Salt Water

STILL LIFE WITH FISH Then, my dear friend, we lived in Fornells – not in the Fornells that is in Menorca, a shabby, squalid spot, but Fornells in our country, a sheltered, delightful place. After wandering the world for so long, after so much futile, wearisome activity, it was time for me to stop for a moment and rest a while. It was the right decision: I went for a couple of weeks, and was still there a year later, far from hunger, work and stress. At the time Fornells had no church, no public clock, no local government office, no embodiment of legal authority. There wasn’t even a cemetery, which is surprising, given there are so many cemeteries in this world. It meant those of us who lived there thought we would never die. If in the event anyone did, tears prompted by the presence of death turned to icy anguish and the coffin was carried along the most unlikely paths. There was an excellent source of water, under pine trees, with a large wash-place where young girls with gleaming teeth and moist gums went to wash. In winter when the gods brought downpours, there was a rush of water like a woman’s translucent thigh, green-blue veins under a pinkish body of water. Small, nondescript houses were scattered around, connected to a distant hamlet by a series of tracks and shortcuts. There wasn’t anything one could describe as an appreciable urban mass. Men and women, old and young, all told we must have been some thirty-five individuals, and the houses we occupied were detached, and separated by some distance. It would have been an exaggeration to call it a village: they were simply fishermen’s houses set on a rocky landscape, in the most sheltered spots, surrounded by evergreen mastic trees – small, whitewashed houses clinging to the ground, roofs touching the rock face, doors open to the sea, pine branches giving a little shade to their façades. Rather than a strategy to communicate with others, those houses represented a way of living extremely solitary lives. Everything that goes with human life was there: no house was without a cat or two; three or four dogs, of complex, mongrel stock, had settled in the area; a cockerel heralded our dawn; two old, shaggy, good-natured asses seemed like remnants from a past long destroyed. Culture – what people generally call culture – was little in evidence. There were no teachers and the laws related to state education were ignored. If they wanted to study, children would have had to cover seven to ten or twelve miles there and back: commonsense dictated that they went when they had nothing else to do, and even then it wasn’t a foregone conclusion. We didn’t even have a single wretched volume of the Espasa Calpe dictionary to consult. We received one or other of the daily newspapers, very late, in the form of wrapping around rice, noodles or beans, which we rushed to read – or rather daydream over – if their dense pages didn’t first disappear into the kitchen stove or the fire in the hearth. Women, in particular, had no respect for the printed page and were always short of paper. It is undeniable: Fornells, in that era, was no hotbed of culture. Nevertheless, if you wanted life with the taste of oblivion and remoteness that nervous exhaustion craves, it was a wonderfully mellow place. Sheltered from northerly winds by the Cape Begur cliffs, the land sits there like a earthenware dish on its geological base – a sunny dish, open to the sun rising across the sea, and closed to the sunset by the mountains. The land is poor but has been admirably cultivated with the noblest of crops: ancient silvery olive groves, carob trees, cypresses, evergreen pines, almond trees and vines. Contemplated through their majestic forms, sometimes bending under the richness of their sap, the sea was something bright and beautiful, like an unexpected reassuring gift from nature. In early February, when almond trees blossomed above the small ears and beady eyes of broad bean plants, the sea loomed across a pink haze. Bathed in the wintry sun, the sweet yellow of the mimosas dazzled. Bronzed green oleanders had a reddish glow. Agave plants on rocky ridges were streaked with an egg-yolk yellow. A scent of rosemary, gorse and lavender floated in the air along paths melding with pine resin: it was a refreshing smell, a tangy, innocent delight abroad.