View of the World

by Norman Lewis

  Another picturesque adjunct to the scene was Jaume, an artist in the use of the raï. The raï is a circular, lead-weighted net, in use in most parts of the world, which in the Mediterranean is thrown from the shore over shoals of fish feeding in the shallows. Usually these are saupas, a handsome silver fish with longitudinal golden stripes, considered very inferior in flavour, but highly exciting to stalk and catch. Jaume’s routine was to patrol the shore when, in periods of flat calm, certain flat-topped rocks were just covered by the high tide. Schools of saupas would visit these to graze like cattle on the weed which had recently been exposed to the air and, as there were only a few inches of water, would thrash about in a gluttonous orgy, their tails often sticking up right out of the water, and completely oblivious of Jaume’s pantherish approach. Jaume had been doing this for thirty years, and, just like Pedro, he never missed. At the moment of truth his body would pivot like a discus-thrower’s, the net launched on the air spreading in a perfect circle, then falling in a ring of small silver explosions, Jaume’s arm still raised in an almost declamatory gesture in the second before he sprang forward to secure his catch. Sometimes he caught as many as thirty or forty beautiful fish at one throw, but they were worth very little in the market. Jaume also fished with a kind of double-headed trident with a twelve-foot haft called a fitora, usually at night, spearing fish by torchlight as they lay dozing in the shallows after rough weather. This kind of fishing too was unprofitable, depending, as it did, too much on time and chance, and the fishermen who went in for it were usually bachelors, without mouths at home to feed, who had an aristocratic preference for sport as opposed to profit. The great aesthetic moment of any day was when, all too rarely, Pedro and Jaume appeared together in the theatrical seascape laid out under our windows, Pedro passing like an entranced gondolier while in the foreground Jaume stalked, postured, and invoked Poseidon with a matador’s flourishes of his net.

  These were the dedicated artists in our community. Besides them there were others who fished with hook and net, and thereby wrested a slightly more abundant living from the sea within the limits imposed by their antiquated methods and tackle, their superstitions, their hidebound intolerance of all innovation, and their lack of a sound commercial outlook. Even the hooks these men used were exact replicas of those employed by the Romans, to be seen in the local museum, and when these were in short supply nothing would ever persuade them to use others of foreign origin having a slightly different shape.

  Only three of the Ses Estaques men, working as a team, made anything like a living by Western standards. They fished all night, putting down deep nets at a conflux of currents off a distant cape, and at about nine in the morning their boat would swing into sight round the headland, its lateen sail slicing at the sky. All the citizens of Santa Eulalia with a fancy for fish that day would be gathered in our garden awaiting the boat’s arrival, which would be heralded by three long, mournful blasts on a conch shell. Each day this little syndicate landed between six and twenty kilograms of fish, about half of which would be of the best quality – mostly red mullet. Within a few minutes the catch would be sold, the red mullet at the fixed price of sixteen pesetas a kilogram, while the rest, gurnets, bream, mackerel and dorados, fetched about ten pesetas. In summer there was never enough fish to go round, but there was no question of raising the price to take advantage of this situation. Ibiza may well be unique in the world in that here the laws of supply and demand are without application. Whatever the catch, the price is the same. The system by which in Barcelona or Majorca, for example, prices are advanced to as much as sixty pesetas a kilogram when hauls are scanty is considered highly immoral, although this strange island morality of Ibiza can hardly survive much longer in the face of the temptations offered by the defenceless and cash-laden foreigner.

  From this it will be understood that no fisherman of Ses Estaques has ever made money to free himself – even if he wanted to – from the caprices of wind and tide. There is no question of his ever rising to the bourgeois level of a steady income from some small enterprise, nights of undisturbed sleep, and a comfortable obesity with the encroaching years. If he leaves the sea at all, he is driven from it by failure, not tempted from it by success. This is regarded as the worst of catastrophes. The life of a fisherman is a constant adventure. He realises and admits this, and it is this element of the lottery that attaches him to his calling. In the long run he is always poor, but a tremendous catch may make him rich for a day, which gives him the taste of opulence unsoured by satiety. The existence of a peasant, with its calculation and lacklustre security, and that of the generous, improvident fisherman, are separated by an unsoundable gulf. For an ex-fisherman to be condemned to plant, irrigate and reap, bound to the wheel of the seasons, his returns computable in advance to the peseta, is considered the most horrible of all fates.

  The village of Santa Eulalia lay across the bay from Ses Estaques. It was built round a low hill which glistened with Moorish-looking houses and was topped by a blind-walled church, half fortress and half mosque. The landscape was of the purest Mediterranean kind – pines and junipers and fig trees growing out of red earth. Looking down from the hilltop, the plain spread between the sea and the hills was daubed and patched with henna, iron rust and stale blood – the fields curried more darkly where newly irrigated, the threshing-floors paler with their encircling beehives of straw, the roads smoking with orange dust where the farm-carts passed. From this height the peasants’ houses were white or reddish cubes and the cover of each well was a gleaming egg-shaped cupola, like the tomb of an unimportant saint in Islamic lands. The course of Ibiza’s only river was marked across this plain by a curling snake of pink-flowered oleanders. Oleanders, too, frothed at most of the well-heads. A firm red line had been drawn enclosing the land at the sea’s edge. Here the narrow movements of the Mediterranean tides seemed to submit the earth to a fresh oxidation each day, and after each of the brief, frenzied storms of midsummer, a bloody lake would spread slowly into the blue of the sea, all along the coast. The sounds of this sun-lacquered plain were those of the slow, dry clicking of water-wheels turned by blindfold horses, the distant clatter of women striking at the tree branches with long canes to dislodge the ripe locust beans and the almonds, the plaintive cry, ‘Teu teu’ – like that of the redshank – with which the farmers’ wives enticed their chickens; and everywhere, all round, the switched-on-and-off electric purr of the cicadas. The whole of Santa Eulalia was scented by great fig trees standing separated in the red fields, each spreading a tent of perfume that came not only from the ripe fruit, but from the dead leaves that mouldered at their roots.

  Down in the village, life moved with the placid rhythm of a digestive process. The earliest shoppers appeared in the street soon after dawn, although most shops did not close before midnight. By about 9 a.m. the first catch of fish was landed, and the fisherman who sold it arrived on the scene blowing a conch shell, a solemn, sweet and nostalgic sound, provoking a kind of hysteria among the village cats, who had grown to realise its significance. After that, nothing much happened in the lives of the non-productive members of the population until 1.30 p.m., when the day’s climax was reached with the arrival of the Ibiza bus amid scenes of public emotion as travellers who had been absent for twenty-four hours or more were reunited with their families. Between three and five, most village people took a siesta. Shutters were closed, filling all the houses with a cool gloom redolent of cooking pots and dead embers. The venerable taxis, Unics, De Dions, Panhards, crowded into the few pools of shade by the plaza. The only signs of life in the streets were a few agile bantam cocks which appeared at this time, to gobble up the ants, and some elderly men of property who, preferring not to risk spoiling their night’s sleep, gathered pyjama-clad on the terrace of the Royalti bar to play a card game called ‘cao’. At seven o’clock in the evening the water cart which came to replenish my drinking tank at Ses Estaques with what was guaranteed to be river water, and usually contained one or m
ore drowned frogs, used to fill up its ex-wine-barrel at the horse-trough in the square. Then, with sprinkler fitted, it would pass up and down the only street that mattered, spraying the roseate dust. The horse’s name was Astra – by which name most goats are also called in Santa Eulalia – and the driver, who was very proud and fond of it, used to urge it on with gentle, coaxing cries in what was just recognisable as an Arabic which had become deformed by the passage of the centuries.

  At the weekends things brightened up. Saturday evening saw an invasion from the countryside of farm-labourers and their heavily chaperoned girls. The farm-labourers worked cheerfully all the hours of daylight for eighteen pesetas – or about three shillings – a day. On Saturday nights they paraded the principal street of Santa Eulalia, which does not possess a single neon sign, until it was time to go and dance at Ses Parres – Ibicenco for The Vineyards. Drinks at Ses Parres cost only three pesetas and the purchase of a round entitled the patron to watch the floor show and to dance all night. About a third of the girls still sported the local costume, which is voluminous in an early-Victorian way, a matter of many petticoats and an abundance of concealed lace, worn with a shawl like Whistler’s mother, pendant earrings, and long-beribboned pigtails. Many still wear the paesa costume because it is insisted upon by their husbands or future husbands. A friend, a prosperous small farmer, told me that of a family of eight girls, only his wife retained the paesa dress, the pigtail and the tight side curls. He had insisted on this and made it a stipulation of the marriage, as he thought it improper that another man should see his wife’s legs. Women dressed in paesa style are allowed to wear ‘modern’ ciudadana clothes and rearrange their hair style if they leave the island – usually on a visit to a medical specialist in Palma.

  Sunday mornings in Santa Eulalia always produced a curious spectacle. As the growth of the village away from its defensive position on the hill had left the church rather at a distance from the centre, people had taken to going to mass in the chapel of a tiny convent away among the grocers’ shops and the bars in the main street. The sixty women, or thereabouts, who attended seven o’clock mass filled this building to overflowing, so that the men – who in any case were separated from them by custom – were obliged to form a devotional group on the other side of the road. Here, divided from the rest of the congregation by the flow of morning traffic, they followed the service as best they could. There were usually about twenty of them, and, as in Catalonia, I noticed that no fishermen were present. The fishermen of Ibiza are, and have probably always been, almost savagely anti-Catholic. This antagonism does not arise merely from recent conflicts over attempts to compel fishermen to attend mass or to join in religious processions, but appears to be rooted in some ancient resistance never completely overcome, to Christianity itself. It is unlucky to see a priest, or to mention the name of God unless coupled with an obscenity, and fatal, indeed, to the day’s luck with the line or nets to overhear Christian prayer. One of my fisherman friends told me that his daughter, whom he had been obliged to send to the nuns to be taught her three r’s, took advantage of this fear of his, to blackmail him into taking her fishing. If he refused, all she had to do was to threaten him with the Lord’s Prayer. The Lord’s Prayer for him was a malefic incantation of terrible power which would bring the dolphins to ruin his nets.

  ‘And then of course,’ Vicente said, ‘you’ll have heard of the Inquisition. They used it to try to get the better of us. All this happened somewhat before my time, fifty or sixty years ago. It was our wives they were after. Every priest’s house had a hole dug in it with iron hooks on the sides and a trap door. If they took a fancy to your wife they ordered you to take her to their house for some reason or other, and you can be sure that it wasn’t many minutes after you got there, before the priest had your wife, and you were down the hole.’

  Ses Parres bar, dancing and cabaret, functioned on both Saturday and Sunday nights. The floor show was innocent entertainment, intended to provide something typical for foreign visitors, and usually consisted of a group of local artists performing Ibizan dances. However unexciting this might have been for the peasants in the audience it at least did nothing to dissatisfy them or endanger their cultural integrity by potentially corruptive spectacles from the outside world. In these dances of Ibiza – so unlike the bouncing jotas and sardanas of the neighbouring regions of Spain – anything that is not Moorish is pre-Moorish, or perhaps even Carthaginian, in origin. The woman twists, turns, advances, recedes, eyes cast down with resolute unconcern, body uncompromisingly stiff, feet twinkling invisibly beneath the sweeping skirt. The effect is that of an oriental doll moved by an exceptionally smooth clockwork mechanism. Her partner is more active. He postures at a distance, arms raised, hands clacking castanets, and swoops deferentially to the rhythm of flute and drum. Sometimes the rhythmic beat may be accentuated by striking a suspended sword. Occasionally the entertainers at Ses Parres are persuaded to sing those strange songs – the caramelles – each line of which ends in a sobbing, throaty ululation. The caramelles are properly sung before the altar on high feast days, and nobody knows anything about them, except that there is nothing to be heard like them anywhere in the world, and that their antiquity is so great that they no longer sound like music even to the most imaginative ear.

  Ibiza’s un-European flavour is, simply enough, the product of the island’s geographical position, of which its history has been almost the automatic consequence. It is on the nearest sea route between Spain and the two conquering North African civilisations of the past – those of Carthage and of the Moors. It was taken and colonised by Carthage only 170 years after the foundation of the mother city herself in 654 BC. For the Moors it was the indispensable halfway port of call – in the days when a fair proportion of galleys never reached their destination – between Algiers and Valencia, the richest city of Moorish Spain. These were the two civilising influences in the island’s early history and the thousand years in between were full of the pillagings of Dark Age marauders: Vandals, Byzantines, Franks, Vikings and Normans. In 1114 Ibiza was considered by Pope Pascual II a sufficiently painful thorn in the Christian side to justify the organisation of a minor crusade in which five hundred ships were necessary to carry the loot-hungry adventurers normally employed on such expeditions. But after Ibiza’s final recapture from the Moors in 1235 its strategic importance was at an end. It was no more than a remote and inaccessible island, with no natural wealth to attract Spanish settlers, and soon deteriorated into a hideout for corsairs, pillaged indiscriminately by Christians and Arabs. Within a few years of the recapture, the population had declined to five hundred families.

  Much of the island’s distinctive style, and those special and subtle flavourings which differentiate it from the other Balearic islands, and also from the adjacent mainland, are likely to have been formed in the two breathing spaces of peace and plenty of antiquity. The Carthaginians taught the natives almost all they knew about agriculture, including such basic Mediterranean techniques as how to grow olives. They also instructed them in the making of garum, the most famous of Carthaginian dishes, which consisted of the entrails of the tunny fish beaten up with eggs, cooked in brine and left for several months to soak in wine and oil – a modern version of which, estofat del buche del pescado (tunny-fish stomach stew) is still prepared. They struck enormous quantities of coins bearing the effigy of their god Eshmun, shown as a bearded, dancing dwarf, and built cave temples for the worship of Tanit, the Carthaginian Venus, who in spite of her appearance, which in her statuettes is as sensible as a Dutch barmaid’s, had a sinister reputation for demanding young children as sacrifices in time of national stress. The Carthaginians were extremely systematic in the disposal of their dead, which they buried in vast necropolises, as standardised in all their details as a modern block of flats. Although most of these must have been ransacked in the past, a few still remain intact, and one or two, with their inevitable yield of ivory charms, figurines and lachrimatories, are ope
ned every year.

  During and after the Carthaginian period, the island manufactured and exported great quantities of amphorae. The Ibizan product was esteemed throughout Europe for certain magical properties attributed to the clay from which it was made, including the talismanic power of driving away snakes. Many galleys laden with them foundered in storms when outward bound along the island’s excessively rocky coast, and a minor modern industry has arisen as a result of the large number of amphorae which have been salvaged intact in the fishermen’s nets. These amphorae fetch between 500 and 1000 pesetas apiece in Ibiza, according to their size, shape, and the secondary interest of the marine encrustations with which they are covered. The industry consists in ‘improving’ genuine amphorae with interesting arrangements of shells, which are cemented in position – it took me several hours to remove those that had been stuck on a wonderful 2600-year-old pot I bought – and submerging modern amphorae in the sea until enough molluscs have attacked them to deceive the would-be buyer of a genuine antique.