Mayflower (Flor de mayo): A Tale of the Valencian Seashore

Though much good the concession did him! For his sister was now on ground where, from the long tirades of Siñá Tona, she could be counted quite expert. She talked passionately, with a tinge of irritation in her sweet vibrant voice. "Women, eh! Women! Not a bit of it! It's the men, I say, and I know what I'm talking about. Among the pigs in this world, the prize hog is the man! See trouble anywhere? Look and you'll find a man at the bottom of it. Mama says so, too. There are two kinds of men in this world – scamps and puddingheads! If a woman goes wrong, it's the man that's to blame. If she's not married they are all after her to get what they want … and maybe I don't know that! If I was the fool some men take me for, God knows the fix I'd be in to-day! And if you are married, well, it's worse, almost – for the scamps try to get you into trouble, and the puddingheads haven't sense enough to keep their wives where they belong. Look at Tonet, for instance! Wouldn't Rosario be serving him right if she went on the street, even, to get square with him for all he does! And then, well, no! Stop at Tonet! We don't need to give other examples! But the whole Cabañal knows about husbands that are themselves to blame if their wives aren't all they ought to be!"

And the girl leered at the Rector so unguardedly, in saying this, that Pascualo, in spite of his corpulent obtuseness, caught the glimmer of an allusion and studied her face enquiringly. But his immense faith, at bottom, in people and in things stood him in good stead against any dangerous inference. And he protested, mildly, at her exaggeration. Bosh! People in the Cabañal made him sick! They were always talking about somebody, to pass the time. If you listened to what people said, there wasn't a decent woman in town, nor a husband that wasn't the joke of the beach. But that's only a way they had of amusing themselves. The Cabañal had no manners, as don Santiago, the curate, said so well! "Now, take me, for instance. I've got the best, sweetest wife in the world, and everybody knows it! Well, does that keep those fools from blabbing about her? And who's the man? Tonet, may it please the court! Tonet, of all men! The people in the Cabañal are donkeys, idiots, rotters, that's all! Tonet, God save us! Why, Tonet … he worships Dolores, like a mother… But no, my house has simply got to be a brothel, for those chatter-boxes… Tonet! God!" And the Rector laughed one of those hearty laughs of pitying superiority at the stupidity of people, the kind of laugh the Spanish peasant gives when he hears some benighted ignoramus questioning the authenticity of the village Virgin's miracles.

Roseta stopped short in her tracks, sizing up the Rector with those dreamy sea-green eyes of hers. What did that laugh mean? Was Pascudo serious? Yes, without a doubt. As serious as a preacher! That puddinghead was proof-proof! And the certainty angered her. Instinctively, without reckoning the consequences of what she was doing, she came out with the charges that had been tickling her tongue for years! In short: two kinds of men, scamps and puddingheads! And a glance of hers stamped the second label upon her brother, as he, in fact, divined.

"So I'm the puddinghead, am I! Hah-hah!.. Now see here, Roseta … out with it! All you know! And no mincing of words, either, or you'll be sorry!"

They were half-way home now, near the roadside Cross. And they stopped a moment in front of it. The Rector's ruddy face had turned pale as death, and he kept biting nervously at his fingers, those blunt, bony, calloused fingers of a fisherman.

"Well, Roseta," he added, when she stood silent still. "Out with it!"

But the girl did not come out with it. She had caught a dangerous gleam in her brother's eye. She was afraid she had gone too far; and, a kindly soul at heart, she repented her imprudent innuendos. She had caused the pallor and the expression of fierce solemnity on that good-natured face!

"Oh, as for knowing, Pascualo, I don't know anything. It's only what people say. But they say lots of things. And if you want them to stop talking, I'd advise you to have Tonet around your house as little, as little, as possible!"

Pascualo had stooped over the watering-trough near the Cross, and covered the whole end of the pipe with his mouth, to let the stream run full into his stomach, as though to drown a conflagration that was burning in his insides. He straightened up and started on, the water dripping down over his chin, till he wiped it away with the back of a rough hand.

"I see. So that's all talk! Well, if they want to wait for me to be nasty to Tonet, they can wait till hell freezes over. Filthy, stupid, malicious chatter-boxes! That's what they are! So I must slam the door in the face of that poor boy, eh! Well, I won't! Just when he's settling down a bit, from the good influence Dolores has over him! And they're all jealous of her, that's what. Just plain jealous!" And the gesture with which he underlined the spiteful words seemed to include Roseta among the envious. "Well, it's my affair, and so long as I don't worry, they needn't. Let them talk their tongues off. That boy is what amounts to a son to me. Why, it seems only yesterday when I was carrying him around in my arms, like a nurse. And when he went to bed at night, I'd roll up in a ball almost, so's he could have plenty of room. And now I'm to kick him out of my house. No, you don't forget some things in a hurry. Oh, yes, when things go right and there's no trouble, you forget easy enough. You forget the fellows you used to drink with in the taverns. But we used to be hungry together, redeu, hungry; and you don't forget times like that. Poor Tonet! No! I'm going to stand by that boy till I get him on his feet and make a man of him, I am. What do they think!.. That I'm an ox, probably, a plain damn fool! All right, but this damn fool has got a heart under his ribs, he has." And the Rector, filling with deeper and deeper emotion, rapped on that well-padded chest of his, and his thorax echoed like a drum.

For as much as a quarter of an hour the two of them walked on in silence, Roseta frightened at the possible outcome of their conversation; Pascualo, in a gloomy mood, stumbling along with lowered head and frowning darkly whenever he raised his eyes, clenching his fists as though in struggle with an evil thought that would not down. Thus they reached the Grao and were through it before either of them spoke.

"And anyhow, Roseta," said the Rector at last, from sheer necessity of giving some expression to the anguished meditations that were writhing within him, "and anyhow, it's just as well that it is mere talk. For if I should find some day, that it's more than that … recristo, nobody really knows who I am! I'm afraid of myself, sometimes! I'm an easy-going sort of chap, and never go around looking for trouble. I even yield a point down on the beach, now and then, because I've a boy to look out for and have never cared to play the bully, or the tough. But there are two things in this world that I have, and that I call mine: my money, and my wife. Let no one dare lay a finger on either of them. On the way back from Algiers, with that load, I was afraid once the cutter was going to get us. And do you know what I had made up my mind to do? Back up against the mast there, with my knife out, and kill and kill and kill, till they cut me down on top of those bales of 'mayflower' that for me meant fortune. And then Dolores … at times when I thought how nice she looked and what a good woman she was, something of the great lady about her – I don't know what – that makes her so wonderful, it occurred to me – why not say it right out? – that some fellow, some day, might try to get her away from me. Well, sir, I could have throttled her almost, at the mere idea of such a thing, and then gone out raving through the streets like a mad dog. I guess that's what I'm like, Roseta, a dog; so good-natured, so harmless, ordinarily, but able to clean the town up when he goes mad, so's they have to kill him. Well, that's the point! They'd better let me alone, and not go monkeying with my happiness, nor with what I've got together with my own hard work…"

There was a drawn expression on his face as he looked at Roseta after this tirade, a veritable oration for the phlegmatic Rector; and the poor girl felt as if she were being accused of the attempted theft of Dolores.

But Pascualo suddenly, with a gesture of disdain, seemed to come out of his abstraction; and it was evident he felt ashamed at having lost hold on his tongue so far, in a moment of baseless alarm. He had had enough of Roseta, however. And, in fact, they could separate there. "Remember me to mother!" he said, as he turned down to the beach, leaving his sister to go on alone along the road toward the tavern-boat. But it was late that night before the influence of that disquieting conversation was lifted from Pascualo's mind. Tonet was at home when he arrived, but did not seem at all embarrassed in his presence. All a lie, of course! One look at the boy was enough to show that! The Rector looked searchingly into his own heart, and could find no trace of suspicion there. Nothing to it, absolutely, absolutely, nothing! And when, the men of the crew dropped in to get their final orders for the next day, he had forgotten the matter completely.

He had hired a boat to work in team with the Mayflower, though, with dog's luck, he would some day be able to build another just like her! Among the men was an old sailor whom the Rector listened to with profoundest respect. Tio Batiste was the oldest tar in the whole Cabañal. Seventy years of sailoring were stuffed into that sun-dried crackling hide of his, whence they issued, smelling to heaven of strong tobacco, in the form of practical suggestions and maritime prophecy. Pascualo had taken him on, not so much for the help his aged arms could give, as for the exact knowledge he had of the coast thereabouts. From the Cabo de San Antonio to the Cabo de Canet, the gulf did not have a hole nor a shallow that tio Batiste did not know all about. Turn him into a smelt and toss him overboard, and he'd tell you where he was, the minute he got to the bottom! The top of the water might be a closed book to other people; but he could read, from the looks of it, just what there was underneath.

He would sit up forward on the boat, and describe the bumps on the bottom as though he were on a wagon roughing the road-ruts. With one glance he could tell whether your boat was over the kelp grounds, or over the mud-banks, called El Fanch, or over those mysterious submarine hillocks, called the Pedrusquets, where the fishermen were always in terror of losing their nets on the sharp crags that cut the seines to shreds. Between the Muralls de Confit, the Bareta de Casaret and the Roca de Espioca, lay deep tortuous gullies far down under the sea. Tio Batiste could drag a net through the winding channel there without catching on a single rock, and without scooping up a mass of kelp that would break your tackle through. A dark night of fog! Not a lighthouse visible! Thick gloom ten feet ahead! One taste of the mud on your net, and the old wizard would say where you were to a hundred yards. Only a salmon or a squid could have been the teachers of that wondrous learning! And tio Batiste knew many other useful things – that you should not cast your seine on Hallowe'en, for instance, unless you wanted to bring up a corpse; or that the man who carried the Cross of the Grao on Good Friday would never die at sea.

For that matter he had spent all his life on shipboard. By the time he was ten, he could show callouses under his arm-pits, from hauling at the lines. He had a dozen trips to Cuba to his credit – not the kind of trips youngsters brag about nowadays, because they've been across as waiters or barbers on a big liner – but real voyages, in good old-fashioned faluchas, better built than they make them now, that went out with wine and came back with sugar, and were owned by gentlemen in cape-coats and top-hats! And every trip with a lamp on board, lighted at the wick floating in the oil bowl before the Christ of the Grao! And a rosary every night on board, without fail, unless you wanted something awful to happen! Those were the days, according to tio Batiste, the real days, for sailormen. And as he cursed on, the wrinkles would wiggle all over his face, and his ancient goatee would whip up and down; while vicious bits of forecastle obscenity would punctuate his contempt for the irreligion and the conceit of the younger generation of salts.

Pascualo liked to hear the old man talk. There was something of his old master, tio Borrasca, about him, and the man reminded him of his father, old Pascualo, too. Though the other members of the crew, Tonet, two sailors and the "cat," made fun of the venerable tar, and tried to get him angry all the time by assuring him he was too old for the business now, and that the curate would be willing to take him on as sacristan. Chentòla! Too old for real work, eh! Wait till they got out to sea, and they'd whistle another tune! The boys of these days don't know what a wind is! He'd be fanning himself, while they'd be calling for mama!

The next morning all the Cabin section was in motion. The bòu-boats would put to sea that evening after sundown – taking the men-folks offshore for their honest battle with the elements for bread. An annual migration of husbands, brothers and sons, this; but, nevertheless, the women, thinking of the months of worry and uneasiness they would have ahead of them till spring, could never take the event very calmly.

Captains were bustling about with their last preparations. They went down to the harbor to look over their boats, test the pulleys, run the lines, raise and lower the sails, pound the bottom over inside, be sure the supplies of rope and canvas were on hand, count baskets, examine nets. And when inventories were complete they would have still to go back to the office to get clearance papers from all those stuck-up fellows in white collars who could hardly speak to a workingman decently!

When the Rector went home for dinner at noontime, he found siñá Tona in the kitchen talking to Dolores, weeping her eyes out, and patting a bundle she held across her knees. When she saw her son coming, she began at him angrily. "I've just heard, and it's a pretty father you are! So Pascualet is going 'cat' on the Mayflower! A boy of eight, who might better be at home with his mother, or at least playing down at the tavern with me! The idea! A baby like that going to sea and made to do a man's work, and Lord knows what else! Well, I'm not going to stand it, I'm not! That's not the way to treat a child! And since his mother don't dare open her head, and his father is actually the one to blame, his grandma must take a hand! I've come to get Pascualet and take him home with me. I won't allow such a thing. Pascualet! Pascualet! Your grandmother wants to see you."

Pascualet came in, the little devil, swallowed up in a suit of yellow baize, barefoot, to be more in character, and with a sash that passed almost under his arm-pits and made his blouse bulge out like a balloon. Cocking his black cap down over one ear, he began to strut up and down in front of the women, imitating the tough and independent manner of tio Batiste, and trying to put some of that worthy's picturesque obscenity into the insults he heaped upon his grandmother for her efforts in his behalf. "I'm through playing at the tavern! You can keep your bread and cheese! I'm a man now, I am; and I'm going 'cat' in the Mayflower!"

His father and mother were in convulsions at the saucy antics of this chip of the old block. As for the Rector, he could have eaten the boy alive with kisses. But siñá Tona could only bawl and bawl like a cry-baby, till her son got really angry. "Mama, will you stop that noise! What do you think we are doing to the boy, cutting his throat? The world isn't coming to an end! Pascualet is just going to sea, the way his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather did. What do you want to make of him? A tramp? No, I want him to be a man of pluck, and able to do a day's work, and not be afraid of salt water, where his living is likely to be. If I can leave him a little bit, when I pass on, so much the better; but he ought to be ready to look out for himself. He'll be in no danger. But if he gets to know what a boat is, he'll go to it with his eyes open. Any one can have an accident, afloat or ashore. Just because my father ended the way he did is no signs we're all to end that way. Too much bawling around here! Give us a rest, will you!"

But siñá Tona knew they were all possessed of the devil! The sea had her eye on the whole family, and would get them all, finally! She hadn't slept a wink for nights – and the most frightful dreams! Worry and worry about your son! And then you find they're taking the baby, too. No, she couldn't stand it any more. They were bound to kill her with worry and sorrow! If they weren't her children, she wouldn't look them in the face, they were so brutal!

But the Rector, letting the old lady grumble on, sat down to his bowl of steaming soup. "What do you say to dinner, Pascualet! Don't mind her! Your daddy is going to make the best sailor in the Cabañal out of you! Tell us, mama, what you got in that bundle?"

Siñá Tona boo-hooed louder than ever at the joking question. A present! A little present, that was all! She thought it would ease her mind. So she had taken what money she had saved – a few pennies it was – and had bought something for him. A life-preserver! A neighbor of hers had gotten it from an engineer on an English steamer! And she produced the huge vest of padded cork, which folded up so easily along the seams! The Rector looked at the strange mechanism and smiled. Did you ever! What things people could think of! "I'd heard there were rigs like that in the world, but I never saw one before. Glad to have it aboard, though I can swim like a fish, myself, and never do it in uniform!" And he was tickled to death, at bottom. He left his soup and tried the life-belt on, laughing at his own stoggy appearance in it; for it made his already generous allowance of paunch still more conspicuous, and he ended by looking and puffing like a seal – for the straps made it hard for him to breathe. "Thanks, thanks! I'll not drown in this. I'll simply strangle. But the Mayflower will like to have it!" And he dropped it to the floor. When Pascualet, tugging and straining, finally got the thing on, his head and feet barely extended beyond the cork armor. He was a tortoise in a shell, for all the world!

The meal was almost over, when Tonet came in, with a huge bandage around his hand. He had just had a bad blow, that morning; and he reported the news in such a way, that his brother did not see fit to ask how nor why; nor was the Rector sharp enough to note the self-conscious expression on the face of Dolores. Up to his usual tricks, that boy! Probably been in another fight in some drinking-place! "But what do you expect you'll be good for outside? All trussed up like that! Never mind this trip. We won't be out more than a day or two, if we have any kind of luck. We'll take you day after to-morrow, or next day!" The Rector talked on very calmly. That temper of his was hard to ruffle! But Tonet and Dolores sat looking at the floor, as though they were ashamed of something.

At four o'clock, the final preparations for the sailing of the fleet began. The bòu-boats, two by two, were moored to the harbor wharfs, dipping their masts on the swell as though curtseying to the people ashore, while their hulls went up and down in graceful undulation. Those tiny sea-dogs, with their rough profiles of ancient galleys, made one think of the old armadas of Aragon, or of the fleets of doughty pinnaces with which Roger de Lauria used to spread terror along the coasts of Sicily. And the fishermen, too, as they came down, crew by crew, their clothes and blankets in rolls over their backs, looked like the bands of almogávars that gathered, of old, on the beach of Salou, to sail, in like craft or worse ones, to the conquest of Majorca. A savor of the historic, of the antique, hovered about that fleet and about each separate craft, which took you back, perforce, to sea legends of the Middle Ages, when the triangular sails of Aragon were as dreaded of the Moors of Andalusia as of the isles that lay smiling in the classic seas of Greece.

The whole village was down on the shore. Women and children were running here and there, trying to identify, in the forests of masts, of crossing and criss-crossing cordage, the boats where their own men were. It was the annual excursion into the deserts of the sea, the recurring foray out into danger to snatch bread from the mysteries of the deep, which sometimes gives up its treasures peacefully and without a struggle, but at others hangs on to them and threatens the plucky Argonaut with death.

Down over the gang-planks from wharf to deck moved a procession of bare feet, yellow trousers, sun-baked faces, all that miserable flock of human beings who are born, live and die, on that shore there, knowing nothing of the world that lies beyond that blue horizon. Hunger, on the starting-line, as it were, for a race with death at the signal of opulence! Men condemned to ignorance and filth and danger, that, inland, other men may sit down before glossy linen table-cloths, and feel their mouths water before a succulent lobster's claw on a creamy cod swimming in luscious sauce!

The sun was hanging low. The last flies of summer, their huge bellies swollen and their wings sluggish, were buzzing about in the golden afternoon, gleaming with a sputtering fire. Away to the horizon, which the peak of the Mongó broke with a blotch of haze, like an island floating in the distance, the sea stretched calm and tranquil. Good weather! Good weather! That was the burden of every woman's tongue, as the boats swallowed up crew after crew. With good luck, there would soon be good things a-plenty in every house! Now the "cats" were almost the only sailors left on shore. They were still running up and down the wharves, stamping barefoot on the pitchy floorings, doing the last errands of the captains, putting the hard-tack aboard, and a final cask of wine!

And the sun was down. Everybody – more than a thousand men in all, there were – was now on board. The boats were waiting only for the papers to come down from the offices. How slow those lubbers worked! The spectators on shore were beginning to get impatient, as though the curtain were late in rising on a show.

For still one ceremony had not yet been completed. From time immemorial it had been the custom of the whole village to wish the bòu-fleet godspeed by insulting the men who were going away. As the boats cast off, atrocious witticisms flew back and forth between deck and shore – all in good humor, of course, for such tradition would have it, and it was a test of brains, besides, to be able to say just the right word to those lanudos, those husbands whose eyes would be snugly plugged with wool, and come home in blessed ignorance of all their wives had been up to meanwhile! This theme of the wayward wife and the unsuspecting husband is the commonest sport – however cruel it may seem – along the shores of the Levant; and so inveterate the habit, so inevitable the parting serenade, that some of the departing sailors went aboard with pockets or baskets full of stones, to be ready for any thrusts they could not parry with words.

And the last of the after-glow had faded. The lamps along the wharves gleamed like a rosary of fire. Red snakes of light coiled and writhed out over the placid waters of the basin. Stars, green and scarlet, shone from the peak of every mast. The sea was catching the ashen brightness of the nocturnal sky, and boats and buildings stood out in dark outlines of indigo against a vast background of nickel gray. "They're off! They're off!" Sails were being hoisted one by one, and in the night the canvas filtered the harbor lights as through veils of distended crêpe, or translucent wings of great black butterflies.

Swarming mobs of ragamuffins had occupied the points farthest projecting seaward. That would give their gibes the greatest possible range. And what fun it would be! But all ready to duck I They've got plenty of stones aboard to-night!