Voices of the Old Sea

by Norman Lewis

  This episode provoked much derision among the atheists of Farol, and the Curandero seemed shocked when told of it. He pretended at first to lose all interest in the affair, telling the villagers that he did not wish to meddle, and recommending them to wait and see if the Church provided a miracle. In the end he was mollified and agreed to do what he could. Due to his old injuries he could only walk with difficulty and had to be carried in a chair to the place called the Shrine of Saint Agata on the fringe of the cork forest. He made it clear that he could not hold out much hope of saving the trees, but assured the villagers that he would at least tell them plainly one way or another what fate had in store for them.

  St Agata’s shrine was the scene of a dismal fiesta of the local kind held by the dog people on the third of May every year. The shrine was a small stone ruin in a field wired off to keep out the goats, and all that happened for the fiesta was that the villagers went up to it, traipsed round the field twelve times – the men going in one direction, and the women the other – and then ate the sandwiches they had brought and went home. The Curandero’s party passed the first of the trees before reaching the shrine, and here he asked to be put down. He limped round the tree, sniffed at the trunk, broke off a twig and examined it, and crushed a prematurely withered leaf between thumb and forefinger. His manner was silent and abstracted, and the general feeling was that he was still put out over the business of the procession. When they arrived at the shrine the villagers had been hoping for some sort of performance from him. They would have felt reassured to see him froth at the mouth or fall into a trance and prophesy a satisfactory outcome of the dilemma, and if he’d poured out the sherry they’d brought along on the ground, by way of a libation, it would have been better than nothing. All the Curandero did was to poke his head inside the ruin while the little crowd of villagers stood by, twisting their hands. After that, he said, ‘The spirit’s gone. Let’s get back,’ and that was the end of the matter.

  This left the villagers in too depressed a frame of mind to object when the Curandero told them that as they might need all the help they could get from the people of Farol in the bleak years that lay ahead, they had better make their peace with them while they could. The outcome was that the dog people called off their ban on the fishermen’s use of the shortcut through their village lands, and in return the cat people invited their neighbours to take part in the annual fiesta of Farol, held in September. This, too, was an exceedingly dull affair, involving a seemingly meaningless ritual in which both villagers and strangers alike linked arms to prance three or four times up and down the village street – an exercise followed by the inevitable consumption of stale sandwiches.

  These matters now disposed of, the Curandero was free to apply his gifts to the more important procedures of preparation for the great annual tunny fishing upon which the meagre fortunes and dubious prosperity of Farol so much depended.

  It turned out that the tunny fishing was likely to be held up until some days later than had been hoped. The Curandero observed the direction and change in the winds, was taken in a boat to test the temperature of the currents, worked out an astrological chart, consulted the tarot cards, and announced in the end that it would be another week before the shoals reached that part of the sea.

  The delay caused some alarm. We were reaching the end of August and nobody could remember a year when the tunny had failed to arrive by the beginning of the month. For five years in succession Farol had experienced the renewed calamity of the nonappearance of the spring sardine shoals, and the depressing viewpoint was gaining ground that these would never be seen again. It was remembered that fate seemed even to have gone out of its way to prevent the village from deriving benefit from the last sardine harvest. The fishermen assured themselves that nothing would go right when a fox was sighted in the village shortly before the event. This was the most dreaded of all omens. What happened was that the sardines showed up in their millions on Good Friday – a day when the government decreed that activity of any kind came to an absolute standstill. On this day Sebastian said that anyone could have walked down to the water’s edge, carrying a pail, dipped it into the water and lifted it out full of fish. By Saturday the shoals were thinning and heading away, and a mediocre catch had to be taken by sea to Palamos, where with a chance of the fish going stale it had to be auctioned off on the Monday at less than a quarter the expected price.

  In the lean years that followed, life in Farol, under its brisk and well-scrubbed aspect, became a matter of planned survival. Even when there were fish to be caught the fishermen began to suffer more and more from natural wear and tear to their gear. The boats had been laid up to deteriorate during the war, since when it had been impossible to buy tackle. Nets were wearing out, and most of the boats spent several weeks in every season out of the water under repair. The fishermen were hardly better off now than their counterparts would have been in the Middle Ages, because the engines fitted to the large boats had suffered a process of cannibalisation over the last eight years until valves and pistons and crankshafts were at an end, and only one boat remained with an engine that still ran in a spasmodic and fitful fashion.

  Now the unspoken thought in most minds was, what was to happen to them all if the tunny stayed away? There was no cash left, and the fishermen had been living on credit for six months. The shopkeepers, the Alcalde who kept the supply of wine going, and the men who sold hooks, line, caulking material, varnish, carbide for the acetylene lamps, oil and petrol were all heavily in debt to their own suppliers and faced ruin if the fishermen were compelled to default. This was a village under the threat of death.

  While Farol waited, the Curandero covered his charts with diagrams of the stars in their courses, with cubic sections, parabolas and mystic rays, and the fishermen fussed about putting finishing touches to their preparations. I carried on my patient campaign for full acceptance into the fishing community, making myself useful in small and unobtrusive ways, always ready to help haul a boat up on the beach or bail out one that was leaking. Such assistance was taken for granted – no one was ever thanked in Farol for anything – but I now found myself sometimes invited to join a group drinking in the bar. My Spanish was fairly fluent and my neighbour Juan helped me with Catalan, produced a vocabulary of fishing terms, and listed some sixty kinds of fish by name. The problem here was that the Spanish name for almost everything was quite different from its name in the Catalan dialect in local use, which in itself differed from Catalan as spoken in the city.

  Juan fished with the palangre, the local version of the paternoster line. It had been a great social breakthrough when he had invited me one evening in the most casual fashion to join him, and thereafter I helped him wherever I could – an exercise which inevitably cost a night’s sleep. Alonso de Barros’ Familiar Sayings and Moral Proverbs – bible of these remote villages offering practical as well as moral counsel on every human predicament from nymphomania to foot-rot in sheep – makes pessimistic reference in three separate instances to line-fishing as opposed to the use of nets. ‘The man who fishes with the hook eats more than he catches,’ says Barros; it is an opinion still shared by most fishermen throughout the Mediterranean. However net-fishing on the whole requires corporate effort, whereas line-fishing is suited to reflective and solitary temperaments, of the kind Juan possessed. His boat carried sixteen lines, most meticulously coiled in shallow baskets, each line having between thirty-nine and forty-seven hooks, totalling nearly a thousand hooks. Preparations were endless. When there were fresh sardines to be had these were the best bait, but these days sardines were caught once in a blue moon. In their absence hermit crabs were the best substitute, but a preliminary operation had to be mounted to catch them, and they were only to be fished in sufficient numbers a mile out to sea. A small, specialised type of lobster pot used for the hermit crabs was put down in great numbers the night before going out with the palangres. Baiting up the hooks took us from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m., after which we went out and put
down the sixteen lines, which would be taken up three or four hours later. On our first trip out with the palangres Juan caught forty-two fish and sold them for 60 pesetas. I took nothing from him for which I knew he was grateful, although it would have been bad form to say so. He was pleased to have me with him because I kept fairly quiet, and he mentioned that most of the fishermen were forever spouting poetry, which got on his nerves. Some brief allusion was made to the cork trees, and he told me that he and Francesca had given up any hope of further income from Sort, and from that time on he expected to be as poor as any other fisherman.

  Juan introduced me after this to a senior fisherman called Simon, who had been selected to ‘dominate’ one of the boats once the tunny fishing started. Simon had been involved as a boy in the terrific catastrophe of the freak storm of 11 January 1922 which had suddenly blown up out of a clear and calm sky to drown hundreds of fishermen all along the Spanish coast. He had been one of three survivors of twelve men of Farol caught at sea when the storm overtook them. He had been blown halfway to Italy and picked up, semi-conscious and unable to give any account of himself, by an Italian ship on its way to South America, from where he had returned as if from the dead two months later. Since then he had been regarded as saturated with what the Arabs called baraka – communicable good luck – and was hardly ever seen unaccompanied by two or three companions who kept as close to him as they could in the hope of benefiting from some auspicious current flowing from his body.

  Simon, a wasted but still commanding presence, questioned me about my habits and beliefs, warned me of the disciplines imposed on tunny fishers, including the usual embargo on sexual relations on the preceding night, and the obligation to maintain a Trappist-like silence until the moment when the actual fishing began. With Juan’s sponsorship I was able to pass the test and Simon said that he would speak to the other ‘part-holders’ in the boat, and see if they would agree to taking me along.

  ‘Make sure you don’t wear a leather belt in the boat,’ Juan had warned me, adding the story that in his father’s lifetime a man in a tunny boat who was found to have secreted a leather wallet, supposedly containing a charm, had been thrown into the sea, and drowned.

  Storms were a matter of weekly occurrence during the winter months, many of them comparable in vigour to those battering the Atlantic coasts of northern Europe at that season. In summer they were short-lived, freakish and rare, but one blew up, taking Farol by surprise, during this period of apprehensive waiting during the last days of August.

  It also caught a number of fish off their guard. Large and highly esteemed species such as the Mediterranean sea bass feed close to the rocks in heavy seas, favoured by the reduced visibility in their raids on small fish. Like incautious drivers in a fog they are subject to accident, and often stun or kill themselves by high-speed collision with the rocks. In winter such casualties add to the gleanings of the sea provided by fish stranded in rock pools, helping the fishing community to eke out an existence at a time when the weather puts a stop to normal operations. Sudden deaths among fish from such causes are infrequent in summer, although they happen once in a while. As soon as this particular storm blew itself out Sebastian and I went out in his boat on a routine spear-fishing trip, and visiting a sheltered inlet among the rocks we found a magnificent dentol lying dead on the bottom in shallow water.

  The dentol, a form of sea bream, is a fish of exceptional and striking beauty, large and solitary and weighing up to 25 pounds, daubed on its back just below the head with a glowing iridescent purple patch – a lustre that begins to fade as soon as it is caught, and becomes invisible by the time it reaches the slab. Seeing this fish drifting so very slowly, as it always does through the soft, powdery haze of deep water, it is hard to believe that it does not actively radiate light, rather than reflect it. Dentols were never taken in the nets and there was only one young fisherman in Farol who had inherited the almost mysterious skill of catching them by line. The fish we had come upon was a relatively small one of its kind, weighing some seven or eight pounds, but for us it was a great prize, and I recovered it with a shallow easy dive, and a harpoon shot into the spine at a range of two or three inches.

  Sebastian passed his share over to the Grandmother, with whom he was beginning to build up a substantial credit, but as I had speared enough spiny little rock fish to cover my rent for that day, my half went to Carmela. She accepted this sizeable piece of fish with perhaps the slightest relaxation of her expression of stony indifference, and quite amazingly managed as usual before going off to stow it away out of sight somewhere about her person. Gratitude must have stirred somewhere under the layers of acrimony and suspicion, for next day she turned up with a small turtle, as she claimed it to be, although I was never altogether sure that it was not a tortoise, which she insisted that she would cook for my lunch. The stipulation was that I should absent myself while the culinary preparations went ahead, so I strolled as far as the bar, sat under the stuffed mermaid for a palo, waited for a half-hour, then returned. ‘If you’d have seen it before it was ready your mind would have been prejudiced,’ she said. ‘All meat is good, but sometimes you must forget where it comes from. When we were hungry in Alicante we ate dog when we could. The idea was a bad one, but it was better than rabbit. Oh yes, much better. You will eat this and enjoy it.’ I did.

  Slowly the true facts about Carmela had come out. First of all I learned that she was under some sort of loose police supervision, and that she was frequently harassed by being awakened in the middle of the night for a search of the shack she lived in, or to be called in for questioning. We finished what was left of the dish, the delicate medallions of white meat flavoured with garlic and marjoram that could have been fillet of pork, while she explained how all this had come about.

  The story was that at the beginning of the Civil War she had been on a visit to the island of Ibiza, at that time still in Government hands. One Sunday afternoon while parading in conformity with local custom along the seafront, the crowd of which she was a member had come under attack by Italian planes supporting the Nationalist rebels. Everybody thought, she said, that the planes were on their own side, and she and her friends and many others had stopped to wave and cheer. At the end of the front the planes banked, turned and came in low for their bombing run. The result was devastation, and Carmela had been blown through a café window accompanied by the headless corpse of a friend. She had escaped with minor damage.

  Next day a number of Fascist sympathisers already held in prison were put up against the wall and shot. Anybody who felt like watching this spectacle was invited to do so, and Carmela had gone along. She described the episode in her usual matter-of-fact way, noting that the firing squad took aim at the eyes of the men they executed. Somehow Carmela’s presence had been remembered, and ever since the Nationalists had taken over, she had been under constant suspicion.

  * Anda, que no te quiero,

  Porque levaste

  El dia de San Marcos

  El estandarte

  Go away, I don’t love you,

  Because on San Marcos’ Day,

  you carried the standard.

  (Traditional song from La Solana in La Mancha)

  Chapter Five

  ON THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER the Curandero told the fishermen that all his prognostications were complete and that they should be prepared with their bait for the fishing that would begin next day. Tunny was fished with a species of sand-eel called sonsos as live bait. It was believed in Farol that sonsos existed only in the coarse shell-impregnated sand to be found in the immediate neighbourhood of the village, and it was a theory that their presence even in the far past had been the sole reason for establishing the village where it was. As usual Farol depended on the expertise of a single family to provide this vital resource. There were said to be only two other fishermen in the province who knew how to catch sonsos and they were forced to travel long distances to Farol when sonsos were in local demand.

  The
bait fishing involved its own ritual which was quite inexplicable even to the fishermen who practised it. Several boats, operating under the instructions of the specialist, swept the seabed with shallow nets, and while this was going on custom insisted that the fishermen keep up a tremendous outcry, as one man after another would boast of his capabilities in the fields of fishing and lovemaking and the others would respond with a chorus of mockery and oaths.

  I was not allowed in a boat, but permitted to stand at the water’s edge and watch while this happened. It was a morning of flat calm with the sea a little misted, like glass that had been breathed upon, the boats’ keels slicing the water cleanly and a dribble of fire twisting in their wake. The fishermen’s shouts of pretended rage and scorn came ringing across the tympanum of the surface, the filthiness of ritual oaths cleansed in the extreme purity of the surroundings.

  By an unlucky chance a Spanish family of holidaymakers, wretchedly lodged and fed at the fonda, had chosen on this day to hire a boat for an outing. They had blundered into this scene, actually fouling one of the nets. They were driven away with the most terrible imprecations – although next day the fishermen made amends by sending a present of fish to the fonda.

  That night all the men took baths, scrubbing themselves most carefully with abrasive green soap. Most of them went straight to bed after this, to keep themselves intact from injurious influences.

  In the morning we were at the water’s edge, very quiet, all communication reduced to gestures. Simon was already in the bows of the boat he dominated and Juan and I climbed in in silence. There were five of us and I took one of the oars. It was an ‘old sea’, a slow heave of water following a distant storm that had blown itself out, and a curl of low cloud on the horizon which was thinning out presented no threat. The men were tight-lipped, with thin, forced smiles, like prisoners awaiting sentence, and I noticed that one was trembling. We dipped our oars in the water with great care to avoid splashing, as the tunny were credited with an acute sense of hearing. As the fishermen put it, one crept up on them. Should we find the tunny shoal, our problem would be the shortage of tackle. There was a scarcity of everything, of line, even of hooks. If a line gave way a valuable and irreplaceable tunny-hook went with the fish. Juan was down to his last three hooks.