by Josep Pla
I asked Senyor Dalí why Ribera had left the job he had in that cove and moved with his family to Cadaqués and then taken up another maritime job on La Naviera Mallorquina’s tin-pot schooner.
“I’ll tell you why,” he replied. “In this neck of the woods there have always been a number of people who can’t sit still. They’re soon bored and are always on the go. That was probably the case with our much-lamented friend Ribera.”
“Are you suggesting that our mariner was a little, shall we say, bohemian, a tad unhinged? People in our country can be hard to understand, downright peculiar.”
“Yes, it’s most likely. But don’t go overboard. I don’t think he was at all bohemian or unhinged. He did everything in good faith, thinking it was all for the good of his family, his household and himself. You know how that is, when someone does the most ridiculous things in good faith, people are always ready to be understanding and charitable.”
“Agreed. But even so he embarked…”
“Yes, unfortunately, he did. But you’re familiar with this terrain, you know that mariners here who sail the world want only to live on land, and those who live on land move heaven and earth to get on board a ship. If we’re like that, what can be done? It’s an inbred disease and that’s one way of going about it.”
“That’s all very well, but it’s difficult to believe such a discerning fellow as our friend Ribera would sail as boatswain on a down-at-heel, precarious hulk like the Cala Galiota. Her disappearance…”
“Please don’t say any more. It’s a shipwreck that has really upset me. It’s one of the most incredible, extraordinary shipwrecks along this coast. Not a trace was left, not a whisker. Total loss of crew and goods. The Cala Galiota sank to the bottom of the sea and left no signs of life. It’s impossible to explain what happened, because we know absolutely nothing. Our friend Riba lost his life there, at its peak, with so much experience and knowledge, just like the others. It was a good, knowledgeable crew. What happened? Nobody knows and nobody ever will. It’s the most technically perfect shipwreck there’s ever been along this coast.”
* * *
—
At some point, the daughters from the Ribera-Albert marriage moved to France. They’d had a wretched, unpleasant time as a result of the sinking of the Cala Galiota. The drawn-out business of the Palma commission of inquiry, which made it impossible to certify the crew was dead when that was obvious all along, was inexplicable. When they crossed the frontier, they encountered a different atmosphere and thought they were now protected from everything they’d suffered. When they left for France, the tourist boomtown Cadaqués has become hadn’t yet started. Its inhabitants lived a totally gray life. In the post-civil-war period, existence in Cadaqués was hand to mouth, though it was ideal for moneyed people.
In France the Ribera-Albert girls worked mainly in restaurants and learned to cook; they were intelligent and remarkably quick on the uptake. Eventually they decided to return. Cadaqués was changing and there was quite a tourist trade. They must have missed the town, because, as is well known, Catalans are wont to be nostalgic. Once established, they set up a restaurant they called La Galiota, in memory of the schooner that sank. It is a small restaurant, that’s what such places must be – cozy and pleasant, with a cuisine that is often quite interesting. It is undoubtedly the best restaurant in Cadaqués. As it is a small space and they often can’t fit everyone in, they don’t serve coffee after dessert, to avoid customers engaging in too much table talk. Personally, I think that’s a mistake, because I believe you should be able to drink coffee at the same table where you have eaten. If it wasn’t for that, I would say La Galiota is one of the very few proper restaurants along this coast.
So there you are: all these words I have just written on the sinking of the Cala Galiota show that the lives of men and women suffer many twists and turns, which are always unexpected and extraordinary, and that everything that happens in life – whether good or bad – is beyond reasoning.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
Dictatorship and civil war, confinement and exile – as well as the need to earn a living as a journalist – had a profound impact on the work of Josep Pla. He began writing the first version of The Gray Notebook in 1918 when the “Spanish” flu led to the closure of Barcelona University and his return to the family house in Llofriu close to the fishing port of Calella de Palafrugell. When he eventually graduated, he landed a post as a foreign correspondent for a Catalan newspaper in Paris. Pla incurred the wrath of dictator Primo de Rivera for articles criticising Spanish military interventions in Morocco and continued his foreign journalism that included a year of weekly dispatches from Germany, 1923-24, a series of articles on the rise of Mussolini in Italy and the state of Russia in 1925 that became a best-selling book. After the Spanish civil war his passport was withdrawn because of critical comments on the Franco regime (he was horrified, among other things, by the criminalization of the use of the Catalan language) and he embarked on writing as an internal exile. He lived on the Costa Brava, in the tiny fishing hamlet of Fornells, near Begur, and then for longer spells in the fishing ports of L’Escala and Cadaqués. Although in his preface, Pla states that the maritime stories and chronicles are writings from his youth, they were, in fact, mainly written in the 1940s, where he incorporates and refashions earlier pieces about the sea from earlier publications. Why would he make such a statement? Perhaps to wrongfoot potential censors? In the 1940s Pla was a prolific journalist writing in Spanish for the weekly Destino magazine, and his articles containing veiled critiques of the dictatorship made him the most censored journalist in Spain. Whether he was detailing the struggle of fishing communities to survive or wryly commenting on the enthusiastic participation of local clergy and worthies in the looting of shipwrecked vessels in the distant past, contemporary readers, adept at detecting critical subtexts, would have recognized that even at his most quietistic, Pla remained a writer who spoke to their daily experience of fascism which he also challenged by simply returning to write in public in Catalan.
Most of Salt Water was published for the first time by Biblioteca Selecta in the early 1950s when the regime began to allow literary work to be published in Catalan. I have based this translation on Aigua de mar, the second volume of Josep Pla’s Obra completa that he prepared for Destino and was published in 1966. Only one other essay has been added to complement the others that deal with shipwrecks, Cadaqués and the post-war situation: his conversations with Dalí, the painter’s father.
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