Voices of the Old Sea

by Norman Lewis

  In the year before my arrival in 1948, people in Sort began to notice that something was happening to the trees, that the early spring foliage had changed colour and was withering. Word of their neighbours’ alarm reached Farol, but the fishermen shrugged their shoulders and went on preparing their lines or mending their nets. It was impossible for them to understand that their destiny could be in any way linked with that of peasants with whom they had little contact and from whom they were separated by huge differences of temperament and tradition. For the fishermen of Farol the peasants of Sort might have been the inhabitants of a distant planet rather than of a village five kilometres away, and they found it difficult to interest themselves in their fate, whatever misfortune might have befallen them.

  Chapter Two

  MY INCREASING INVOLVEMENT in village life was helped by a friendship struck up with Sebastian, the Grandmother’s second son-in-law, who was married to her young daughter, Elvira, both of them living in her house. Sebastian was bold and romantic-looking, with flashing eyes and the face of a corsair, but his striking appearance fronted for a character that was hesitant and meek, and he was firmly under the Grandmother’s thumb, and plotted endlessly to break the chains she had laid upon him.

  He had come from Figueras, his home town, to work as a carpenter-mason at Farol, and the Grandmother’s Elvira, captivated by his looks, had demanded him from her mother, who had agreed to underwrite a marriage that would have been otherwise impossible. The state fixed Sebastian’s wages at 21 pesetas a day, and without the Grandmother’s subsidy and the provision of a furnished room in her house it would have taken Sebastian six or seven years to save the 10,000 pesetas custom required of a man before marriage could be contracted.

  Elvira was rather ugly, an inheritor of the Grandmother’s over-masculine features although little of her intelligence, but she and Sebastian got on well enough. Elvira had had a narrow escape in the matter of names, for in the epoch following the fall of the monarchy, when Spaniards came to hear something about socialism, the Grandmother had called her first Libertad (Liberty), and then Juana de Arco (Joan of Arc), but even Don Ignacio – who wanted to keep everybody happy – had felt obliged to turn these names down at the christening. The Grandmother’s less than benevolent despotism saw to it that the marriage was conducted on her own terms. Because they could not afford children it was the practice of many fishermen to restrict the opportunities for begetting them by sleeping with their wives only in the siesta hours, between two and four in the afternoon, and Sebastian received orders to subscribe to this custom, otherwise occupying a bed on the verandah at the back of the house. She also commanded him to learn to fish in his spare time in order to increase his income and thus struggle upwards towards the financial independence which he so earnestly desired. This he did although, lacking both experience and skill, he was able to practise the art only in its lowliest form.

  The fact that Sebastian and I were both forasteros, strangers, outsiders, who might have come as well from Barcelona as from England, drew us together. He, at least, had a foot in the door and held it open for me but, although he had lived for four years in the Grandmother’s house, he was not accepted as a villager. Every evening, work over, he took a boat and fished for calamares, which he sold for a peseta or two to the Grandmother. Only if he caught more than one fish – this happened on average one evening out of three – was he allowed to keep the extra money himself. His problem was that he could not manage the boat efficiently and fish at the same time, and that no fisherman – probably from reasons of superstition, he thought – would go out with him.

  We sat in the bar under the despairing glare of the mermaid, our mouths atingle with the Alcalde’s tart wine that left the teeth discoloured after a single glass, and discussed a project that had occurred to him. ‘How long are you staying with us?’ he asked.

  ‘As long as the money lasts out.’ I explained the currency restrictions in force. ‘A month. Two months. Depending on how things go.’

  ‘You could come fishing with me. Between us we could catch five or six calamares a night. The Grandmother would buy your share, or she’d take it in payment for the room.’

  I told him that the last thing I wanted to do was to tread on the fishermen’s toes.

  ‘You wouldn’t worry them,’ he said. ‘No one fishes for calamares. It’s too boring.’

  ‘I’m very anxious to get along well with these people,’ I told him.

  ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘You only have to remember two things. Don’t wear leather shoes – certainly never in a boat – and don’t stand on the beach and watch when the boats are coming in. If they’ve caught nothing they’ll say you brought them bad luck. If they like you they’ll ask you to give a hand pulling up the boats. When that happens you’re in.’

  On our first calamar fishing expedition we put Sebastian’s leaky twelve-foot dinghy into the water soon after five, then rowed for an hour along the shore to avoid any possible collision of interests with the fishermen. As ever in this deep clear water over rock, the sea was a polished interweave of sombre but refulgent colours that contained no blue. Past every headland the view opened on a new adventure of riven cliffs and pinnacles, of caves sucking at the water, of rock strata twisted and kneaded like old-fashioned toffee. Boulders of colossal proportions had fallen everywhere from the cliffs and we threaded through a maze of them over water possessed of a surging, muscled vivacity to reach an inlet where the fishing would take place, and where the shallows were of such transparency that the weeds under us showed through, like the fronds, the fanned-out petals and the plumes of a William Morris design.

  The implement used in this least creative of all kinds of fishing was a lure composed of a circular base plate of bright metal from which curved some twenty inch-long hooks. The lure was lowered on a line until it touched bottom and then after a few seconds jerked upwards. No bait was used. If a calamar happened to be in the neighbourhood it would be attracted by the shining metal, and caught by one or more tentacles. In this way, manoeuvring the boat with one arm and raising and lowering the lure with the other we covered the narrow triangle of water at the end of the inlet until the shadow of a cliff closed like a curtain over the water and the fishing came to an end. We went back to the village with six small calamares, of which I had caught two, and Sebastian four. These the Grandmother accepted without comment, showing some cautious approval, however, by including a small piece of extremely bony fish with the evening meal of rice and onions she supplied for two pesetas. In addition she presented me with a rare starfish and a knot of fossilised wood, indicating where they should be hung on the walls to produce the most attractive shadows. Yet a further gift was a glass jar full of translucent pebbles, green and yellow in colour, to be found by the thousand on the beach. ‘To make the place seem more like home,’ she explained.

  Encouraged by this first small success, we went out with the boat every evening for some weeks whenever the weather permitted. Slowly our average catch improved, not so much because we became more expert in handling the lure, for there was no art concealed in its use, but because we gained in knowledge of the habits of the calamar, and where and when it was most likely to be found. In the first week we doubled our catch, so that the Grandmother felt obliged to knock half the price off my board and lodgings. So far so good, and Sebastian and I now began to consider ways in which we could expand our fishing activities.

  As a matter of course we turned to the Grandmother for her advice, but the counsel offered little more than a restatement of commercial principles.

  ‘Don’t bring me anything but noble fish,’ the Grandmother said. Noble was the favoured adjective in local use to express approbation – indecente, its opposite. ‘I am not in the market,’ she went on, ‘for fish of indecent appearance, for example eels of any description.’ There was a pause for the wag of an admonishing finger. ‘Nor are fish with stings or poisonous spines, including rays or aranñas, of any interest, in fact th
e reverse, and I have no truck with anything notorious for feeding on offal or any filth that can be found. Octopus aren’t welcome here except at times of general shortage.’

  We hoped for some positive lead but there was none. ‘As for catching your fish,’ the Grandmother said, ‘what do you expect me to tell you? Watch what the others do, and copy them in an intelligent fashion.’

  We studied the experts, but success eluded us. In three evenings of line fishing, using the correct bait generously provided by the next-door neighbour, we caught only one strangely bewhiskered dogfish which the Grandmother declined to buy on grounds of indecency. A further attempt at diversification was even less successful, as we borrowed a small net, wrapped it, as instructed, round the base of a submerged rock, and not only took no fish, but wrecked the net, at a cost of fifty pesetas for its repair. So it was back to the tedious business of calamar fishing, with its small but dependable return, and in the end we became so accomplished at this that we consistently doubled our average catch of the first few days, and the Grandmother ceased to charge rent.

  In this way we continued, unadventurously, until Sebastian suggested that we should try diving masks and a speargun made up by the local mechanic from an illustration he had seen. Mysteriously this had appeared in a magazine devoted to religious topics, and the picture showing a Japanese spearing a fish was supposed to illustrate an article on the life and miraculous works of the Blessed Egideo of Naples. It was the speciality of this saintly personage (whose reputation I happened coincidentally to be aware of, having recently spent a year in that city) to bring ‘off’ fish to marketable life, as recorded on twenty-seven separate occasions in the Ufficio Prova of the Vatican.

  Like most Mediterranean people who spend their lives in close association with the sea, Sebastian could not swim and became nervous and unsteady in water reaching up to his chest. It was only because he was of peasant or artisan origins that he could even contemplate learning to dive and becoming an underwater fisherman. In my three seasons on this coast I never saw or heard of a fisherman by birth and background who could bring himself to do so. Some primordial restraint held them back from such investigations (and violations – as they put it) of the mystery of the sea. ‘I hold the sea,’ said a fisherman in the Alcalde’s bar, ‘to be the father and the mother from which we all come, and therefore to be treated with every respect.’ It is significant that in Spanish the sea can be equally el mar, or la mar, masculine or feminine, grandly and uniquely unisexual, above and beyond all creation.

  For our experiments with the mask and speargun we selected a sheltered spot where the rocky seabed sloped down in a series of wide, shallow steps providing a succession of graded depths from about three feet to fifty feet. Sebastian fought off his panic, put on a mask and took the gun and began to wade about in the shallows. He pushed his face under the water, made his choice of the brilliantly striped or spotted wrasse wiggling about in the weed, poked the trident of his gun down and eventually skewered a fish.

  After some minutes of this I left him, to explore the deeper water. A number of technical difficulties prevented the fishermen from putting down their nets in this spot, and swimming on I entered a new and wholly extraordinary submarine world, an underwater preserve that might have remained unchanged for thousands of years.

  Everything in this sunny scene, every form and colour, was fresh. The panorama was one of the sea-gouged and polished bedrock, splashed all over with scarlet and ochreous algae, with its sierras, its jungles of weed and its teeming population of fish. Apart from the birds, the visible life of our world is largely restricted to surfaces. Here limitless stratification encouraged a dense marine populace with fish of all sizes from darting coloured particles to enormous bull-headed meros stacked at varying depths to feed, to circulate in a slow ruminative way, to rise or sink with a gentle ripple of fin or a flicker of tail.

  I recognised many of these fish, and knew them by their local name, but many were unknown to me. They were on the whole indifferent to my presence but curiosity impelled some to move in for a closer inspection and an occasional servia – a large pelagic fish constantly on the move – would circle me several times before drifting away. Fish seen in this way were saturated with colour which faded instantly in death. Escorvais, weighing up to four pounds, presented themselves heraldically in static family groups outside the caverns in which they lived, glowing with purplish incandescence in the water, seeming actually to emit light, no trace of which would remain by the time – tarnished and flaccid – they reached the fishmonger’s slab.

  I turned back, making for shallow water through bead-curtains and chain-mail of fish; fish sable and silver, fish glistening like Lorca’s small, stabbing knives, fish that sparkled in their shoal in unison, off and on, like an advertising sign, as with a common impulse they changed the angles of their bodies to the light. As the seabed came closer and more clearly defined, I could see the small fidgeting movement of crabs, crustaceans and molluscs in its crevices. A moray slid a little way out of its fissure to watch me with its demented stare, and a family of mullet prepared, if unmolested, to socialise even with humans, turned to accompany me into shallow water.

  While I had been away Sebastian, still nervous and unsure of his footing, the water up to his armpits, had speared a dozen wrasse and had them dangling from a wire carrier tied to his waist. In the boat they made a couple of limp handfuls, but for Sebastian they were full of promise of things to come.

  I told him of the big fish I had seen.

  ‘How big?’

  I had already caught the fisherman’s habit of exaggeration. ‘Big as mules. Get your friend to make you a better gun and we might get some.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him about it,’ Sebastian said. ‘Looks as though I shall have to learn to swim.’

  Chapter Three

  THE GRANDMOTHER had a suggestion to make. It was the custom in the cat village to wash the tiled floor of every room in the morning of every day. I had not done this, and she pointed out that it was no part of her bargain that she should do it. She therefore suggested that a woman called Carmela should come in for an hour every day to do this and any other tidying up that had to be done, at a cost of two pesetas.

  Carmela was another odd person out. She had arrived as a refugee from the deep south, had been in trouble with the police and claimed to have a sick child to look after, who nobody had ever seen, for whom she was always scrounging food. Carmela proved to be fiftyish, boss-eyed with straggling grey hair, and dressed perpetually in a faded and shapeless party frock with frills. She arrived, scrubbed the floor with high vigour, polished the jar with the precious stones, picked the cat up by the scruff of the neck and threw it into the street, begged for a crust left over from the previous day, wrapped it in a grubby cloth, stuffed it down the front of her dress and went. Before she left she offered to procure for me all or part of a rabbit, which I knew, her reputation being what it was, would be poached on somebody’s property in the cork-oak forest. I conferred with Sebastian on this matter, and it was agreed that we could afford to take half each. In this way it was left.

  Two days later Carmela arrived with the rabbit, which she split down the middle, and Sebastian and I paid her eight pesetas each for our halves. It turned out that part of the deal was that she should do the cooking for me on this occasion, and while she chopped up the rabbit I was sent to the village shop to buy an earthenware casserole, a fistful of charcoal and a tablespoonful or so of black-market olive oil. Although an outsider she was as emphatic as a cat villager on the subject of colour, and the casserole was turned down on the grounds that it was too brown, and it had to be changed. It later occurred to me that these trips backwards and forwards to the shop might have been part of a process of mystification, a kind of three-card trick, by which odds and ends of the meal were spirited away, for when the cooking, done on a tiny charcoal fire on the balcony, was at an end, the quantity of rabbit that remained seemed small.

  Carmel
a was positive, dictatorial and taciturn but when she spoke at all it was to some purpose. On this occasion it was to mention that with every week that passed she had to go deeper and deeper into the forest to snare her rabbits. This she believed to be due to the loss of cover. Last year a number of oaks had failed to produce any foliage, and this shadeless, denuded area was spreading. The gist of her argument was, if you wanted to eat rabbits, now was the time. The way things were going this time next year there wouldn’t be a rabbit to be had anywhere.

  My next-door neighbour Juan was the only man in Farol who should at least have had some slight interest in the fate of the oaks, for his wife, Francesca, had brought fifty oaks as her dowry to this dowry-less village, and another seventy had passed to her as her inheritance on her father’s death. She was a lively, high-stepping, intelligent woman who wore a silk dress on all occasions, and had strutted about in high-heeled shoes until the Grandmother had warned her in a tactful fashion that all articles made from leather were taboo in the village. On a later occasion, and in my presence, the Grandmother tackled her, in a pretendedly jocular way, on the matter of her attire. ‘I shit on God,’ the Grandmother said (it was the mildest of Catalan oaths, rarely out of her mouth). ‘Why do you go in for these colours?’

  Francesca returned the triumphant smile of youth. ‘To draw attention to myself,’ she said. ‘When I’m older – say thirty-five – I’ll be into greys and browns, and when I’m fifty it’ll be black for good, heaven help us. Let’s make hay while the sun shines. Who wants to look at an old woman?’

  Her gaunt but imposing young husband, who always seemed on the verge of prophetic utterance, said he felt himself tainted by property acquired in this way. He had put off visiting the trees and the few barren acres that had gone with them, although agreeing to accompany his wife on mushroom-hunting trips in the vicinity, from which they returned with basketfuls of the celebrated amanita caesaria, used by one or more Roman empresses to poison their husbands.