Voices of the Old Sea

by Norman Lewis

  The boat with the Curandero led the small fleet of seven. The Curandero wore his hairnet, his earpads and his wellingtons, but out of deference to the fishermen’s suspicion of something meant to resemble leather, he had left his imitation suede jacket behind. I was told later by one of the men in his boat that he had kept his eyes closed and guided the boats towards the tunny by smelling them out. He claimed not to be able to smell the fish once they were in the boat.

  The mysterious intuitions of nature seemed attuned to what was to happen. Grey mullet, scavengers among sewage in shallow water, were slithering just under the surface in pursuit of the boats, and great squawking gulls – hardly ever seen along this coast – had dropped out of the sky to flap about just over our heads. Back on the beach, which, by custom, should have been deserted at this moment, a solitary horseman had appeared, identifiable as a guardia civil. His small, sombre profile provoked uneasiness. A mounted policeman could only be an officer, and what could a man of such rank and power want with a wholly unimportant fishing village such as Farol?

  The Curandero raised his hand and we stopped rowing. There was nothing to be seen in the water other than circling mullet but the Curandero blew his conch-shell, a sullen and melancholic hoot as a signal for the fishing to start. There were three inches of sand in the bottom of each boat, and over it three inches of water. The sonsos, carried in canvas bags to the boats, had been tipped into the water, and the lively ones, the ‘vivos’ – those to be used for baiting the hooks – had instantly burrowed into the sand, from which their tiny watchful heads projected. Those sonsos lacking the energy to burrow into the sand continued to swim about in a lethargic fashion, and my friends scooped up handfuls of these to throw them as hard as they could in all directions into the sea. We listened in the silence to the spatter of the bait hitting the water, then the fishermen baited their hooks with lively sonsos, hooking them through the lower part of the body, and threw out their lines.

  The fish struck instantly, setting off a great outcry in the boat. It was impossible to hold the lines until the tunny’s first efforts to escape and survive had begun to slacken, and the seventy-five-gauge nylon line wound on cork bobbins that lay free by the gunwales went out in great whipping snatches, thirty feet at a time and in a fraction of a second, with the corks bouncing and spinning in the air. The tunny were the fastest fish in the sea, believed in their first dash for freedom when they felt the hook to reach a hundred kilometres an hour, and the fishermen made no attempt to hold them until they reached the bottom of one of their tremendous dives. We had thrown out three lines and three fish had struck. The fish hit bottom, and the men took the lines and hung on with agony in their faces as the line cut into their hands, opening old sores, and the blood began to flow.

  Almost in the same moment all the other boats had hooked fish, and a great confusion began, because some small boats were being towed in all directions, even gyrating like leaves in a whirlpool, and the proper sickle-shaped tunny fishing formation had broken up. To this disorder was added the fouling and crossing of lines and the extravagant underwater knots tied in them as the tunny twisted and turned, shot under the boats and encircled them as they came closer to the surface with the loss of their first ebullient energy. Now they came into sight; great gliding metallic shapes, appearing strangely inanimate although still possessed of great reserves of power.

  In our boat, a kind of demented ballet was being performed, with Simon the dominator who should have restored order distracted by his struggle with a monstrous fish. The most skilled and important task of all was to pull out the boat’s drain plug at regular intervals to allow fresh water to flow over and revive the sonsos, after which the man who performed this urgent duty would replace the plug and bail out. But the man who should have done this, Pablo, had a fish on his line and could not bring it in. Pablo was the man who had been trembling, and now he was close to tears. I hauled in the line with him, and my hands, too, were bleeding. ‘There’s too much at stake,’ he said. ‘If I catch fish I get married, and if I don’t, that’s it.’ I took the line from him while he went to deal with the sonsos. There were three of us hauling side by side, with the boat listing over, and you could see the fish held quite still about thirty yards away, their silver slaked in the blue. We were flying kites together in the deep sky with our hands full of blood.

  The fish gave up unexpectedly, like toys with motors that had suddenly run down. I pulled Pablo’s fish straight into the boat’s side and Simon gaffed it through the tough skin over the backbone, bringing it up with a jerk and a lift into the gunwale, spattering us all over with its black-red gore, balancing it for a moment before letting it crash down into the bottom of the boat. Here it lay, an unconvincing manufactured object in cheap-looking tin-plate with the brassiness showing through, and straight grooved lines fanning out from the corner of the jaw where the hook had held across eyeball and cheek. A failing mechanical aftermath opened and closed its mouth, very slowly three or four times, after which it moved no more.

  Tunny were coming in now one after another and because the fresh water and bailing procedures had gone by the board, the sonsos could hardly be seen for blood, but there was nothing at this late stage to be done, for, said the fishermen, to have bailed out this water saturated with blood would have frightened the fish away. The men went on fishing with whatever bait they could find. Confusion and fury worsened, an oar was broken, a precious, hopelessly tangled line had to be cut, one of Simon’s fingers was half-severed, and another man had cracked a rib.

  Suddenly the shoal had thinned, the shouting died down, until we could hear the echoless babel over the water from the other boats, and this, too, died away. The Curandero blew on his conch shell again, signalling that the fishing was at an end. It was unwise, unlucky to push on with the fishing until the very last fish had been induced to take the hook. The fish had to be ‘left with hope’. All the remaining sonsos, plus a bagful of bogas brought along for that purpose, were tipped into the sea by way of a token recompense, and the boats turned back, leaving a lace-cap of seagulls settled on the water to mark the place where the fishing had taken place. It had been a good fishing, leaving the men physically drained and a little emotional in their relief, and one or two of them were wiping their eyes with the bloody cloths used to clean their hooks before rebaiting them.

  Back on the beach the solitary horseman had ridden away, carrying with him the menace of his presence, and now it was in order for the villagers, to whom the Curandero had signalled with another blast of his conch shell that fish had been caught, to congregate at the water’s edge. Our boat was so laden down with the catch that Simon could never have brought it in to shore in heavy seas. We had thirty-two fish, of which Juan had caught nine weighing between thirty and fifty pounds apiece – his record catch. The fish had now to be sold with the minimum of delay. It was a commercial transaction too big for the Grandmother to handle, and a buyer from France with tinted spectacles and a tartan shirt was waiting. His discouraging news was that tunny fishing had been going on all along the coast for the past two days, threatening the market with a glut. At the beginning of the week one of Juan’s fifty-pound fish would have fetched 500 pesetas at the canning factory. Now the price was down to 150 pesetas and likely to fall further. The man’s lorry was parked at the junction of the short cut and the main road, and the fishermen wheeled their fish on barrows and hand-carts to where it awaited them. The buyer and his assistant weighed the fish, then the buyer took out an enormous bundle of thousand-peseta notes and paid them off. The amount received by every man was enough to settle his accumulated debts. With whatever was left over family men, as they always did, would buy new clothes of the best quality to be found for their wives and children. From this point on they started again financially from scratch and the shops and the man who supplied their tackle would reopen their credit accounts.

  They were a race of optimists, and suddenly every man of the cat village was sure that the sardines
would be back once more in the coming spring.

  Chapter Six

  THE POLICE CAPTAIN, who had been watching the tunny fishing from the beach, was on an annual tour of inspection of the area of his command and he pranced up and down on a beautiful horse with arched neck, flowing mane and incredibly fine limbs. He wore a patent leather hat from the early part of the nineteenth century and under it his face was classic, but slightly unearthly – that of a centaur. There were starred reflections everywhere on his splendid harness, his polished boots and his silver stars as he pranced about, and the morning after the great tunny-fishing trip, there was a sharp, authoritarian rapping on my door, and he was there.

  He came in, took off his kid gloves, sat down on an uncomfortable chair of local manufacture, reached for my passport and began to copy down its details in a strong but careful hand into his gold-tooled, black leather book. He spoke hard but mellifluous Castilian, with strong emphasis, as a man of education, on the subjunctive. If a classic statue could have spoken it would have been with the marbled resonance of this voice. What was I doing here? he asked, and I told him I was on holiday.

  In a place like this? He looked through the window at the vacant beach. The fishermen were sleeping off the exhaustion of the previous day and had pulled the boats out of the water and gone off without bothering to clean up the mess. A number of cats like mangy little grey tigers were doing what they could to remedy this.

  ‘It’s quiet,’ I told him, ‘and that suits me.’

  ‘Why do you like it quiet?’

  ‘I’ve had enough of crowds. There aren’t any distractions.’

  ‘No,’ said the captain, ‘there are no distractions. Nobody comes to a place like this unless they have to. I certainly would not. The sea has no appeal for me. You must not think that Spain is like this.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘I can tell you of better places to spend your holidays. Places where there is some life. These people are not even real Spaniards. How long do you intend to stay?’

  ‘As long as I can.’

  The police captain picked up his gloves and put them on, stretching them carefully over his fingers. ‘I saw you out in one of the boats yesterday. They are not allowed to carry anyone who is not a member of the registered crew.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Your visa has a month to run. To be able to stay here you must comply with the laws. When it expires you must leave the country. If you want to come back I would choose some other place.’

  The Alcalde of Sort had put an empty house at the captain’s disposal and given him a servant to look after him, and later in the day this woman appeared in Farol trying to buy fish for his supper. She was told that no boats had gone out, which was true, but her story when she got back to Sort was that she had met with a point-blank refusal. The captain, it was heard at Farol, had been furious.

  It turned out that this man was very religious. Very little was said in private in either village that did not soon become a matter for public gossip, and it appeared that the old woman who looked after our priest had been hanging about in the background when the captain called on him, and made a careful record of their conversation, which she reported to Carmela, who passed it on to me.

  The question was raised as to the church-going habits of the villagers. The priest said, ‘They’re not very devout in this part of the world. At least not openly.’

  ‘But surely you have some sort of congregation?’

  ‘The Alcalde, the shopkeeper and his wife come most Sundays, the town clerk puts in an appearance once in a while.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘As a general rule. People who go to confession, for example, are distrusted by their neighbours, who believe that they must have committed crimes that need to be confessed.’

  ‘Don’t they realise that we are all born in sin?’

  ‘Nothing will make them accept it. I used to preach “all we like sheep have gone astray”, and they’d walk straight out of the church. The fishing population is subject to a kind of taboo. They mean no harm, but it’s impermissible to make any reference to religious matters except in a blasphemous way.’

  The captain shook his head in wonderment. ‘What do you put that down to?’

  ‘Many of the people in these villages are really pagans. The Inquisition used to carry out expeditions up and down the coast as late as 200 years ago. It didn’t do much good.’

  ‘Do they worship anything?’

  ‘Conceivably the sun, in an off-hand sort of way. It’s the only thing I’ve ever heard a fisherman admit to having any real reverence for.’

  ‘And this is a Christian country,’ the captain said.

  ‘In the hinterland, perhaps,’ Don Ignacio said. ‘To some extent.’

  The captain told the priest that he would have liked to enter the Church himself, and, according to the priest’s housekeeper, seemed eager to discuss religious topics in general. The old woman told Carmela that she knew her master well enough to realise that few things bored him more, and that all he really wanted to talk about was archaeology, about which the captain knew or cared nothing.

  The captain thoroughly approved of Sort, and one of the reasons he had chosen to stay there was the story published in the papers about the way the villagers had resisted the FAI. The anarchists had gone round collecting the wooden saints in the churches for burning, but the dog people had buried their saint and only dug it up again after the Nationalist victory. It was an episode for which the cat people expressed nothing but contempt.

  With this prejudice in their favour the captain set out to make himself agreeable to his hosts, and certain official duties to be performed were carried out in a perfunctory way. On two occasions, one eleven and the other sixteen years previously, murders had been committed in which it was suspected in each case that wives had pushed their husbands down dry wells – ‘the final solution’, as such domestic killings were referred to in the local jocular way. These murders remained unsolved, and since in the interim one suspect wife had died and the other emigrated, the captain announced that he proposed to cease investigations and close the cases.

  In Farol he showed himself less sympathetic; once again his enquiries were into a mysterious disappearance, this time of a local man who had suddenly dropped out of sight within days of the end of the war, just as advancing Nationalist troops were about to overrun the village. The young man in question lived alone in some state in a pretentious house built on the outskirts of the village. This had been abandoned for some years and had now fallen into ruin. He announced himself to be the illegitimate son of a ducal family, and let it be known that he had been provided with substantial funds and packed away out of sight under the threat of cutting off all support if he caused any trouble. The impression I got from the fishermen was that they believed him to be not quite right in the head, and that he had succeeded in making himself generally objectionable at a time when no one could afford to fall out with his neighbours. He drew attention to himself at a time when self-effacement would have been preferred; by aping grand manners he annoyed a people with no cause to have any affection for the rich.

  The captain called on the Alcalde of Farol and gave him six months to find out what had happened to the man or lose his job. He made it clear that Farol was a place he thoroughly disliked. His last action was to go down to the fishermen’s boats and check on their names, most of which he said struck him as detestable. He particularly disliked the pagan name Afrodite, and was puzzled about La Dudosa (‘The Doubtful Girl’ – doubtful about what?), Una Grande Liebre (‘A Great Hare’ – is this some joke?) and Inteligencia (faith is what we demand of Spaniards, not intelligence). The owners of these boats were summoned, ordered to paint out their names and rename them after the saints. The man who called his boat ‘A Great Hare’ was questioned for half an hour as to the possibility of concealed motives, but the captain could get nothing out of him, and concluded he was mad. Th
e captain checked on the boats’ registration numbers. Odd numbers were considered lucky, and even ones unlucky and to be avoided; thus registration numbers containing more than their fair share of threes and sevens were noted down in his book to be changed at the Comandancia de la Marina, so as to teach their present holders not to be superstitious.

  Simon was asked to explain the significance of the wavy lines painted on the prow of his boat.

  ‘They represent waves, in a formalised way.’

  ‘In my opinion they contravene the regulations. Better get rid of them,’ the captain said. He called over another fisherman. ‘What purpose do you imagine those eyes on your boat serve?’

  ‘We regard them as a sign against evil. Well, say a defence.’

  ‘The evil eye, as you call it, doesn’t exist,’ the captain said. ‘Evil is in men’s hearts. Paint them out. While you’re about it, there’s no such saint as Santurce. Change the name to San Faustino.’

  The police captain went finally prancing away on his fine horse to be seen no more that year, and Farol settled to relative calm. As soon as he was out of sight the Curandero emerged from Farol’s equivalent of a priest’s hole and a boat was ready to carry him off to his next port of call. I was told that the fisherman who had risked naming his boat ‘A Great Hare’ had had a most lucky escape, due purely to the captain’s ignorance of the dangerous joke the name recalled. The Nationalist slogan had been España – una, grande, libre (‘Spain – united, great, free’), and the Republican prisoners held in camps at the end of the war and forced to chant this over and over again, sometimes for hours on end, had been accustomed to inject sly derision into the procedure by changing the libre into liebre, so that the slogan came out ‘Spain – a great hare’. In this part of the world the hare was considered the most disgusting of animals, with homosexual proclivities and prone to syphilis.