used to express all manner of superficial sentiment. Then, on a lesser scale, come swallows, and on a par with them, owls. If a library of the texts inspired by these birds were to fall on us, we’d be in a parlous state, even though their subject is so wingèd. Images of these birds have helped to enlighten human feelings. Naturalists have described them with their customarily cold lexicon. But we still know very little about the lives of birds – not a scrap, in fact.
In my view, there are three kinds of gulls, though that’s only my humble personal opinion.
White-headed gulls – the biggest, with long, sturdy bodies and a huge wingspan – are the most becoming, and nothing much is known about them. It’s not right to say they are marine birds, that they live exclusively in the sea. More precisely, they are birds that belong to maritime and land areas. They make their nests in the most recondite, remote, inaccessible places on the coast and are totally antisocial. It’s true that they’re visibly parasitical to boats and hunt fish, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also head inland. If they fly above an olive grove, when the olives are ripening, white-headed gulls will devour them in large quantities. The people of Cadaqués know this only too well. If olive groves are in their flight path, you’ll find a large number of olive pits on coastal areas frequented by these birds. They like fish and they like olives; in this way, they are the forerunners of individuals who like to sit on a café terrace at aperitif time eating olives stuffed with anchovies.
Obviously, people aren’t necessarily aware of this, because these gulls are obsessively eye-catching over the sea, so clearly profiled you want to sketch them, whereas on land, in the depths of an olive grove, they aren’t so visible. Conversely, our eyes are so used to seeing them fly over the sea, as part of the horizon’s furniture, that we can’t imagine what they look like when they’re pecking olives on land.
Their most aristocratic – or literary – moment is when they pursue ships like decorative predators. Their resilience in flight is surprising; they can follow in a boat’s wake hour after hour, especially when gliding on a tail wind. Their loyalty to shipping is not all romantic, even though any bird in flight arouses a drop of romanticism within us: their fidelity is fostered, in fact, by the scraps thrown out by vessels. In this activity, white-headed gulls have achieved a degree of guile that I have repeatedly observed. They manage to adapt their lives to the timetables of the ships that pass across their field of vision. All sailors in coastal vessels have acknowledged this. If a vessel appears in their sights in the morning or at noon – I mean at breakfast or lunchtime – the gulls abandon their rocky hollows and throw themselves into the chase. If a vessel passes by midafternoon, they take no notice, don’t budge, don’t shift, because they know they won’t find anything succulent in the foam from the screw and rudder. And that is no fantasy but a reality that’s been confirmed time and again. Poets are duty-bound to ignore this, as is the poet manqué in every sailor or passenger, because, after all, nothing can be more agreeable at the end of a long sea voyage than the appearance, just before land hales, of gulls flying through the air. It’s as if they have come to welcome us personally, to tell us that family and friends will be delighted to see us again. They come to eat, but they seem to come to welcome us. Splendid! It would be folly not to accept appearances. Keeping images, symbols of hope, alive is a sensible, practical activity.
Fishermen love these large, lean birds, with their steely cartilages and their bitter-tasting flesh and the forlorn, cynical stances they adopt when resting, for the same reason: they bring hope. Their presence in a specific area of sea is almost a guaranteed sign of fish – of great shoals of fish swimming near the surface. If dolphins accompany the gulls, then there are fish for sure. However, dolphins are such stupidly greedy animals, are such a blind, disruptive force, eat in such a noisy, disorderly way, that they scatter the shoal and make their capture tentative and precarious.
In the placid calm of June, a joint attack of dolphins and gulls on a mass of sardines or anchovies swimming close to the surface is a spectacle that helps one to understand the meaning of life. Dolphins attack head on, swoop in viscous spirals, gobble savagely. Their path, three fathoms under water, is marked on the surface by a trail of bubbles and white froth and the oily outline of the area where the fish swim as they feel themselves under attack and scatter in every direction. The shoal disintegrates and the fish escape in a frenzy. In the meantime the gulls, with one wing folded and the other in the air, at a forty-five-degree tilt, make the fish leap like silver coins, amid the turbulent, swirling, foaming water.
But all this is a frantic spectacle that’s hardly edifying or exemplary. It is nature unleashed, shamelessly displaying itself, in all the biological glory of animal might. For a fisherman, it is a spectacle that leads to scant profit and brings little hope.
Dolphins spoil everything, like too much tomato in a stew. When gulls operate in isolation, released from the predatory dolphins, they offer more potential. Thus, when they swoop vertically, at dawn or dusk, on an area of sea not scored by fins, a nearby longboat can live in hope. “Now we’ll be able to pay,” thinks the fisherman, affectionately eyeing nature, “our most pressing debts and the one hundred eighty-seven coffees recorded in the IOU book.” These are the expectations of well-minded folk. And when the gulls resurface with a couple of fat, silvery sardines in their indistinctly yellow, gilt-tin beaks, appearance becomes reality. The sardines are like flaccid, drooping mustaches on the aging faces of those big birds – mustaches that give them each a sinister, scowling aspect.
Then there are the herring gulls, from the less precipitous coast. They appear with their offspring at low tide, when an intense aroma wafts inland from the many reefs jutting out of the water. Even in the most crowded parts of the shoreline, you can often see four or five young herring gulls, the size of a year-old partridge, carefully poised on a microscopic, glazed archipelago, while the parents, on sterner, bulkier rocks, seem to watch assiduously over them. That’s when the youngsters experience their apprenticeship in cunning and patience. They spend hour after hour – if the parents don’t signal danger – fervently gawping at nearby occurrences. The soporific, trusting progress of a small, aquatic monster swimming close to the surface makes them nervous and lively. Any movement in the sea – a fish, a shadow, a glint in the water – makes them move their legs and wave their wings. If there is a real possibility of a catch, they shift from contemplation to a dive in a second. They catch it or don’t. It makes no odds. It’s about learning the trade, honing their skills…Suddenly the old parent birds signal to their chicks – a sign I’ve never been able to pin down (maybe a faint, almost human cry of distress) – and the little ones fly up and after their parents with a swiftness and sense of obedience those papas and mamas on land who spend so much on educating their children would envy.
Then there is the third class of gulls, a kind of degenerate white-headed gull that lives out at sea, if it can earn its keep there, and, if it can’t, in the lakes and lagoons of the hinterland. Like those intellectuals classified as alimentary empiricists, as yours truly was, from an early age by the high priests of puritanical rhetoric, a category I will never be able to throw off, however many years go by.
In the spring, when the sea abounds in fish swimming on the surface, these birds could be mistaken for heroic, upstanding white-headed gulls. However, when the sea empties out, their resistance is weak: they look for waters that can feed them. In barren periods of autumn and winter, they fly inland and you often spot them in murky inland marshes, sewer-fed harbor waters and mudflats. If pickings are slim, they fly farther inland, following the course of rivers. You might even see them in inland cities, as long as they have even the slightest bit of water. When the weather is poor, you’ll glimpse them in small farmyards mingling with the most stupidly tame and well
-drilled domestic animals. Then you observe the strangest sight: faced with unbridled nature, the farm animals go wild in a way and make a bid for freedom, while the gulls, who are usually self-sufficient, embrace a more domesticated livelihood. You get that curious mixture of geese, ducks, gulls, hens, chickens, pigs, cows, mules and horses that you encounter on land that is close to the sea. The mix is short-lived: when the land dries out, the gulls fly off.
These birds are pulled by two opposing incentives: freedom and domesticity. Like humans they face an unpleasant, insoluble, eternal dilemma, and like humans they resolve this dilemma based on two factors: their mood and their level of hunger.
* * *
—
The white-headed gulls distracted us for a good while. Then they took flight and abandoned us.
Meanwhile, we’d sailed a number of miles amid the most extraordinary stillness. The day had turned cotton-woolly, silent, atonal. A low ceiling of white clouds had covered the sky. The blue of the sea had grayed. The light had dimmed. The lines of the horizon had shredded and disappeared. We could no longer see the coast of Majorca: the island’s lofty northern coast had floated for a time between sky and land, like a purple cloud, and now it had disappeared from sight. But the becalmed sea was literally astonishing: there wasn’t a breath of air, the yard was still and Rufí moved with limp sails, driven by a noisy engine that clattered annoyingly.
Martinet sat on the stern side smoking cigarettes. He was watching the weather out of the corner of his eye. He seemed content, and then not so. When I glanced quizzically his way, he said: “It’s so calm!”