AnimalFarm.org - The Life and Death of a Spanish Town

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Of Fish and Fishermen

From the depths of the sea and the hidden ledges and alternating patches of seaweed and sand came daily the evidence of seasons more mysterious than those familiar ones of the verdant slopes of hills. In approaching Ibiza from the sea, at night, after pitching and swaying in the rough cross currents which had menaced the Phoenicians and the Greeks, one would see in the distance a constellation of low lights, rising and falling with the swell, sometimes obscured, then reappearing. It was the fishing fleet. And later, when the passenger ship passed between them, just as the starlight was thinning, one would stand at the rail and try to guess which boat was Captain Juan's, which was manned by Mateo Rosa and his cousins, which by the curly-headed man whose child was sick in the alley leading to Jaume's carpenter shop, and in which of the dories was Edmundo, peering through steel-rimmed glasses, or Toniet Pardal, who had borrowed fifty pesetas to buy his skiff and was repaying me, through all eternity, with presents of lobsters, ink-fish, daggers forbidden by the Guardia Civil, rare shells, old coins and his unending conversation.

I think there are no beter fishing grounds than those lying north and east of Ibiza, and let no one imagine that the tales of hardship and death and perpetual danger (such as those of Hugo or Melville or the chroniclers of the Nefoundland banks) apply to the happy-go-lucky crews who set out from Santa Eulalia. There was no ice in the riggings, no bulling skipper, no waiting women wringing their hands on the shore. On the contrary, if the weather was the least bit rough they stayed in town, strolling from caf‚ to caf‚, and by nightfall would be roaring but never belligerent. There was no reason for them to risk their necks. For thousands of years, the sea which lay within convenient rowing distance had yielded richly whenever the waters were calm and if the people who remained on land, wither in Ibiza or Valencia or Barcelona could not have fish a certain day, they could eat lamb or goat, and in the winter, pork or sobresada. As to Fridays, the fishermen liked nothing better than to annoy the priests by failing to have fish that day. The fishermen never knew when they were going to work, and did not care. When their luck was good they spent more, that was all. I never knew of a fisherman getting rich, or even starting a bank account. Captain Juan had got hold of enough pesetas to buy a thirty-foot boat and a reliable motor, but most of them got along with crude equipment and still were able to eat and drink.

After passing through the fishing fleet, the passenger ship headed straight for the Tagomago light, which stood on a rocky island almost touching the northern coast of Ibiza. Around Tagomago, on which the fishermen often camped at night, were other dories and quite different varieties of fish. It is a dangerous coast, much like Norman's Woe, except for the abscence of tides. Reefs show a ragged crest just above the water surface or lurk just below. One large rock with scrubby vegetation on it, about one hundred yards square, bears the name of Santa Eulalia and can be seen from the hill roads behind the town. In the lee of the rocks the nets are spread, buoyed up with corks and green glass buoys and each morning when they are hauled up they yield an unimagianble assortment, in shapes, colors and sizes, of sea creatures, gasping, flopping in futile convulsions.

To see them overflowing the baskets or lying side by side - huge meros with red open moths a foot in circumference and six jagged sets of teeth, smooth cirviolas like torpedoes with green and indigo markings on their steel covered, daurade with golden flecks if imitation sunshine to hide their lurking eyes, tuna, great and small, bonitos, snake-like picados with long sharp bills - to see them is not like seeing sheaves of wheat or tubs of grapes. If a fisherman had to plant a mero, bend over in the hot sun for months at a stretch in order to pluck it, then thresh it and gather it into barns no fish would be available for mankind. On the days when the big fish were plentiful, that is, when the season was right and the weather calm enough to permit the fishermen to go out three or four miles from shore without discomfort, there was a quickening of the pulse of the town. The fishermen's families knew there would be money in larger than everyday quantities, the wives began to look for chickens for the rice, children thought of candy, clothes and possible bus-rides to the port city, storekeepers looked forward to an active day and Antonia, whose caf‚ was opposite the Royalty, on the eastern corner of the public square, prepared herself and her < name="18">grown daughters for hard and profitable work. Antonia's was the fishermen's hangout. First, because it was situated nearest the great spreading tree in the shade of which the fish were sold from baskets and also because fishermen liked to have women near by when they drank.

So each calm morning, hours before the dawn, while the card playing, and discussions and songs were still in progress up and down the main street, far off shore the fishing boats were rising and falling with the swell. Nearer the shore, among the ledges, nets were spread and the buoys made strange hieroglyphics in the calmer water. Around Tagomago and the island of Santa Eulalia a few men were fishing with handlines for sarks, or catching langostas (similar to the Pacific lobster) or large crabs called krankas. After daylight, the fishermen farthest out would come inshore, haul in the nets, and with their craft and tenders gleaming with their catch would come into Santa Eulalia's small harbor, just inside the point which sheltered it on the north. All the fish would be dumped into flat-bottomed skiffs and ranged in large wicker baskets on the shore. The cirviola, tuna, bonito or dentuls were like battleships with eyes, designed for speed and high pressure, having nothing to fear or pity. Burnished steel, reflecting all the colors of the dawn, smooth sides, torpedo tails, the force of battle in their strain. And around them their lesser brethren, whose environment had made them flabby or grotesque or crafty. Large skates with their deathlike bellies on which was a false ghost's face, flounders with eyes staring out at forty-five degrees, the flat limande (or Mediterranean sole), all the fish that lived on the bottom, their backs marked and tinted like veined clay, their undersides light so that when they rose from the sand and mud in their defenseless condition the fish of prey could pass beneath them without seeing them. The large-mouthed fish caught near the shore had heads like traditional monsters. Because they were likely to be left stranded by the waves, they were built to live longer in the air and breathed heavily with their gills long after the big fighting fish had lost their power. They were not colored like the currents in deep water, nor stained to look like mud, but had all the weird colors of the sea plants and wet rocks, brick-red, dark-violet, brown-green, green-grey. The largest of their kind was the mero, a giant mediterranean bass that lurked among the largest ledges. The smallest was no larger than a man's little finger and looked like a dragon carved in green gumdrop. Then there would be eels, dark morenos six feet long, grey eels with triangular heads, small sharks with their wicked underslung jaws, sea butterflies with antennae and ribbed wings marked like peacock feathers, vacas with streaks of gold and a thumb-print of violet on each side, mahogany-colored fish with scarlet slashes to make them invisible in red reeds, light pink prophet fish with pale staring eyes, spider crabs with legs a foot long, pajels with blue and turquoise like changeable silk, sea snails, lobsters, and shellfish called cigales built like steam shovels with saw teath on their powerful tails.

These creatures, in damp baskets on the shore and the fishermen standing around them, were not like anything on the earth. Still, in looking at them one could see the beginning of machines, the grimaces of actors on the screen, the glitter of the ballroom, the fighting fleets, the gardens of Babylon, the sidewalks of New York, projectiles, kitchenware, whatever there is or has been. And Captain, the cleverest of all the fishermen, would often look at his catch and shake his head in a pleased and bewildered way, and chuckle about the vagaries of chance and the prodigality of nature, as evidenced by what came daily from the sea. He thought of the big fish in terms of pesetas and spending money, but he knew the fish seasons and migrations, where they lived, how they behaved toward one another, what they fed on. He was happy whenever he could add to his store of fish facts.

As the different boats came in, their owners and the helpers would load the baskets and start the half-mile walk to town in pairs, each man holding one handle of the heaviest basket and carrying another on his outside hip. Frequently they would stop to rest, or to roll cigarettes. They were strong men, with great endurance, but none of them wished to make an ordeal of a job which could be done in easy stages.

Usually they got in with their catch about a half hour before bust time, if there were big fish to be shipped to Ibiza and from there to Palma, Barcelona, Valencia, or Alicante. The first stop for Captain Juan would be Cosmi's hotel, where Antonio, Catalina, Anna Cosmi, and old Antonia Masear would come out to see what he had. Antonio or Anna would select what was needed for the hotel, the fishermen would stop at the bar for coffee and cazalla, then the Captain would go on to the Royalty, where Juanito, the young properietor, or his mother, Isabel, would buy the day's supply. The big fish remaining would then be iced and placed on top of the bus which left for Ibiza at seven in summer and seven-thirty in winter. In the Ibicenco dialect, there are only two words for seasons, estiu meaning summer (April to November) and ivern for the rest of the year.

The men carrying baskets of smaller fish made many more stops. As they approached the town from their mooring place, they blew a horn made from a large sea-snail shell. The first stop was at Gork's, the theatre caf‚. There a group would gather from the nearby houses. After that, they would go as far as Can Xumeau, in which was the public telephone office and exchange. Xumeau, the proprietor, his sedate wife and melancholy daughter, Sindik and his helpers from the carpenter shop next door, Guarapi¤ada and his wife from across the street, the barberet (so-called because he was the smallest of the barbers), the new baker's wife and sister-in-law from the back street, and others would take their pick. Each fish was weighed on hand balances which probably had not been checked in twenty years and paid for in copper coins, including French, Italian, Algerian sousand English pennies.

And so it was, as the fisherman proceeed from north to south along the main street of Santa Eulalia, the great fish an the small gasping ones would be spread back through the countryside according to a plan or a system whose ramifications had to do with the structure of human society and fish destiny. The small rock fish, pale garnet or brick red, the ones which lived longest out of water, had known nothing but terror, and were cheap, found their way into houses like that of Jaume the carpenter, and the poorest little shacks. Large lobsters, cirviolas, the choicest and most belligernet in their own environment, went straight to the houses of the rich. The hotels got the middle class fish, the salmonetas like over-size Wagnerian goldfish and merluzas so insipid in taste and texture that even English tourists could eat them. Flabby and defenseless fish got into soup, relentless ones were baked or fried. The big ones were packed in ice, some stopped off at Ibiza, others went on to Barcelona, Valnecia and Alicante and were relayed to Madrid.

Captian Juan was not an avaricious man. Because of his superior knowledge and equipment, he could have made it more difficult for his competitors but it is doubtful if he ever thought of Mateo Rosa, or old Pere the deaf man, or Edmundo in that light. He accepted a bit more responsibility, could be depended upon to fill larger orders, took care of the customers he liked in case they did not show up while the best of the fish were going. He was one of those who listened most carefully, with a pleased and benevolent smile, when Cosmi, late at night, or old Mousson, who ran a communistic pottery in a nearby cove, would say that all men were brothers. He did not hate the rich, who made it difficult for friends of his on land, but he feared them less than most men did. When he saw a Guardia Civil he looked at him frankly, knowing the officer would like to shoot him but aware that no pretext was likely to arise. Apriest he thought was grotesque, without being funny like a clown.

The fishermen and police were natural enemies, partly because long centuries of coercion had failed utterly to make fishermen attend or respect the church. Also, the fishermen augmented their income by smuggling tobacco from Africa and thus weakened a government monopoly. Captain Juan was not outspoken in his defiance of constituted authority and dogma, as was Edmundo, nor a member of a secret political commitee like Mateo Rosa. He was small in stature, mild in manner, but he was fearless. He was dangerous because the other fishermen, whome he had never tried to put out of business, considered him their leader. All he seemed to do was lead them from bar to bar, but in those bars he frequented, Cosmi's, Andres', and Antonia's, talk wnet on, irreverent, suggestive of change. It was hushed when a Guardia entered - passing priests or deacons caught only a rumble of it. Unmistakably, however the police and the clergy were happier in the inland towns.

My modest friend Juan was a Spanish Red. He had scarcely heard of Moscow, had never slit a throat. He had not aspired to political office, never made a speech, but he could not be imposed upon and he complained when any of his acquaintances got an unfair deal. He had no selfish interest in a change of the social plan. He wanted most of all for the children to be saved from religious instruction and for countless officials who were being paid for doing nothing to be dropped from the rolls.

Juan, the best fisherman in a fisherman's town, knew nothing of Karl Marx. The ideas which pleased him, when he heard them expounded, and harmonized with his tempeerament and the lessons of the sea, would correspond with those of American patriots. Freedom of thought and expression, freedom of action within reasonable social limits, separation of church and state, re-division of idle land, abolition of special privilege and the poor old brotherhood of man - nothing more.

The only man Juan ever fired was Toniet Pardal. And this was done gently. The Captain waited for their twelve-months agreement to expire and then did not renew it. It was a painful moment for him. He dreaded it for several days in advance, blushed, made false explanantions more kindly than the real ones, stood on one foot, then the other. In the end he probably would have embarassed himself to the point of relenting had not Toniet, who was capable of tactful or even noble gestures, made it impossible. Bothe men were drunk for days afterwards, in their different fashions. Toniet was sorry for himself and went about seeking sympathy, which no one gave him. Juan was very quiet, and sought out a few of his intimate friends, like Cosmi, to explain that he really had to do it.

What the town hadn't understood was why Juan had kept Toniet so long in his boat, for Toniet was lazy and undependable to a degree that made him lag behind even the gentle rhythm of Santa Eulalia's activities. Worse than that, he talked too much. He was always apologizing. Sometimes he was quarrelsome.

"My pobre madre," Toniet had said to me one day when his sixty-year-old mother passed us in the heat of the day with a basket of fish on hear head. Toniet was doing nothing at the time, but, his pity for his mother and her lifetime of toil was as genuine as that of Villon, who began a stanza of his testament with the same words. The poet would have liked the rich intonation of Toniet's deep voice when he said "My poor mother" and turned away from the sight of her misery.

There is a sort of poetic justice, however, in the fact that Toniet, who had been a burden to his fellow-fishermen many years, did them a service in the class struggle they so dimly understood. The point of land and rocks behind which for centuries Santa Eulalia fishermen had moored their boats, and on which they had loaded their baskets and often slept under trees on warm nights, was owned by Don Carlos Roman, a red-faced genial man whose father had been an antiquarian and an expert on Phoenician relics. Don Carlos knew nothing of relics, but he had been appointed curator of the excellent Ibiza museum when his father had died. That was the way in Spain. The King's agents kept a few families loyal everywhere by giving them whatever they could not themselves take away. The Romans were such a family, and owned large tracts of land, had several houses, and enjoyed complete immunity from the law. By that I do not mean that Don Carlos was a bad fellow. Decidedly he was not. Nearly everyone liked him, and that is the test. That is what saved his life later on, when nothing else would have done it. His town house in Ibiza was near that of his aristocratic neighbors and inconvenient for the purpose of orgies, so he decided to build a house in Santa Eulalia on the point the fishermen had always used. It was far enough from other houses in Santa Eulalia and could be enclosed by a wall. The fishermen knew nothing of this until one day some workmen began building the wall. The boss mason informed the fishermen that they must trespass no longer.

That night the shack in which the workmen kept their materials, a motorboat and tender belonging to Don Carlos were burned. The Guardias slung their rifles and searched the countryside and, unable to find a bit of evidence, arrested Cosmi's brother-in-law, Marc Colomar, in order to show their superiors that they had not been idle.

Marc's arrest was not known in town until the next morning, and immediately Toniet came to my room. What should he do? I told him to be quiet until nightfall, that Marc would be released that day, and exonerated. I told him also to be careful what he did with matches in the future. He started to go away, but I could see that he was hurt and dissappointed, and sudenly it occured to me that he wanted me to judge him. Moral questions were too difficult for him.

"You did a good job, Toniet," I said, and I wish you could have seen him smile.

Nearly always, however, there was an acceptance of things as they were, few outbreaks, few protests, extreme smoothness in the flow of life. Sea moods. States of sea. The rise and fall of the dories and motorboats in the stillness of the night, the oncoming lights and then the bulk of the steamer from the mainland, fire light and pans of rice among the rocks and the pale buff beaches. The fishermen saw each other and their friends and customers daily, rode over expanses of the sea, sorted our miraculous draughts of fishes, eels; crustaceans and bivalves, lugged baskets, blew soft horns made from conks, made change, while the Guardias dozed and loafed in the Cuartel or patrolled wooded roads in a desultory way and the black gowns of the priests made spirals in the middle distance as they wound upward and trickled downward over Santa Eulalia's hill. The fishermen seldom read letters
Vistas of Seaor wrote them. They saw their wives infrequently, except for the noon meal and in bed on rainy nights. Santa Eulalia and its coast to them was a countless number of superimposed vistas from the sea, with the green slopes spreading upward toward the skyline, the best of the trees and the white plaster houses gliding slowly in concentric movements, crossing one another, falling into new alignments, resolving themselves in a stationary pattern when the harbor was reached. The main street was fed by streams of morning customers. Don Abel Matutes made all the money because he controlled all the means of transportation, gave out the licenses, filled or emptied cash boxes, mended or neglected roads. Who cared? It is possible that the fishermen considered men lucky who were born with unlimited acres, funds and exemption from all laws except that against murder. They were certainly friendly with Don Carlos and Don Ignacio and Don Mariano Riquer. The visiting millionaire banker who had built a summer house in Santa Eulalia, Don Rafael Sainz, they pitied because his wife was so holy and he was afraid to behave as he liked. But Don Abel \-Iatutes, who spent all his hours making his money in divers ways and forgot to shave as he sat among his ledgers and clerks, was as foreign to them as a spider might be.

Toniet Pardal's wife had five children to care for. She made all their clothes and mended them. That took all her time that was not needed for preparing meals. She had no women friends and her relatives avoided her because she was so often in need. Her manner to her husband was respectful but not submissive or fearful. She showed her age much less than most of the other women who had much less to do. Probably her work was less arduous than that of a poor farmer's wife, but her life lacked the farm festivals and the church holidays and the other pleasures in which women were permitted to share. Patience snakes women beautiful in middle age, and Toniet's wife radiated a part of the calm which was Santa Eulalia's best attribute. At any moment she could have begun to enjoy herself if she had had time. And in front of her door was one of the town's most magnificent grapevines. The gnarled stock was thicker than a man's arm, the leaves spread luxuriously on a wooden trellis, offering always a sharp patch of shade on the dust of the back street. As the clusters swelled and grew, Toniet's children would stand in a row, looking up at them, and others would stop and express their admiration. Senora Pardal loved the vine because it was her only possession that others might envy, and the bunches of sweet white grapes, as they grew and took on that faint tinge of brown that sweet grapes should have, were singled out by Toniet and his wife and the children to give as presents to those they liked best, and Toniet's manner, bringing grapes, was something one can never forget and for which he may be forgiven anything.

I cannot leave the fishermen without a word about Edmundo. In a town where the lives of the inhabitant were so closely inter-related there are few men wh^ always stand alone in one's memory. Edmundo was such a one. He was the only man on the island with that name. He was the only one who habitually wore a black shirt, and that had nothing to do with the meaning of black shirts elsewhere. Edmundo was the
The Only Edmundo
most thorough and outspoken republican I ever saw, tinder no matter what regime. The protests others might think about or whisper, he would shout at the top of his lungs when a Guardia or a priest was passing Icy. Drunk or sober, he would defy arrest or constraint of any kind. He was the only fisherman who wore spectacles. These spectacles had nickel-plated rims, with small lenses which must have been out of alignment, and they gave Edmundo's face a particularly villainous appearance, although his features were Much like those of his brother, Mateo Rosa, the bestlooking man in town. Edmundo had a small motorboat and fished alone. When he walked or staggered up the street, he would he alone. He would join his friends for a drink or a song, but even then something about him made him seem to stand apart from them. He had been married once, to celebrate the 1931 revolution, had been left with a couple of children and for their sake had married again, but his wife stayed at home on the back street, did her housework well and was sound asleep long before Edmundo left the cafes each night. There was a purely unsentimental arrangement between them.

Mateo Rosa and Edmundo might have started out as young brothers with similar instincts and inclinat ions, but since Mateo had tried to appear as respectable as he could, considering the demands of his temperament, Edmundo had emphasized his iconoclastic views in every possible way. Against the formidable inertia of custom and the force of coercion, lie had set himself resolutely. He was tough, and the authorities were afraid of him. He said and did what he pleased, knowing he was right and the others were wrong, and nobody dared lay a finger on him. He was one of the best sailors, one of the best dancers, a good companion and a loyal friend. Later I shall tell you what happened when someone tried to force him to take up arms against himself and the other republicans.

And I must not forget the fisherman named Carlos who had a very small house in a narrow alley between the main street and the back street. He was tall, with curly hair and dark-brown eyes and his wife was slender and wore a pigtail, in the ancient style. They did their cooking in a black pot over a small wood fire outside their doorstep, and had only one child. They were together, the slender woman and big curlyhaired man and the small child, grouped near their outdoor fire, much more than other fishermen's families. Once the child lost his appetite, and ate almost nothing for about a year, and the mother and father moved through the alley and the town with listless steps and downcast faces. Their fire burned with a duller gleam, and whoever passed through the narrow alley heard the child weakly crying. Then suddenly the child began to eat again, and the woman smiled and danced by the doorstep with the baby in her arms, one step forward, one step back, singing a Moorish lullaby. Carlos walked briskly to and from the harbor, and caught huge baskets of fish and almost laughed aloud as he shouted "Bon dia" all the way from Gork's to the tree in the square, where he put down his basket and blew merrily on his horn.

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