by Josep Pla
“In the meantime, Papaoekonomos moved to Barcelona, where he entered into partnership with a Barcelonan by the name of Carrascal. Now that they had exhausted their search for sponges, they turned to coral. They came here, to L’Escala to be precise, from where they waged a very successful coral-gathering campaign along the Torroella coast. They were responsible for the first use of a diving suit to fish coral. After so many centuries using coraleras, that was the first really important innovation.
“Diving suits produced excellent results and the old coral gatherers in L’Escala adopted this new procedure. They bought diving suits and the machines for injecting air. Extraordinarily, the crews of the coral craft refused to adopt the new method. On the other hand, a number of small farmers from the surrounding area – from Albons, Viladamat, Bellcaire, etc. – did opt to go down to the bottom of the sea wearing that monstrous attire. Such cheek had never been seen before. They knew absolutely nothing about the trade. They were people who worked on the land – farmworkers – the lowest of the low, according to sailors. They led the campaign quite blindly but earned money.
“Papaoekonomos and Carrascal liked living in the country. Carrascal married a girl reputed to be the prettiest girl in town at the time: her name was Marina. They became so well acquainted with the area that one day they appeared with a small steamboat, apparently to fish coral. It was absurd: that was no boat for maneuvering between the rocks on our coast. Scandalmongers said the steamboat was intended for wholesale smuggling – which is a smuggler’s ideal set up. L’Escala boasts a long, admirable tradition of smuggling. Those foreigners – the Greek and the Barcelonan – tried to participate in the genius loci, to enter the most genuine local traditions. I don’t know how their new business went. But the competition from local divers using diving suits certainly greatly annoyed them.
“At this point, my father had gotten established in Barcelona, worked for himself and set up a company sponsored by the royal family and peninsular grandees – the Marquis of Comillas, the Count of Villar, etc. He explored the east coast as far as Cape Leucate looking for sponges but found none. By Leucate, he found a few dead, rotting sponges. These seas don’t breed sponges. Maybe because they’re too clean. The sponge is a plant whose alveoli are filled with a rich fauna of insects and microbes. The alveoli of sponges along our coast remain empty, and the sponges stay stiff and hard. Sponginess doesn’t develop, as in the melati of the coast of North Africa. This fact could trigger only one outcome: systematic coral gathering by diving-suited divers, with psikefalea, as we say in Greek – which is what my father decided to do with diving companies from the Greek islands.”
Three complete diving suits are drying on board the small craft. Honestly, I find them quite alarming. It’s a curious fact that diving suits were first used in the Mediterranean at the beginning of the industrialization of coral fishing, between 1830 and 1840. These innovations developed alongside the aforementioned appearance of the middle classes and the onset of industrialization. Everything joins up. A diving suit comprises two parts: the helmet – that is the key element, a tin sphere with a window to allow you to see out, attached to which is the air-injection tube and the breathing valve – and plates, also made of tin, attached to a rubber suit that covers the rest of the body: the plates cover chest and back, and the rubber, belly, legs and arms. The helmet is screwed to the suit as tightly as the screwing will allow. A man inside that apparatus is transformed into a strange, monstrous being, as if viscous shapes from the sea have been tamed by mass production. However, there is one thing worse than a diver dressed as a diver, and that is a deflated, flaccid, dead diving suit hung to dry over the railings and gracious lines of a tiny craft. In the gentle autumn afternoon light in the port of L’Escala, that sphere with its turbid glass window, tin chest and languid, soft-rubber shape, at once wet and hard, is enough to make your hair stand on end.
That’s why, when the diver, dressed like a synthetic octopus, sinks into the sea, you wish – quite inhumanely – never to see him again. The machine for injecting air starts up. Those small devices were simple enough but onerous to operate. You had to keep turning the wheel nonstop, and as the diver gained depth, turning the handle became ever more strenuous. At a specific point of pressure – triggered by the diver’s depth – you had to activate the handle every minute. Those machines are now powered by small electrical motors, which can be controlled according to air requirements the diver signals by means of a guide rope.
When the diver is immersed, responsibility for his life is in the hands of the guide. The guide is the man who understands the language communicated by the diver via the rope joining him to the boat. The diver and the guide exchange an international – primitive, if intelligible – language. One touch – a pull – on the rope means: more air. One pull and short tug signal: bring me up. Two tugs: decrease pressure. Two pulls and short tugs: send down a hammer, etc. The guide must be alert. He can’t daydream, because a good part of the success of the operation depends on him.
The diver carries a bag on his chest, where he puts the coral and objects he thinks worth collecting along with the fish he catches, if catching fish is at all feasible. If he does catch a fish, he must first kill it, because fish – so foolish when free, to the point of approaching any unusual presence they encounter – when trapped, will defend themselves. Carrying a live fish to the surface in a diver’s bag would be a difficult feat.
A diver in a diving suit can work for half an hour at a depth of thirteen or fourteen fathoms. A fathom is about eight hands. Twelve fathoms is twenty yards. As the diver gradually sinks down, the pressure increases and the length of stay at any depth shrinks proportionately. This quick sketch gives some indication of the revolution the use of a diving suit represented in coral fishing compared to using coraleras or deep-sea divers.
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Diving suits solved the coral gathering problem to such an extent that an area systematically explored by those divers became totally barren for years. Coral grows a centimeter every eighteen years. It is an animal that grows so slowly it would be impossible to breed – if anyone decided, at their own expense, to risk doing so.
As coral thrives in hollows, caverns, stony roofs and eaves, and tends to grow from top to bottom like stalactites, the problem is obvious enough: a diver must be able to reach cavern ceilings. If the hollows are low roofed, it’s feasible to work standing; if they’re too low, he must wriggle inside like a fish. However, caverns are sometimes high and inaccessible. In such situations, the diving suit solves the problem, because the diver can control at will the air pressure inside the suit. When the air inflates the suit it helps draw him back to the surface. An absence of air inevitably makes him go down. He can thus hang under the cavern vaults asking his guide for more air and working on his back under the ceiling, or on a level with the cavern by opening the air, or expiratory, valve. The diver activates this valve, located in the tin helmet, with his head. It’s all about being skilled enough. It’s part of the trade. In any case, I know few intellectual workers who can weave so delicately with their heads as those suited divers.
That expiratory valve is very useful, as we have just seen, but it has one drawback. The caverns and caves where divers work tend to be covered by a layer of mud left by sea squalls, a muddy silt that the air expelled by the valve stirs up, thus clouding the water. The diver’s body movements agitate the mud even further, making the watery space where the diver must move and work cloudier still. This means the divers carry out the task of severing the coral with a suitable hammer from the ceilings of underwater caverns with poor visibility; in fact, they must grope their way, because the water becomes extremely murky. This phenomenon happens not only in the hollows in zones with light but also in those deeper down, more so in the latter, which aren’t affected by squalls as much as by the action of currents. Of course, the latter offer a natural obstacle, their intrinsic lack of light.
If divers nevertheless succeed in producing positive results, it is because as they grope around, intuition and experience help them orient themselves in the water; it’s not infallible, but it’s usually effective. They manage to explore pitch-black caves and water that is so churned up and dark where people not in the trade wouldn’t be able to move, let alone work. A diver must orient himself before entering those dens, before the water has been stirred and the air expelled from the suit has disturbed the layers of mud. The clear waters allow him to locate coral and all the fish to be found in the area. In such places you can find lobsters and corvinas. The crustacean is one of the few sea animals that hide from the presence of a strange body, it slips into crevices in walls and shelves in rocks. But theirs is a strange way of hiding: they always do so leaving their two long antennae sticking out. Sometimes you only have to pull on the antennae and the animal emerges, because the place offers no source of self-defense. In those situations, the diver kills them by twisting their heads and puts them in the bag over his tin breastplate. But sometimes they don’t emerge, even though their antennae are visible. The corvina is a fish that likes dark hollows. It is a dark, silvery fish that, in my opinion, is surpassed in taste only by sea bass. It is also a foolish fish that swims toward the glass in a diver’s helmet when he is hammering away at the stone base inhabited by swarms of little insects where the coral grows.
Coral is a very sensitive animal within its habitat. As long as it can’t feel any contact with a strange body, it remains quite hard and secretes a viscous substance, covering itself with a kind of fatty plastic. As soon as you put a hand on it, it hardens further, shuts itself off to a degree, absorbs that plasticky layer and seems to petrify. While it is under water, the level of petrification is less hard than when it is in contact with air: then petrification is total. In July and August the coral buds open and a kind of small white flower emerges. The coral secretes more juices. It is the moment when the animal is at its most firm and plastic – though, clearly, that plasticity is quite relative. It’s the moment when divers say the coral is blossoming and looks like tiny almond trees in bloom, a wondrous, charming sight.
In the end, what really makes work difficult for these divers in their suits is the scant, often nonexistent, visibility where they are operating. I am sure the day will come when their labors will be made easier by the presence of a powerful light attached in some way to their clothing. Perhaps the new physics will solve that. But they don’t seem enraptured by innovations. When I tell them of the efforts being made to bring light to their underwater explorations, they shrug their shoulders. They remind me of the way deep-sea divers were ravaged by the introduction of individual breathing apparatus. Those devices made divers overconfident in their powers. They went much deeper and remained under water too long. Many died when they resurfaced, with burst veins, arteries and blood vessels, and with blood spurting from noses, ears and mouths. Pearl fishers, whose work is heavier than gathering sponges because they have to shift through kilos of oysters before they find the jewel they’re after, have always refused to use that innovation that, conversely, has been adopted by divers in many ports. Perhaps it’s all to do with a desire not to facilitate their trade by making it accessible to any amateur, as well as the need not to wipe out coral reefs entirely.
Given the obstructed visibility that the mere presence of these men produces at the bottom of the sea, particularly in the more geologically fantastic places near the sea floor, divers usually grin wryly when people tell them about underwater wonders and incredible seascapes – especially now that there are so many shotgun fishers. The sea – they tell me – hardly ever comes with the still transparency of an aquarium. It is possible to see the colors and shapes of underwater seascapes as long as you remain in the lit zone and the area is sheltered – say, in an unexposed cove. If the water is quite shallow, the sun is shining brightly and the surface is like a mirror, you don’t have to enter the sea to observe fascinating subaquatic vistas: you can contemplate the view without moving from the side of your craft. However, the open sea is affected by currents. Along this shoreline, currents from the east muddy the water; currents from the southwest increase transparency. On the other hand, the presence of an alien body underwater – of a diving-suited diver, the only person who can gaze at the view before him with a degree of calm and serenity and, thus, the only one who can take it in – stirs up all the deposits in the area, disturbs all around him and, consequently, muddies limpid waters and destroys visibility. However much an area may resemble an aquarium, an alien presence changes the medium, waters churn, becoming murky and agitated. These are sights you see only from a distance: if you draw near, your movements generate clouds of matter in motion that fly up before your eyes and blot out the spectacle. Divers believe all those scenic wonders have only ever been perceived from open air by people in sheltered spots.
The sea has a top layer of water that is invaded by daylight, where these fantastic spectacles can appear: viscous, repellent, unsuspected shapes, sometimes so malignant they send a shiver down your spine, amid colors the human imagination could never conceive: the ochers, magentas, mauves of the petrified reef, the reds on the viscous brown of some reptiles, the faded, deathly yellow of languid jellyfish, the unreal gray of small slugs, the liquid, deliquescent green of wrasses, the carnival speckles of five-beard rocklings the color of grilled salmon. Sometimes the fish swim by, undulating so slowly they seem to caress the slimy skin of lethargic seaweed. Small, round saddled sea bream, blue and gold stripes over white scales, swerve and flatten out like rolling silver coins. Dreamfish and spring minnows sometimes spark a blue flash when they swerve over a long stretch of sand. Snails proceed slowly in fast-running channels; whelks slide over tiny flora on rocks; hairy sand crabs go in and out of their lairs; deep-crimson mullet seem to slumber between sand and weed; while a shoal of mackerel, all green and blue, swim by switching their tails. Sometimes, a brushstroke the color of quince jam on the back of a swordfish recalls an autumnal sunset. However small fish may be, their eyes look straight out of hell; in the water, almost all eyes bulge out of their sockets, some over a purple circle, like a circle of exhaustion and tedium, which is the case with gilthead and white sea bream; they are amusing fish because their hellish eyes seem to harbor a strange, melancholy fury. Common pandora are a luminous salmon pink, and blotched picarel are characterized by pale gilt on dark scales. But no fish has the rich colors of the rainbow wrasse, especially its mahogany, peppermint-green and clerical-purple streaks, the reddish gray of its belly and pinkness of its fins. If you scrutinize a square centimeter of geological strata, you find an animated microcosmos, dotted with alveoli and holes, inhabited by insects, minuscule crabs, diluted-wine-colored slugs, small orange monsters like drops of a technicolor pus. Fish swim by opening and closing their gills: their exposed insides glitter like tiny rubies. At surface level, sea urchins appear to suck the water and tense their spikes, a funereal black, though never really pitch black: males are reddish black; females are flatter and purplish black. The water’s movement makes the surface of the rough, barren, grayish rock shimmer.
How far down does this layer of luminous water go? It is impossible to say. There is no day of the year when the light has the same intensity. Winds change the surface of the water; currents can be dirty or clear. The luminosity of an area depends equally on its latitude and the surrounding geology. Sandy seabeds are more luminous than seaweedy ones. Limestone and granite rock attract more light than veins of slate.
It is also true that at a certain depth, you enter an area of dull light, of monochrome, motionless light. Light must pass through the huge blue filter of water. It is a thick filter that seems to paralyze the light. Reds and oranges disappear; yellows tend to turn green – light green – intermediary colors are demolished, a monochrome stasis invades everything, the light isn’t strong enough to penetrate the filter’s glaucous mass, and colors evaporate, everything turns a flat greenish bl
ue. Underwater photographing is almost impossible from twenty yards down if you don’t have a stream of artificial light. The best photographs of the sea are always taken in aquariums. The becalmed monochrome of those luminous areas is impenetrable. The dim, uniform space slowly shrinks as you get deeper. Through that imperceptibly darkening zone, you enter a zone of total blackness. With the means we now have at our disposal, fifty to sixty yards represent new frontiers, just a fraction of the sea’s expanse of shadow.
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So the afternoon passes pleasantly chatting to those fine folk. As the light begins to dim, objects touched by the sun turn golden. The breeze picks up, but the humidity has a soothing influence. A light southwesterly blows along the beach at dusk and ruffles the sea. The flatland above the sand is covered in a fine bluish mist. Golden light touches the liquid green tops of the pine groves in Torre de Pals. As the sun goes down, the foliage around the Ter assumes an elegant, solitary, autumnal splendor.
I sit and gawp for a moment at the strange aspect of the helmets and rubber suits lying on deck, and old Contos invites me to put one on to see how I’ll look in it. It’s an amusing suggestion but I am not amused.
“My dear Contos,” I tell him, “we talked about lots of things this afternoon, but I reckon it must be quite tiresome to work inside that peculiar garb.”
“Of course it is. This suit carries a hundred forty pounds of lead to facilitate immersion. It’s indispensable. But when you’ve reached the spot where you want to work, it feels like a dead weight and makes moving freely difficult. It requires a grueling effort to stay down. Surfacing is simple enough: you only have to ask for more air. Dragging that weight along is exhausting. To try to delay the onset of exhaustion, we rarely work in a vertical position. We drag ourselves along the sea floor like crawling beasties. We grip hard on rocks or whatever is around. There are many kinds of diver, and their ways of working are different depending on what they hope to achieve. Clearly it’s one thing to pull up sponges or collect oysters for their pearls or salvage iron from a shipwrecked vessel. I’ve worked as a diver in this country doing every job imaginable. During the First World War, I brought up coal for Senyor Fortó in Sant Feliu from a vessel that had gone down on the underwater reef by the Aro beach. That was very different work from what we’re doing now in those islands over there. I think the best, least tiring, way to gather coral, especially if you have to descend to a substantial depth, is to move like a lobster, which always goes up and down by clinging to jutting eaves, balconies and shelves of underwater rock faces. Other people work in other ways. As I was saying a few moments ago, it would be hard to regulate work at the bottom of the sea, because it’s not like factory labor. I’ve seen wonderful, extremely strong divers who have been competent at one task and not at another. Italians make good divers in diving suits for working on wrecked ships at a great depth. But nobody can rival the Greeks for working underwater. They’re the best in the Mediterranean in this line of work.”