by Josep Pla
How did he find the channel out of the pond in the pitch black of night? I couldn’t explain that either. I simply remember that when the prow was in the breach, its back to the wind, he howled like a wild animal: “Lengthen the jib, Pau!”
The jib sail was lengthened, the prow of the Mestral rose, and we passed through the strait in a cloud of sand, as if the current carried us out in its arms. Once back in the sea, he let the boat be driven by the tail wind for ages. We sailed out to sea, and suddenly to the south, a quarter to our west, the beam from the light on Cape Béar appeared.
“Ah!” said Baldiri, taking a deep breath, waving his hand in the air. And while he steered the boat toward land (I imagined he was heading to Sant Pere de Roda), a huge squall of rain crashed over his back. He was unmoved. I suspect the worst was over from his point of view. The key moment had been getting out of the rat trap of that pond. A difficult journey lay ahead, but the contest was won.
We sheltered by his side. There was a driving wind and huge sea current. The Mestral sailed using all her wonderful qualities. She descended from the crest of a wave like a frail feather. When she came down like that – and the prow lurched – we felt an emptiness in the pits of our stomachs, and our hearts thudded. The skipper was alert to such lurches. He had tied a rope to the helm to keep it straight and controlled the rope with his hand. It was a real effort for his amazing arm to keep the vessel on course when the current was battering her. But he rarely failed.
All of a sudden he asked for coffee and liquor. We’d passed on supper. It was a peculiar longing that was difficult to satisfy. However, Saldet couldn’t resist trying to appease him.
“I suppose you won’t mind waiting half an hour…” replied Pau.
“Or even an hour…You make the coffee as best you can, and God will reward you.”
Soon we could see thick smoke wafting over the deck by the mast area.
The problem was always the same: there was nothing you could do or say; you could only long for the pleasant things in life. Squalls whipped our faces; bundles of water keeled us over; we felt a kind of nighttime, salty cold in the marrow of our bones…and could only longingly recall those pleasant things. The pitching of the wave-battered Mestral forced us to hang on to those memories of past comforts ever more intensely.
Our mugs arrived half-empty, but the emptiness was compensated by large shots of a dry, metallic liquor. Baldiri reckoned it was sweet and bland. “It tastes of palm fibers…” he said. “On land all drink seems strong…but men have yet to invent a drink to match the blasts of the mistral.”
Wind and the sea carried us along.
Baldiri stared toward the southeast. When you’re sailing on a night like that, your mind dreams of lights on land, longs for the lighthouse that must be coming – the lighthouse of hope.
“Did you see it?” he shouted excitedly, all of a sudden.
“See what?”
“It’s Cape Creus…!” he said, putting the tiller aside, abandoning Sant Pere de Roda as our destination and pointing the prow to the light he’d just glimpsed in the distance.
A few minutes later, the glow was confirmed.
“Hey, Pau, my friend, take the tiller for a while…Now we know where we are, I want to have a smoke…And you, my good mate…” he said, ramping up his chumminess toward me “Don’t you move one inch. You’ll be fine under the prow. Don’t be afraid of leaks…The Mestral is well caulked…”
It would have been absurd to congratulate him. Meaningless too. Anyway, I was quite exhausted. I retired to my usual lair – the funnel-like hole that’s so comfortable when you’re familiar with its rough corners and that cossets me on good nights and bad. As I took off my sopping clothes – bumping my head now and then – I felt a pleasant sensation of comfort. The Mestral’s pendular swaying no doubt helped me sleep like a log.
* * *
—
The next day, when I woke up, I wasn’t sure whether it was morning or afternoon. When I poked my nose outside, I saw we were anchored by El Jonquet in Mar d’Avall in Cadaqués and sheltered from wind and sea. The wind was still gusting; you could tell that from the silvery, white-foam color of the olive trees in Guillola Bay and the limpid, bright-blue sky.
The immediate air I breathed was full of a delicious aroma. Saldet was preparing a sea-bream stew with a few potatoes. The skipper had caught the sea bream fishing with a rod. Rod-fished sea bream is the most delicious fish in the ocean. Saldet alternated his ladling maneuvers with a careful polishing of the gramophone horn purchased from the North African in Port-Vendres. The skipper had asked him to give it a rub with a cloth. It was a splendid, exuberantly green, white-striped horn – the only item we’d brought back from our voyage.
When it was lunchtime, Baldiri said: “We could have gone to Port Lligat, but given last night’s weather, I’m sure they’d have assumed we were coming from France…So we’ve landed up in El Jonquet, a solitary spot, except for the flies, naturally. It’s a bit farther for you to go, senyor, and a rougher ride, but it’s what there is…and won’t take a day.”
We said our farewells midafternoon. Baldiri planned to leave soon after in order to reach Roses in time for supper. I grabbed my small suitcase and blankets and set out on the path to Cadaqués. I reached the town via the slate of El Poal. I didn’t meet a living soul. Darkness was already falling. I enthusiastically welcomed the silence.
As soon as I reached my house in El Pianc and switched on the light in the dining room, I saw the fictitious clock on the mantelpiece. As usual, it said 5:25. How odd! I thought. That was the exact time the Mestral had entered the Salses Ponds.
In any case, that vessel had been christened, inspired by the mistral that had blown Senyor Víctor from Cadaqués to Civitavecchia. Now she had received her confirmation after a similar phenomenon had blown us home, in fits and starts, from the Salses Ponds.
STILL LIFE WITH FISH
Then, my dear friend, we lived in Fornells – not in the Fornells that is in Menorca, a shabby, squalid spot, but in the Fornells in our country, a sheltered, delightful place. After wandering the world for so long, after so much futile, wearisome activity, it was time for me to stop for a moment and rest awhile. It was the right decision: I went for a couple of weeks and was still there a year later, far from hunger, work and stress.
At the time Fornells had no church, no public clock, no local government office, no embodiment of legal authority. There wasn’t even a cemetery, which is surprising, given there are so many cemeteries in this world. It meant those of us who lived there thought we would never die. If in the event anyone did, tears prompted by the presence of death turned to icy anguish and the coffin was carried along the most unlikely paths. There was an excellent source of water, under pine trees, with a large wash place where young girls with gleaming teeth and moist gums went to bathe. In winter when the gods brought downpours, there was a rush of water like a woman’s translucent thigh, green-blue veins under a pinkish body of water.
Small, nondescript houses were scattered around, connected to a distant hamlet by a series of tracks and shortcuts. There wasn’t anything one could describe as an appreciable urban mass. Men and women, old and young, all told we must have been some thirty-five individuals, and the houses we occupied were detached and separated by some distance. It would have been an exaggeration to call it a village: they were simply fishermen’s houses set on a rocky landscape, in the most sheltered spots, surrounded by evergreen mastic trees – small, whitewashed houses clinging to the ground, roofs touching the rock face, doors open to the sea, pine branches giving a little shade to their façades. Rather than a strategy to communicate with others, those houses represented a way of living extremely solitary lives.
Everything that goes with human life was there: no house was without a cat or two; three or four dogs, of complex, mongrel stock, had settled in the area; a cockerel heralded our daw
n; two old, shaggy, good-natured asses seemed like remnants from a past long destroyed. Culture – what people generally call culture – was little in evidence. There were no teachers and the laws related to state education were ignored. If they wanted to study, children would have had to cover seven to ten or twelve miles there and back: common sense dictated that they went when they had nothing else to do, and even then it wasn’t a foregone conclusion. We didn’t even have a single wretched volume of the Espasa-Calpe dictionary to consult. We received one or other of the daily newspapers, very late, in the form of wrapping around rice, noodles or beans, which we would skim or daydream over – if their dense pages didn’t first disappear into the kitchen stove or the fire in the hearth. Women, in particular, had no respect for the printed page and were always short of paper. It is undeniable: Fornells, in that era, was no hotbed of culture. Nevertheless, if you wanted life with the taste of oblivion and remoteness that nervous exhaustion craves, it was a wonderfully mellow place.
Sheltered from northerly winds by the Cape Begur cliffs, the land sits there like an earthenware dish on its geological base – a sunny dish, open to the sun rising across the sea and closed to the sunset by the mountains. The land is poor but has been admirably cultivated with the noblest of crops: ancient, silvery olive groves, carob trees, cypresses, evergreen pines, almond trees and vines. Contemplated through these majestic forms, which sometimes would bend under the richness of their sap, the sea was something bright and beautiful, like an unexpected, reassuring gift from nature. In early February, when almond trees blossomed above the small ears and beady eyes of broad bean plants, the sea loomed across a pink haze. Bathed in the wintry sun, the honeyed yellow of the mimosas gleamed. Bronzed green oleanders had a reddish glow. Agave plants on rocky ridges were streaked with an egg-yolk yellow. A scent of rosemary, gorse and lavender floated in the air along paths melding with pine resin: it was a refreshing smell, a tangy, innocent delight abroad.
As there were once lots of vineyards in the area, there are still remnants of drystone walls. Among the old stones, in ravines and gullies, were small, exquisitely kept gardens with small fences to keep off the wind, where a golden light seemed to linger willfully. The produce is first rate. Peas are particularly sweet, subtly so. The Fornells asses labor slowly away in the bright light that hangs over the fenced-off plots. Sometimes, toward dusk, their loud, spectacular hee-haws fill the air, as if a force of nature is being unleashed. Then everything wakes up from its earthly, vegetative slumbers. The asses’ braying reaches to the sky and the small, spongy clouds sailing by appear to halt for a moment. Everything tenses edgily. It is but a moment…When the asses decide their performance is at an end, they let their ears and tails droop, gaze sadly, if benignly, at the outside world and return to the juicy grass.
In such off-the-map byways, existence moves between two extremes: on the one hand, there are lethargy and tedium; on the other, your curiosity is sparked by next to nothing, by the tiniest things, far removed from your own interests. As life passes by, you realize how important lethargy is. Nobody knows how to resist tedium. Life has shown you that some of the perennial sources of anguish are futile agitation, gratuitous movement and other people’s involvement in your life. Even so, you are unable to resist that numbing sensation in your heart when you feel time passing by. Men and women cannot resist lethargy because they think – for no reason at all – that lethargy is like a slow death. Thus, we escape by opening the door to invasion by others. We escape, only to suffer more. That is why I believe that one of the surest touchstones to measure a man’s strength is his ability to resist the onset of lethargy. In Fornells you needed to possess that strength, and openly so. It was an astonishingly tedious spot.
The moment would come in March when you felt the fire in the hearth was an irritant. It was time to build the pine-branch shade over the front of the house. Green was the pine, and pungent its aroma. The operation signaled the start of good weather. The first becalmed seas arrived after the spring equinox. Sometimes that stillness was so profound it lent the lacquered water a soft bluey green. With the sun on your back, your eyes dazzled, you’d be fascinated by the fabulous underwater shapes you could see from the coast. These were rare, unforgettable moments curtailed by the onset of Lenten winds and choppy seas. Human life flitted beneath the shade from the pine branches. Braziers were good company. It was an excellent place to live and let live, to watch things of the land and the sea. Everything invited you to lead a tranquil life and never rush. The sun warmed; the wind caressed. Sometimes you put the noisy old alarm clock in a prominent spot and looked at its hands now and then. How satisfying it was to look at a clock and be able to say: “Only five minutes have slipped by!” It is so pleasant to feel that time isn’t marching on so speedily. It isn’t easy to enter that state. If you succeed, it helps if you want to lead a life without stress. The person who can say: “It’s been a wonderful day…I’ve been delightfully lackadaisical…” is wise, full of insight and first-rate company.
In Fornells, that fantastically lethargic place, I came to embrace the charms of tedium. Giving time a slower rhythm can be sweeter than honey. Feeling you are alive is to feel you are dying, and awareness of the heart’s ticktock prompts unbearable anguish. In the deep lethargy of a small backwater, that ticktock is barely perceptible. The slightest thing catches your attention and sparks your curiosity. I remember so many things that have entirely vanished. I remember the mystery in the air created by a bright January moon; the voluptuous light of spring on the almond trees’ pink blouses; the progress of a lateen sail across the bay; the look in the eyes of a man facing a plate of plump grilled sardines; glistening water streaming off pine trees after a night of slow, silent rain; cats dozing by the fireside at winter twilight. But perhaps my most vivid memories are connected to the world of fish and fishing. In my memory those things are inseparable from the way fish were cooked – the simple, delicious Fornells way of cooking fish.
* * *
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The dusky grouper is the best fish in the Ampurdan. The first time I saw one swimming – in the waters around Cape Begur – I was fascinated by its shape and power. It has a huge head, a muscular body and dark skin covered in yellow blotches. It swept across the limpid water like a phosphorescent flash of lightning – as if the friction from its viscous form had created a beam of light in the luminous water. Dusky groupers can be caught on a longline hook or with a line with bait trailed strategically in front of their lairs, because, it is worth noting, those groupers always live in hollows and caverns along the coast. The depth of their lairs varies constantly: they can be very deep but are often very shallow, three or four yards down, and little more. That’s why on days when the water is clear, it is relatively easy to contemplate the fascinating spectacle of a grouper swimming. They are difficult to land, if they’re not hunted with a creel, because they are so strong: when they sense they’ve been hooked, their first reaction is to enter their lair or squeeze into a crack in the rock. In such cases the danger is that the line hooking them will be severed as it chafes against a rocky ridge. When you feel that first powerful tug on your hand, you must land it quickly if you are to stymie the fish’s stratagem. There is a complete division of opinion about the best way to prepare a dusky grouper. Fortunately, it is excellent however it is cooked. Some reckon the best rice in the world is that cooked with a grouper’s head. I’m also of that opinion. A grouper’s head and a handful of rice is a thing of beauty. Others prefer it stewed. In any case, it is such a meaty, tasty fish it can’t be bettered fried.
In Fornells, the common dentex is highly prized. Is it as good as they say? I don’t think so. In stews – with a few potatoes! – I almost prefer the white, or common, sea bream. Its flesh is scant and a tad tough and stringy. If it’s cooked in good quality oil, it tenderizes. Anyway, it’s not a fish one should at all disparage.
In the local taste-bud hierarchy, brown meagre comes betwee
n the dentex and sea bass. It isn’t as good as sea bass but has a subtler taste than dentex. And that is exactly right. Sea bass – that is, one hundred percent sea bass, nourished in good, rocky waters – is an extraordinary creature. It’s first rate however it is prepared: boiled with a potato and an onion; in a stew; roasted, or simply fried. Fishermen say a sea bass is the wiliest fish in the sea. When it finds itself surrounded by a net on a sandy seabed, the sea bass is amazingly adept at burying itself; that way, the net passes over its back and it escapes capture. It’s compelling to watch the subterranean fish keep a sharp eye on the movement of the net, and no sooner is it out of its grasp than it quickly twists, throws off the sand and shoots off like a rocket. Guile doesn’t make it any less tasty. It retains its name – llobarro – along most of the coast except for the northernmost stretch in Cadaqués, where they are called llops, loups, as in France. Conversely, in Fornells we call the red scorpionfish of Cadaqués a rascassa, like the French rascasse, though we are much farther from France, and in England it is a hogfish. Life is variety. I have heard it said that the best bass are caught by rods or a trident, but I don’t believe the implement by which they are caught affects the quality of their taste. The quality of a sea bass comes from the cleanliness of the water and the food within its reach. A sea bass from dirty or turbid water isn’t tasty: it’s almost a different fish.