by Norman Lewis
‘What was he worried about, then?’
‘Rumours,’ Mayans said – the possibility of a story getting round that he’d been involved in witchcaft. Most of his customers were superstitious. It would ruin his trade. It might even get into the newspapers, in which case the Civil Guard in Gerona would be down on him like a ton of bricks.
‘I told him I didn’t think he had any cause for worry,’ Don Alberto said. ‘While he’d been telling me all this rigmarole I’d been doing a little thinking and putting two and two together. I asked the man if he could remember anything more the farmer might have told him about the two strangers, and he said that he’d mentioned that they had funny accents, like the Aragonese. That settled it, because I remembered that the sixteenth of August is the feast of San Roque in Aragon and that they hold a quite famous ceremony in Villanueva de Giloca, involving the sacrifice of a bull. At midday. That’s where these two fellows must have been from.’
‘They burn the bull to death?’ I asked.
‘That is the time-honoured custom. Our friend managed to remember that one of the two strangers had played the bagpipes while the burning was going on, which also enters into the tradition. They fix balls of pitch between the horns and set light to them so that only the brains are damaged. The iron mask arrangement is intended to slow down the process. The longer it takes the better. I told Mayans that if they didn’t go for him for dealing in unlicensed meat he could forget about it.’
‘Cruelty to animals is without importance?’
‘It wouldn’t be seen as cruelty. This is an ancient festival, recognised and approved of by the state and the Church. The bull is blessed by the priest before they put it to death. I can’t imagine that anyone would want to make a fuss because two villagers from Villanueva who can’t get back for their fiesta hold a little private celebration. The only offence they could be charged with would be an infringement of licensing regulations.’
Chapter Sixteen
THE YEAR WENT DOWNHILL RAPIDLY. A vicious circle was established of boats that became progressively less seaworthy, and equipment that was wearing out because the fishermen could not make enough money with their defective gear to put it in repair. In August the Feast of the Assumption came and went without the appearance of the Curandero, who was rumoured to have died in the end from the after-effects of the great beating he had received. This left the villagers of Sort saddled with the year’s crop of legal and family disputes with no one to help them solve them, while the women of Farol, unable to renew their stock of birth-control requisites, and having no faith in products obtainable from other sources, began to refuse cohabitation with their husbands even in the hour of the siesta. The fishing suffered another blow. Deprived of the Curandero’s guidance, the fishermen hardly knew how to set about finding the tunny. They blundered largely by accident into a few small shoals, but the catch was less than half that of the year before.
Don Alberto had complained of the monotonous character of local fiestas. This year the fact had to be faced that the fiesta at Sort had come to an end. At Farol the Sa Cova evening promenade would happen as usual but, according to Sebastian’s Elvira, the sea pilgrimage, abandoned through lack of a candidate for the central role, was unlikely to take place again. Mentioning this, Sebastian added an item of personal news which he admitted had left him much depressed. By the purest chance, while sifting through a bundle of old Vanguardias left over after the obituary notices had been removed for sale, he had come across an account of the tragic end of Enrique, killed back in April while attempting to escape across the Pyrenees. ‘Frontier Guards In Action Against Bandits’, the item was headed. Enrique and three companions had attempted the crossing at night, and fallen into an ambush. Once in a while, as Sebastian had said, the police had to pretend to clamp down.
While Farol began its slow loss of identity, Muga went from strength to strength, busied with his plans for the coming of the tourists, determined to create for them here a Spanish dreamland, a gimcrack Carmen setting in which the realities of poverty and work were tolerable so long as they remained picturesque.
Despite Don Alberto’s attempts to pull strings in the planning department he had crashed through all bureaucratic obstacles to the development of the sea front, but in carrying these out he had so far stuck to the letter of his word. As promised he made no attempts to plant trees or create flower beds, and the sea wall was built without medieval embellishments. Six bronze lamps in modern rectangular style were suspended from stark-looking cement standards. These, at night, emitted a vibrant bluish light, irresistible to winged insects of all kinds and to night-flying birds, which collided with them in great number, providing manna for the cats waiting below.
The fishermen were quite unable to understand how it could be that a man of Muga’s intelligence and wealth should be so devoid of taste. Naturally enough, there had been no mention in the agreement reached between Muga and the village of the colour of the road, and the fishermen looked on with incredulous horror as Muga’s workmen emptied sackloads of imitation marble chippings of many clashing colours and began to press these into the unset concrete of the road’s surface. ‘I have to tell you,’ said my neighbour Juan, ‘that when I look at this road I have the feeling of having eaten something I cannot digest.’
The effect of Muga’s tidying up was a deadening one. The ancient handsome litter of the sea front had possessed its own significance, its vivacity and its charm. A spirited collection of abandoned windlasses, the ribs of forgotten boats, the salt-wasted, almost translucent gallows and frames on which the fish had once been dried, the sand-polished sculpture of half-buried driftwood that had constituted the stage-scenery against which the rituals of the sea had been performed for so many generations, was now abolished at a stroke. Muga, high priest of the standardisation and monotony that lay in wait, was consumed with a passion for make-believe. Walls with castellations and arrow slits for the archers had been ruled out, but before the villagers knew what was happening to them he had made a start on a Moorish-style café with a dome and horseshoe arches at the end of his road, within fifty yards of Carmela’s boathouse. The fishermen went to the Alcalde, who asked Muga for an explanation. Muga wondered what all the fuss was about. The tourists were coming and Moorish cafés were what was expected of Spain. With the intention of cutting the ground from under the Alcalde’s feet, he announced his intention of presenting the village with the café. The Alcalde asked him if he had acquired the land upon which the cafe was being built, and Muga told him that, like the road, it lay in the public domain. Was the café to be run on a profit-making basis? the Alcalde asked. Muga was ready with his answer, and his ferocious smile. All profits, he said, would go to the community. He was about to set up a trust, he explained, with himself as one member, and he hoped that the Alcalde would raise no objection to becoming the second trustee.
The moment clearly seemed right to Muga for a major confrontation, and he asked the Alcalde to convene a meeting with the five senior fishermen at which he would put forward suggestions for saving the village from impending ruin. This meeting was held in the bar with most of the village males present, and nobody saw any objection to my going along.
Muga asked the men if they had given any thought to what they were faced with in the coming winter, and Simon, who did most of the talking for the fishermen – who had warned him not to allow himself to be bullied by Muga – said it was too early to say. They had been at work through much of the year rebuilding one of the boats smashed in the big storm, and hoped to put it into the water in time for the autumn sardine season.
‘If there is one,’ Muga said. He had dropped his habitual bluff and bluster, and adopted a conciliatory manner. The fishermen had accepted the cheroots he handed round.
Simon told him that the growing belief was that the cycle of bad years was coming to an end. This view, as Muga probably knew, was based on the Curandero’s predictions and Tarot cards, but he forbore to show scepticism. ‘You lost
the tunny,’ he said. ‘Suppose the sardines don’t come. How long can you carry on?’
‘We’ll live on our fat,’ Simon said. ‘We’re used to it. We don’t need five meals a day. We’ll all go to bed for a month or two if we have to. They say if you sleep you don’t need to eat.’ There was a growl of assent from the other fishermen.
Muga had been studying the economics of fishing, and probably knew as much about it by this time as the fishermen themselves. He asked what an average catch fetched in the market when one of the big boats went out.
The fishermen were vague about this, and a long argument went on before a rough figure of 300 pesetas was agreed.
‘Shared between how many men?’
‘Five.’
‘Sixty pesetas per man in fact?’ Muga said.
Well no, not quite that, somebody broke in, because there were small sums to be paid to the one or two widows who had an interest in any boat, and the owner or owners of the nets. In two cases there were engines to be looked after and the men who did this expected a few pesetas.
‘Let’s strike an all-in figure,’ Muga said. ‘What does that leave us with? Thirty-five pesetas, would you say?’
There was more argument, but 35 pesetas was thought about right.
‘For this,’ Muga said, ‘you put in eight hours’ hard work, two hours to put the nets down, two hours to take them up, and four to get the fish out of the nets and box them up. I don’t want to talk about all the time that goes into mending the nets, especially when the dolphins have been at them. At Palamos they take tourists for a two- or three-hour boat trip, and they’re paid 1,000 pesetas. Quite a difference, isn’t there?’
Blank faces all round. Nobody could find anything to say.
‘Can you turn a proposition like that down?’ Muga asked them.
‘First of all, we’re fishermen,’ Simon said. ‘Secondly we don’t have tourists here. Why talk about it?’
Muga then announced that parties of French and German tourists would be arriving on 25 August and had taken every room in his hotel. ‘This is your chance,’ he said. ‘You can charge 1,000 pesetas for taking a party to one of the beaches. Why bother about sardines? Why bother about tunny?’
The fishermen’s expressions made it clear that they were horrified, that Muga’s proposal seemed to them immoral, almost indecent. They had perhaps an inflated view of their own dignity and that of their profession, feeling themselves immeasurably superior to the parsimonious and cringing peasants and the tasteless and ridiculous bourgeois, such as Muga, with whom they were in contact. What Muga now suggested, they complained, was an affront not only to them, but to the sea. They were gente honrada, not tourist touts or pimps.
‘I don’t expect a decision now,’ Muga said. ‘You need time to think about this.’
‘We don’t need any time,’ Simon told him. ‘The thing’s out of the question.’
‘As you know,’ Muga said, ‘I’m not the one to argue. I’ll talk to you again in three days’ time. If you’ve changed your minds by then, all well and good. Otherwise I’ll hire a boat in Palamos and bring it down here. Why should I worry? It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I’m only trying to help you.’
*
In his attempts to arrange entertainments for the expected tourists Muga ran into the same difficulties as Don Alberto had encountered in his failed campaign to brighten up the annual fiesta, but Muga was forceful and persistent where Don Alberto had been easily discouraged. He located an itinerant gypsy family with a performing bear. This wretched animal had been trained – as all such bears were – by dragging it a number of times across a bed of heated stones while a certain tune was played, to prance and hobble in a grotesque and afflicted fashion for the benefit of an audience whenever the tune was subsequently played. Muga was not altogether sure of whether or not the bear would be considered an attraction, but it turned out that one of the boys was a guitarist, so he spoke to the Alcalde about allowing him to play in the bar. The Alcalde wanted nothing of this but Muga bribed him with the promise of a supply of good wine from Alicante and he gave in. It was agreed that no music should be played before ten o’clock at night, by which time all the men of the village were either out with the boats or in bed. Muga’s next step was to force the Alcalde, by producing the text of a law relating to the suppression of improper spectacles, to cover the mermaid with a curtain. These provisions, he considered, made the bar acceptable to the visitors, twelve of whom were to be lodged in the Brisas del Mar and the remaining nine in California-style chalets on his estate that the builders were working on night and day to get ready.
At this moment a rumpus broke out in the Grandmother’s household, as Sebastian’s Elvira announced that she had taken a job as a chambermaid in Muga’s hotel. Sebastian, cowed by the Grandmother’s scorn for a man who would allow his wife to go out and work, dared only support her in secret. His wage now, as agreed by the Government syndicate, was 28 pesetas a day, whereas Muga offered a minimum of 50 pesetas a day to anyone who entered his service. There were stormy scenes in the village when two more women, trembling with nerves and spruced up as if for a christening, went off to take similar jobs. When Simon’s wife told him that she had agreed to cook for Muga for the hitherto unheard-of reward of 75 pesetas a day, Simon informed her that he proposed to emigrate, and actually left the house, staying away for twenty-four hours. None of the men of Farol would agree to associate themselves in any way with Muga and his project, so Muga enlisted cleaners, handymen and a gardener in Sort.
The twelve French tourists arrived by bus from Perpignan on the twenty-fifth, and the party of Germans were picked up at the Figueras station next day. In Farol they were objects of intense curiosity. The villagers were surprised, they told me, at the loudness of the foreigners’ voices, their emphatic gestures, and the informality of the clothes. They seemed anxious to please, and over-generous with their money. The Alcalde and the stupid boy he employed were startled, after serving a party of them with drinks, to be offered tips, and the money was still where they had left it, lying on the table, when the foreigners returned next day. Purely out of politeness the young fishermen lined up to follow the foreign ladies – most of whom were plain – when they appeared in the street, and the ladies giggled in an embarrassed way, but seemed pleased at these attentions.
In preparing his hotel for its inauguration, Muga had shown imagination. Vines had been planted in tubs along the verandah, and the handsome decorative foliage trailed along a species of pergola, from which fairy lights had been suspended. After dinner amplified music was switched on. Most of it was the spiritless stuff of the postwar period when the Spanish had begun to lose their grip as a musical nation, but the whole thing was a huge success with the foreigners. Thumping mechanical paso dobles and the drunken bear-torturing guitarist in the bar were the Spain they had come in search of.
Muga had gauged their mentality and aspirations fairly well but, for all the modern gadgetry of his life, remaining a Spaniard, there were still lessons to be learned. The main view beyond the trailing vines and the twinkle of lights was of the ugly house Cabezas had spent the whole of his life on building single-handedly. At one end of the verandah there was another limited prospect, that of the old wall with its recess in which horses were castrated. The people of Farol had no horses but those of Sort were dealt with here because the castrator had chosen to live where he did in a hutch with a view of the sea. Horse castration was a lengthy and finicky business with trimming-up to be done with a razor after the basic operation, and Muga, looking down from the verandah shortly after the tourists had settled in, and admiring, one supposes, the perfectionism of an acknowledged master of his craft, was suddenly surrounded by horrified and protesting guests. Foreigners, as he later confided to the Alcalde, had to be protected from the unpleasant facts of life. That same day the wall was demolished, and the castrator presented with 5,000 pesetas, and told to go and practise his trade elsewhere.
; Muga continued to do all that he could to ensure that his customers had a good time. Within a few days he arranged what he called an open-air gala supper, setting up tables in the street outside the hotel. This went down badly with the villagers, who by tradition and temperament were opposed to what in this instance came close to a vulgar display. Muga supplied an over-abundance of food, and champagne flowed like water although it was in reality no more than sweetish white wine pumped full of carbon dioxide. Too much fake champagne followed by too much heavy brandy fostered an uproar that continued deep into the night. Even if there were no desperate shortages in Farol at that time, some people still went hungry, and it upset them to see large quantities of food of the kind they could never in any case afford being surrendered to scrounging cats, and even more tipped into trash cans at the end of the feast.
The Alcalde let Muga know as best he could that the villagers objected to being treated like African tribesmen. Notably, they did not wish to be disturbed while at work or engaged in their private affairs by having cameras thrust into their faces. He passed on the message that they found it insulting to be offered money to allow themselves to be photographed. The matter of beach protocol was more prickly. Muga promised to post notices asking his guests not to attempt to enter boats while wearing leather-soled shoes. He did not feel he could embody any prohibition in such notices against urinating on the beach or in the sea.
Don Alberto lent his services in a rather half-hearted way to provide a touch of folklore by inviting a group from Figueras to dance the sardana. Since Farol wanted nothing of them, the performance took place on a Sunday morning in the little square of Sort. The sardana was recognised as the national dance of Catalonia, but Don Alberto was unenthusiastic because it had only been invented in about 1890, was relatively unknown in the countryside and had become the speciality of typists and shop assistants in the towns. The occasion was not an overwhelming success. The visitors enjoyed the dancing, took numerous photographs, and were happy to be taught a few of the dance’s exceedingly simple steps. Some of them, however, showed discomfort at the presence of emaciated dogs dragging themselves about in the last stages of starvation, and there was an unsavoury moment when, through lack of planning, the muleteer arrived outside the bar, within yards of them, to allow his animal to discharge the contents of its bowels in the usual place. It was at this moment when a French tourist leaned over to tap Don Alberto, to gesture first in the direction of the dancers and then at the mule and the dogs, and say with a laugh, ‘The myth and the reality, eh?’