Mare Nostrum (Our Sea): A Novel

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

In the village there were only women, women of all kinds:—women seated before their doors, making lace on great cylindrical pillows on their knees, along whose length their bobbins wove strips of beautiful openwork, or grouped on the street corners in front of the lonely sea where their men were, or speaking with an electric nervousness that oftentimes would break out suddenly in noisy tempests.

Only the parish priest, whose fishing recreations and official existence were embittered by their constant quarrels, understood the feminine irritability which embroiled the village. Alone and having to live incessantly in such close contact, the women had come to hate each other as do passengers isolated on a boat for many months. Besides, their husbands had accustomed them to the use of coffee, the seaman's drink, and they tried to beguile their tedium with strong cups of the thick liquid.

A common interest, nevertheless, united these women miraculously when living alone. When the carbineers inspected the houses in search of contraband goods smuggled in by the men, the Amazons worked off their nervous energy in hiding the illegal merchandise, making it pass from one place of concealment to another with the cunning of savages.

Whenever the government officers began to suspect that certain packages had gone to hide themselves in the cemetery, they would find there only some empty graves, and in the bottom of them a few cigars between skulls that were mockingly stuck up in the ground. The chief of the barracks did not dare to inspect the church, but he looked contemptuously upon Mosen Jòrdi, the priest, as a simpleton quite capable of permitting tobacco to be hidden behind the altars in exchange for the privilege of fishing in peace.

The rich people lived with their backs turned on the village, contemplating the blue expanse upon which were erected the wooden houses that represented all their fortune. In the summer-time the sight of the smooth and brilliant Mediterranean made them recall the dangers of the winter. They spoke with religious terror of the land breeze, the wind from the Pyrenees, the Tramontana that oftentimes snatched edifices from their bases and had overturned entire trains in the nearby station. Furthermore, on the other side of the promontory began the terrible Gulf of Lyons. Upon its surface, not more than ninety yards in extent, the waters driven by the strong sea winds often became so rough, and raised up waves so high and so solid that upon clashing together and finding no intermediate space upon which to fall, they piled one upon another, forming regular towers.

This gulf was the most terrible of the Mediterranean. The transatlantic liners returning from a good voyage to the other hemisphere used here to tremble with a pre-monition of danger and sometimes even turned back. The captains who had just crossed the great Atlantic would here furrow their brows with uneasiness.

From the door of the Athenaeum the experts used to point out the Latin sailboats that were about to double the promontory. They were merchant vessels such as that elder Ferragut had commanded, embarkations from Valencia that were bringing wine to Cette and fruits to Marseilles. Upon seeing the blue surface of the Gulf on the other side of the Cape with no other roughness than that of a long and infinitely heavy swell, the Valencians would exclaim happily:

"Let us cross quickly, while the lion sleeps."

Ulysses had one friend, the secretary of the city-hall, and the only inhabitant that had any books in his house. Treated by the rich with a certain contempt, the official used to seek the boy's company because he was the only creature who would listen to him attentively.

He adored the mare nostrum as much as Doctor Ferragut, but his enthusiasm was not concerned with the Phoenician and Egyptian ships whose keels had first plowed these waves. He was equally indifferent to Grecian and Carthaginian Triremes, Roman warships, and the monstrous galleys of the Sicilian tyrants,—palaces moved by oars, with statues, fountains and gardens. That which most interested him was the Mediterranean of the Middle Ages, that of the kings of Aragon, the Catalunian Sea. And the poor secretary would give long daily dissertations about them in order to pique the local pride of his juvenile listener.