by Josep Pla
When I walked into the cabin, Mascarell asked: “What’s happening? Where are we?”
“Why don’t you try to get some kip? It’s a quarter to one. Do you want anything to eat or drink?”
“Is it still as windy? Is the sea still so rough?” my friend asked dreamily.
“Not so much now…”
“Where are we? Are we in sight of the light on the headland?”
“We’re sailing along the northern coast of Majorca, but I couldn’t tell you exactly where we are.”
I added one or two other things but soon saw he wasn’t responding.
* * *
—
I struggled to get to sleep but finally did so out of physical exhaustion rather than real sleepiness. I could see the red glow from the sidelights on the water through the porthole next to my bunk swaying up and down, and that made me anxious. Rufí was pitching and swaying like a drunken boat, which stopped me from really sleeping.
The next morning I opened my eyes and was surprised by the sense of peace surrounding me. The first thing I realized was that they hadn’t called me at four as we’d agreed. Why hadn’t they? It was quite dark in the cabin. And so peaceful! There was a palpable, physical peace, a force that closed my eyes again. I reacted and, looking out onto the quarterdeck, saw Mascarell dressed for city life and putting things in his suitcase.
“Where are we, Mascarell? What happened?”
“As you’ll see, we’re in Portopetro, one of the biggest ports on the Mediterranean.”
“Why didn’t you give me a shout?”
“You were sleeping so soundly nobody dared.”
“So where is Martinet?”
“He’s gone to see his family. He said he wanted to sleep at home tonight, as the north wind had brought us back here.”
“What about Joanot?”
“He’s in the bow, catching beltfish.”
“But what on earth happened, Mascarell?”
“Martinet will tell you at his leisure. All I know is that when the north wind began to die down in Alcúdia Bay, at dawn, given that we were off Alcúdia, Martinet decided to sail on a few more miles, and so here we are. We sailed here, with a light northeasterly.”
“And what are you doing now, Mascarell?”
“I’m packing my case. We should reach Palma before evening to catch the mail boat. We’ll be in Barcelona by the morning, even though there’s a north wind blowing. I’ve hired a small cart to take us to S’Alqueria, where we’ll try to find a taxi. Come on! Get your things together, we’ve no time to waste.”
“What about Rufí?”
“Martinet will bring her to Barcelona, if that’s what he decides. And if he doesn’t, they will take the mail boat when they feel like it. In that case, she’ll stay anchored here. A relative of Martinet’s will take charge of her.”
“Mascarell, I can see you’ve been busy.”
“You bet, my boy! I’ve convinced myself that dry land is the thing. The sea’s not worth a puff of tobacco smoke.”
Mascarell showed he was an admirable organizer. The next morning we disembarked in Portal de la Pau.
* * *
—
Two or three years after these events, I bumped into Martinet one day on the Pla de Palau.
I asked after Rufí and Senyor Mascarell.
“Rufí is still in Portopetro,” said Martinet. “In the summer the kids dive off her. Apparently there’s a man who wants to use her to breed mussels, if Senyor Mascarell agrees to a deal. He’s yet to get round to it!”
“It’s been ages,” I said in turn, “since I knew the whereabouts of Senyor Mascarell. He spends his summers in the mountains. He doesn’t want to hear any mention of the sea. His obsession was a flash in the pan…”
“That’s how it goes…” said Martinet, with a laugh.
“Anyway, Martinet, I’d like to tell you one thing, now that we’ve bumped into each other. We should have sailed close to land the day that north wind started to blast.”
“No, we shouldn’t have! I couldn’t do that without risking losing the boat.”
“In any case, the boat was lost. We could have reached the harbor mouth with a small sail.”
However, Martinet was in a hurry: he had to go and paint the factory owner’s boat. When we said goodbye, he looked at me rather standoffishly: the way a mariner looks at a beach angler. I accepted that with good grace, because only a fool moves things from their rightful place.
SMUGGLING
That house in the neighborhood of El Pianc in Cadaqués was one of the first I ever rented. There are people who remember the various abodes they’ve had, the houses where they’ve lived, in minute detail. I wish I had that kind of memory. Curiously, nonetheless, I do remember the house in El Pianc very clearly for a series of circumstances quite unrelated to the house itself.
It was clear that the americano who built the house had been been nurturing that dream for some time. It was a large house, made from first-rate materials and in a visible location. When something is a long-standing focus of dreams, it ends up assuming a lavish air. Situated in the highest point of El Pianc, this house enjoyed wonderful views over Cadaqués Bay, the town and Pení mountains.
The basement rooms, cut out of the slate, were spacious and dark, with a big cistern in their depths that collected roof water. It must have been a huge cistern, because when it rained and water sluiced in, it made a dull, sepulchral sound, a scary, thunderous boom. Obviously, the americano had intended to use those rooms to lodge (in winter) his boat, fishing tackle, firewood, barrels of wine and drums of oil. Unfortunately that fine fellow never saw any of his hopes fulfilled because he died in Argentina before making his definitive return. Nor did his children ever come back, so the house became a property rented out over the years to a succession of tenants.
It was, then, a fine house, though there was little in the way of contents: simply whatever people had left behind. To live there, you had to bring the indispensable – which is what I did – the few belongings I possessed in L’Escala. They didn’t fill the place; rather, they seemed out of place and pointless. Most rooms continued to be completely empty; I don’t remember ever opening their doors.
On the first floor there was a large, luminous central dining room, with one bedroom on either side. That suite opened out onto three magnificent balconies on a façade that looked expressly built for a life of contemplation: they framed such intriguing vistas.
One of the dining room’s side walls had a rather pretentiously curved fireplace, and its mantelpiece was home to a pseudo-artistic clock that was perpetually halted at 5:25. That figure of 5:25 remained etched in my memory as a result of a later coincidence I shall describe in due course. It was a curious clock: the outside was normal with a bronze frame, face and hands, but it lacked any inner mechanism. Somebody must have removed it and then abandoned the fictive clock, a disemboweled clock. A white wooden table stood in the center with four reed chairs, beneath a wire hanging from the plain ceiling supporting an electric bulb inside an arty pink glass capsule, like a small engraved bell. That bare item, hanging in too large a space, struck me as rather depressing. It was all that remained of the magnificent light installed by the americano.
But that dining room did have one good item: a settee, a Cadaqués settee, of carved, light-brown mahogany, which had probably come from Italy, a somewhat shabby, appealing settee, with a small couch upholstered in frayed green cretonne. It was a perfect size and really comfortable, adapting as it did to the human body, and even aroused feelings of genuine affection. But the odd aspect of that piece of furniture was the way it belonged to the house’s jetsam – things people had in turn forsaken. I asked the owner’s agent who had made the mistake of leaving the settee, but he couldn’t enlighten me.
The walls would have been bare too, if it hadn’t been for t
he previous tenant – a Swedish painter – who left three or four unframed canvases he’d begun hanging there, attempts to represent olive trees that were in a process of coming into being, in a hazy, intangible state yet to emerge from the murk. If it hadn’t been for some vivid green brushstrokes over the haze, you might have concluded that they were canvases that had been erased rather than just begun. When I gazed at those abandoned attempts, I sensed that the painter had decided to say farewell by leaving a memento in the house, but the memento was timid and inchoate, like the memory of the features of someone you saw walk by years ago, just that once.
The first thing I did when I went to live in the house was to drag the settee over to the balcony and place a table in front of the window so I could work there. As the house faced south and received the sun full on in summer, I hung a gauze curtain over the window to soften the glare. When the weather cooled, it was an ideal place to be. Ideal for idling rather than working. Between one thing and another, however, I spent many engagingly solitary hours on that settee with my papers and tomes on the table. Toward the end of September, clear of summer haze, the Pení mountains regained the purple, bluey-mauve of flowering thyme. Against that backdrop, the whiteness of the houses seemed to blanche and become a light tawny gold or pale brown. Toward dusk, the waters of the bay were streaked with the pink of new wine. It was a time when Cadaqués was silent, peaceful and still. From my balcony I could see a few small figures strolling along the Baluard quayside. The air turned purple. The southwesterly breeze died out on that path. I had visited the Oberland of Bern, that flower of the Alps, in the spring of that year and felt the Alps were radiant. When I compared these memories to ones I had of the Pyrenees – and in Cadaqués I was in the midst of the Pyrenees – I felt the Alps were mountains with clear, uplifting strata while the Pyrenees were a depressing purple. Though that’s purely a personal opinion.
It was at the start of one of those autumnal twilights – early October – when, stretched out on the settee, contemplating the thyme-hued Pení, I heard a whistle that shattered the calm as if someone had just fired a rocket. People were harvesting and working in the olive groves, and Cadaqués seemed empty, if not deserted. My senses had pleasantly dozed off in the silence, and that strident sound so close by startled me. I went out on the balcony. Nobody was on the promenade. I couldn’t see anything special. A sailing boat was slowly entering the bay on the evening sirocco. I thought it was a foreign vessel and stared at it. At that exact moment they tightened the down-haul and were furling the jib sail after steering into the wind. I heard them cast the anchor into the sea. The vessel was in the entrance to El Pianc, directly opposite the house where I lived. There was no better place to keep your boat in Cadaqués harbor.
I soon realized the boat was the Mestral, a small thirty-footer I’d had built in L’Escala and later sold to a Roses fisherman by the name of Baldiri Cremat. This Baldiri was the bravest, wildest sailor in the port of Roses. I immediately knew the whistle I’d heard was his way of greeting me. Baldiri was good company but could be disconcerting.
However, all that rushed to the back of my mind as my eyes affectionately watched the Mestral. She was a small Majorcan keel boat with a bridge, excellent for sailing, one Vadoret had built with exquisite good taste, a boat that had given me so much joy and one I had sold because I’d had no choice, very, very reluctantly. The Mestral is the centerpiece of my memories of life in L’Escala.
When the master carpenter was making it, I spent many an hour in his workshop in La Punta. I even lived in the area. Spending time with shipwrights and caulkers is such fun. That is, in small workshops on the coast. When they are too big, boats become bulky affairs, part of heavy industry. The construction of an iron vessel creates an infernal racket and is best seen in a movie house. Now, small shipyards are a delight. Timber brings a lovely smell. The saw drones monotonously, albeit musically. The tar spitting out from the fire arouses your appetite and, if you have a cold, cleans out your tubes. In winter, the sawdust and wooden chips warm your feet. The caulker’s hammer isn’t deafening. It’s a sharp, cheerful, almost rhythmic tap that never annoys. It’s enthralling to see a boat of human proportions being constructed. It requires specialist knowledge – they are true tradesmen. It is a pleasure to see artisans at work, much more of a pleasure to see an artisan at work than a regiment of workers lifting picks or spades. Artisans have created the most beautiful, most graceful, most decorous things in this world. What machines make is nasty, horrible, depressing and fatally coarse.
When a customer appeared, the shipwright would say: “What do you want, senyor? A sailing boat or motor-driven boat? A Majorcan keelboat or a flat bottom for trawling? There are many kinds of boat, but no two are ever the same. Tell me the length, width and depth you require, I’ll make a model and then we’ll see whether what you want is a vessel or a frog. Because it might be that what you’re really after is a tin crate. Individual whims usually get it wrong.”
“Oh, come on!”
“It’s obvious…It’s what I was just saying: there are no two boats that are identical, not even those that are mass produced. Even machines can’t produce units that are the same. On the other hand, it’s extremely risky if you want to make something different to rely on individual fancies, because you never know what the end product will be. You and I can tell a beautiful woman from one that is not. And that can help us see whether what you have in mind is a vessel or a tin crate.”
“So there are no rules?”
“Very few. As few as there are for predicting how a marriage will turn out. Tell me what you want and I’ll make a model. We can discuss it and then proceed. A boat must be built to sail, and that is no fantasy: it’s for real.”
Once he obtained what he’d asked of me, the shipwright set to work, took out his sheets of paper, made his drawings and calculations. That was his craft, linked to innate insight and the experience he might have accrued sending boats, in any weather, out to sea. “In any weather” goes without saying because you rarely ever sail in complete calm. The calculations and drawings are the practical demonstration of the insight the artisan will call upon when he is actually building the boat. Later, those calculations will be transferred to the timber – which, preferably, is always oak – or the frame timbers, or ribs, as summer holidaymakers call them, that make up the structure. Everything will depend on the grace and solidity of that structure, of the assembling of the frame timbers: the boat’s seaworthiness, its safety, elegance and comfort.
The frame timbers must come before the keel. If you want to build a boat in scatter-brained fashion, first put the keel in place, then attach the frame timbers as best you can. But if you want to build the genuine article, first build the structure and then mount it on a firm, stable keel. In any case, the keel is important. It’s always best if it’s made from a single piece of wood. I’ve seen a thirteen-yard keel made from a single trunk – from a magnificent tree. The wood must be from a first-rate tree. The keel is mounted on the teeth of two pinewood pivots that have been sunk into the ground. This is known as “laying” the keel. Then the timber frame is fitted, like reconstructing a sliced melon. I use the melon simile because I think it is most apt. At any rate, try to ensure the boat doesn’t look like a melon, especially a watermelon.
Fitting the frame is a very delicate operation and requires great precision. The ribs, in the center of the keel, have the open, arrogant shape of the horns of a well-endowed ox. Near the prow, they are at a sharper angle that gradually closes as you draw near to the stem. On the stern side, their form will depend on the shape of stern. What kind of stern do you want? If the boat is motor driven, it will end in a flat surface vertical to the water. If you want to sail and win regattas, you will try to eliminate as many surfaces that involve friction as possible. In a fishing boat, you will shape the stern so it is best fitted for fishing. “England is a country,” said Voltaire, “that has a single sauce and many
religions.” A vessel is an object with a single keel and many kinds of sterns.
Once the timbers are fitted to the basic tree and prow, from stem to stern, the ends of the ribs must be attached at the height of the deck – or bridge – using the strake. The strake runs at a height that depends on the boat’s depth. This strake is the thin, curved timber plank that seals the frame from stern to prow at the top. Once the strake of a boat has been laid, you have a perfect sense of its future shape. You mustn’t confuse the strake with the gunwale. The gunwale is what covers the strake. The strake is what secures the deck and the bridge. Once it is in place, the boat looks like a cage made of curved bars. Then you can see the vessel’s structure and say whether it has turned out to be a frog or a thing of grace, whether it pleases the eye or not. That’s the time to make changes. It will be too late after.
If the boat’s shape is acceptable, then the planking is put in place – that is, the cage formed by the timber frames is covered. There are outside and inside planks: generally they are pinewood and are fixed to the timber ribs and layered in order. Once the vessel is covered in that way, you can say it is finished. Then the building of the deck and gunwale require careful attention. As well as the caulking. Applying tar and paint are entertaining activities.
Once all that is ready, the innards of the vessel must be created, and that’s the job of the master carpenter: the engine must be put in place together with berths, storage cupboards and the infinite elements a well-made vessel must have. It is useful to consult catalogues from England. All these features will reveal the owner’s good taste and seafaring ability. You only have to step foot on a boat to see whether the owner is a man of the sea or simply wants to use it to go out and eat a paella once a year with his friends in some corner of a foul-smelling harbor.