The Woman of Porto Pim Page 5
Art. 66. It is expressly forbidden to throw loose harpoons (that is, not secured to the boat with a rope) at a whale, whatever the circumstances. Anyone who does so does not establish any right over the whale harpooned.
Art. 68. No boat shall, without authorization, cut the ropes of other boats, unless forced to do so to preserve their own safety.
Art. 69. Harpoons, ropes, registration numbers, etc., found on a whale by other boats shall be returned to their rightful owners, nor does returning such items give any right to remuneration or indemnity.
Art. 70. It is forbidden to harpoon or kill whales of the Balaena species, commonly known as French whales.
Art. 71. It is forbidden to harpoon or kill female whales surprised while suckling their young, or young whales still at suckling age.
Art. 72. In order to preserve the species and better exploit hunting activities, it will be the responsibility of the Minister for the Sea to establish the sizes of the whales which may be caught and the periods of close season, to set quotas for the number of whales which may be hunted, and to introduce any other restrictive measures considered necessary.
Art. 73. The capture of whales for scientific purposes may be undertaken only after obtaining ministerial authorization.
Art. 74. It is expressly forbidden to hunt whales for sport.
“Regulations Governing the Hunting of Whales,” published in the Diário do Governo, 19.5.54 and still in force
On the first Sunday in August the whalemen hold their annual festival in Horta. They line up their freshly painted boats in Porto Pim bay, the bell briefly rings out two hoarse clangs, the priest forms and climbs up to the promontory dominating the bay, where stands the chapel of Nossa Senhora da Guia. Behind the priest walk the women and children, with the whalemen bringing up the rear, each with his harpoon on his shoulder. They are very contrite and dressed in black. They all go into the chapel to hear Mass, leaving their harpoons standing against the wall outside, one next to the other, the way people elsewhere park their bicycles.
The harbor office is closed, but Senhor Chaves invites me in just the same. He is a distinguished, polite man with an open, slightly ironic smile and the blue eyes of some Flemish ancestor. There are hardly any left, he tells me, I don’t think it’ll be easy to find a boat. I ask if he means sperm whales and he laughs, amused. No, whalemen, he specifies, they’ve all emigrated to America, everybody in the Azores emigrates to America, the Azores are deserted, haven’t you noticed? Yes, of course I have, I say, I’m sorry. Why? he asks. It’s an embarrassing question. Because I like the Azores, I reply without much logic. So you’ll like them even more deserted, he objects. And then he smiles as if to apologize for having been brusque. In any event, you see about getting yourself some life insurance, he concludes, otherwise I can’t give you a permit. As for getting you on board, I’ll sort that out, I’ll speak to António José, who may be going out tomorrow, it seems there’s a herd on the way. But I can’t promise you a permit for more than two days.
A HUNT
It’s a herd of six or seven, Carlos Eugénio tells me, his satisfied smile showing off such a brilliant set of false teeth it occurs to me he might have carved them himself from whale ivory. Carlos Eugénio is seventy, agile and still youthful, and he is mestre baleeiro, which, literally translated, means “master whaler,” though in reality he is captain of this little crew and has absolute authority over every aspect of the hunt. The motor launch leading the expedition is his own, an old boat about ten metres long, which he maneuvers with deftness and nonchalance, and without any hurry either. In any event, he tells me, the whales are splashing about, they won’t run away. The radio is on so as to keep in contact with the lookout based on a lighthouse on the island; a monotonous and it seems to me slightly ironic voice thus guides us on our way. “A little to the right, Maria Manuela,” says the grating voice, “you’re going all over the place.” Maria Manuela is the name of the boat. Carlos Eugénio makes a gesture of annoyance, but still laughing, then he turns to the sailor who is riding with us, a lean, alert man, a boy almost, with constantly moving eyes and a dark complexion. We’ll manage on our own, he decides, and turns the radio off. The sailor climbs nimbly up the boat’s only mast and perches on the crosspiece at the top, wrapping his legs around. He too points to the right. For a moment I think he’s sighted them, but I don’t know the whaleman’s sign language. Carlos Eugénio explains that an open hand with the index finger pointing upward means “whales in sight,” and that wasn’t the gesture our lookout made.
I turn to glance at the sloop we are towing. The whalemen are relaxed, laughing and talking together, though I can’t make out what they’re saying. They look as though they’re out on a pleasure cruise. There are six of them and they’re sitting on planks laid across the boat. The harpooner is standing up, though, and appears to be following our lookout’s gestures with attention: he has a huge paunch and a thick beard, young, he can’t be more than thirty. I’ve heard they call him Chá Preto, Black Tea, and that he works as a docker in the port in Horta. He belongs to the whaling cooperative in Faial, and they tell me he’s an exceptionally skilled harpooner.
I don’t notice the whale until we’re barely three hundred metres: a column of water rises against the blue as when some pipe springs a leak in the road of a big city. Carlos Eugénio has turned off the engine and only our momentum takes us drifting on towards that black shape lying like an enormous bowler hat on the water. In the sloop the whalemen are silently preparing for the attack: they are calm, quick, resolute, they know the motions they have to go through by heart. They row with powerful, well-spaced strokes, and in a flash they are far away. They go round in a wide circle, approaching the whale from the front so as to avoid the tail, and because if they approached from the sides they would be in sight of its eyes. When they are a hundred metres off they draw their oars into the boat and raise a small triangular sail. Everybody adjusts sail and ropes: only the harpooner is immobile on the point of the prow: standing, one leg bent forward, the harpoon lying in his hand as if he were measuring its weight. He concentrates, hanging on for the right moment, the moment when the boat will be near enough for him to strike a vital point, but far enough away not to be caught by a lash of the wounded whale’s tail. Everything happens with amazing speed in just a few seconds. The boat makes a sudden turn while the harpoon is still curving through the air. The instrument of death isn’t flung from above downwards, as I had expected, but upwards, like a javelin, and it is the sheer weight of the iron and the speed of the thing as it falls that transforms it into a deadly missile. When the enormous tail rises to whip first the air then the water, the sloop is already far away. The oarsmen are rowing again, furiously, and a strange play of ropes, which until now was going on underwater so that I hadn’t seen it, suddenly becomes visible and I realize that our launch is connected to the harpoon too, while the whaling sloop has jettisoned its own rope. From a straw basket placed in a well in the middle of the launch, a thick rope begins to unwind, sizzling as it rushes through a fork on the bow; the young deckhand pours a bucket of water over it to cool it and prevent it snapping from the friction. Then the rope tightens and we set off with a jerk, a leap, following the wounded whale as it flees. Carlos Eugénio holds the helm and chews the stub of a cigarette; the sailor with the boyish face watches the sperm whale’s movements with a worried expression. In his hand he holds a small sharp axe ready to cut the rope if the whale should go down, since it would drag us with it underwater. But the breathless rush doesn’t last long. We’ve hardly gone a kilometre when the whale stops dead, apparently exhausted, and Carlos Eugénio has to put the launch into reverse to stop the momentum from taking us on top of the immobile animal. He struck well, he says with satisfaction, showing off his brilliant false teeth. As if in confirmation of his comment, the whale, whistling, raises his head right out of the water and breathes; and the jet that hisses up into the air is red with blood. A pool of vermilion spreads across the
sea and the breeze carries a spray of red drops as far as our boat, spotting faces and clothes. The whaling sloop has drawn up against the launch: Chá Petro throws his tools up on deck and climbs up himself with an agility truly surprising for a man of his build. I gather that he wants to go on to the next stage of the attack, the lance, but the mestre seems not to agree. There follows some excited confabulation, which the sailor with the boyish face keeps out of. Then Chá Petro obviously gets his way; he stands on the prow and assumes his javelin-throwing stance, having swapped the harpoon for a weapon of the same size but with an extremely sharp head in an elongated heart shape, like a halberd. Carlos Eugénio moves forward with the engine on minimum, and the boat starts over to where the whale is breathing, immobile in a pool of blood, restless tail spasmodically slapping the water. This time the deadly weapon is thrown downwards; hurled on a slant, it penetrates the soft flesh as if it were butter. A dive: the great mass disappears, writhing underwater. Then the tail appears again, powerless, pitiful, like a black sail. And finally the huge head emerges and I hear the deathcry, a sharp wail, almost a whistle, shrill, agonizing, unbearable.
The whale is dead and lies motionless on the water. The coagulated blood forms a bank that looks like coral. I hadn’t realized the day was almost over, and dusk surprises me. The whole crew are busy organizing the towing. Working quickly, they punch a hole in the tail fin and thread through a rope with a stick to lock it. We are more than eighteen miles out to sea, Carlos Eugénio tells me; it will take all night to get back, the sperm whale weighs around thirty tons and the launch will have to go very slowly. In a strange marine rope party led by the launch and with the whale bringing up the rear, we head towards the island of Pico and the factory of São Roque. In the middle is the sloop with the whalemen, and Carlos Eugénio suggests I join them so as to be able to get a little rest: under enormous strain, the launch’s engine is making an infernal racket and sleep would be impossible. The two boats draw alongside each other and Carlos Eugénio leaves the launch with me, handing over the helm to the young sailor and two oarsmen who take our place. The whalemen set up a makeshift bed for me near the tiller; night has fallen and two oil lanterns have been lit on the sloop. The fishermen are exhausted, their faces strained and serious, tinted yellow in the light from the lanterns. They hoist the sail so as not to be a dead weight increasing the strain on the launch, then lie any-old-how across the planks and fall into a deep sleep. Chá Preto sleeps on his back, paunch up, and snores loudly. Carlos Eugénio offers me a cigarette and talks to me about his two children, who have emigrated to America and whom he hasn’t seen for six years. They came back just once, he tells me, maybe they’ll come again next summer. They’d like me to go to them, but I want to die here, at home. He smokes slowly and watches the sky, the stars. What about you, though, why did you want to come with us today, he asks me, out of simple curiosity? I hesitate, thinking how to answer: I’d like to tell him the truth, but am held back by the fear that this might offend. I let a hand dangle in the water. If I stretched out my arm I could almost touch the enormous fin of the animal we’re towing. Perhaps you’re both a dying breed, I finally say softly, you people and the whales, I think that’s why I came. Probably he’s already asleep, he doesn’t answer; though the coal of his cigarette still burns between his fingers. The sail slaps sombrely; motionless in sleep, the bodies of the whalemen are small dark heaps and the sloop slides over the water like a ghost.
The Woman of Porto Pim
A Story
I sing every evening, because that’s what I’m paid to do, but the songs you heard were pesinhos and sapateiras for the tourists and for those Americans over there laughing at the back. They’ll get up and stagger off soon. My real songs are chamaritas, just four of them, because I don’t have a big repertoire and then I’m getting on, and I smoke a lot, my voice is hoarse. I have to wear this balandrau, the traditional old Azores costume, because Americans like things to be picturesque, then they go back to Texas and say how they went to a tavern on a godforsaken island where there was an old man dressed in an ancient cloak singing his people’s folksongs. They want the viola de arame, which has this proud, melancholy sound, and I sing them sugary modinhas, with the same rhyme all the time, but it doesn’t matter because they don’t understand, and then as you can see, they’re drinking gin and tonics. But what about you, though, what are you after, coming here every evening? You’re curious and you’re looking for something different, because this is the second time you’ve offered me a drink, you order cheiro wine as if you were one of us, you’re a foreigner and you pretend to speak like us, but you don’t drink much and then you don’t say anything either, you wait for me to speak. You said you were a writer, and that maybe your job was something like mine. All books are stupid, there’s never much truth in them, still I’ve read a lot over the last thirty years, I haven’t had much else to do, Italian books too, all in translation of course. The one I liked most was called Canaviais no vento, by someone called Deledda, do you know it? And then you’re young and you have an eye for the women, I saw the way you were looking at that beautiful woman with the long neck, you’ve been watching her all evening, I don’t know if she’s your girlfriend, she was looking at you too, and maybe you’ll find it strange but all this has reawakened something in me, it must be because I’ve had too much to drink. I’ve always done things to excess in life, a road that leads to perdition, but if you’re born like that you can’t do anything about it.
In front of our house there was an atafona, that’s what they’re called on this island, a sort of wheel for drawing up water that turned round and round, they don’t exist any more, I’m talking about years and years ago, before you were even born. If I think of it now, I can still hear it creaking, it’s one of the childhood sounds that have stuck in my memory, my mother would send me with a pitcher to get some water and to make it less tiring I used to sing a lullaby as I pushed and sometimes I really would fall asleep. Beyond the water wheel there was a low whitewashed wall and then a sheer drop down to the sea. There were three of us children and I was the youngest. My father was a slow man, he used to weigh his words and gestures and his eyes were so clear they looked like water. His boat was called Madrugada, which was also my mother’s maiden name. My father was a whaleman, like his father before him, but in the seasons when there were no whales, he used to fish for mo ray eels, and we went with him, and our mother too. People don’t do it now, but when I was a child there was a ritual that was part of going fishing. You catch mo rays in the evening, with a waxing moon, and to call them there was a song which had no words: it was a song, a tune, that started low and languid, then turned shrill. I never heard a song so sorrowful, it sounded like it was coming from the bottom of the sea, or from lost souls in the night, a song as old as our islands. Nobody knows it any more, it’s been lost, and maybe it’s better that way, since there was a curse in it, or a destiny, like a spell. My father went out with the boat, it was dark, he moved the oars softly, dipping them in vertically so as not to make any noise, and the rest of us, my brothers and my mother, would sit on the rocks and start to sing. Sometimes the others would keep quiet, they wanted me to call the eels, because they said my voice was more melodious than anybody else’s and the mo rays couldn’t resist it. I don’t believe my voice was any better than theirs: they wanted me to sing on my own because I was the youngest and people used to say that the eels liked clear voices. Perhaps it was just superstition and there was nothing in it, but that hardly matters.
Then we grew up and my mother died. My father became more taciturn and sometimes, at night, he would sit on the wall by the cliffs and look at the sea. By now we only went out after whales; we three boys were big and strong and Father gave us the harpoons and the lances, since he was getting too old. Then one day my brothers left. The second oldest went to America, he only told us the day he left, I went to the harbour to see him off, my father didn’t come. The other went to be a truck driver on the mainlan
d, he was always laughing and he’d always loved the sound of engines; when the army man came to tell us about the accident I was at home alone and I told my father over supper.
We two still went out whaling. It was more difficult now, we had to take on casual labour for the day, because you can’t go out with less than five, then my father would have liked me to get married, because a home without a woman isn’t a real home. But I was twenty-five and I liked playing at love; every Sunday I’d go down to the harbour and get a new girlfriend. It was wartime in Europe and there were lots of people passing through the Azores. Every day a ship would moor here or on another island, and in Porto Pim you could hear all kinds of languages.
I met her one Sunday in the harbour. She was wearing white, her shoulders were bare and she had a lace cap. She looked as though she’d climbed out of a painting, not from one of those ships full of people fleeing to the Americas. I looked at her a long time and she looked at me too. It’s strange how love can find a way through to you. It got to me when I noticed two small wrinkles just forming round her eyes and I thought: she isn’t that young. Maybe I thought like that because, being the boy I still was then, a mature woman seemed older to me than her real age. I only found out she wasn’t much over thirty a lot later, when knowing her age would be of no use at all. I said good morning to her and asked if I could help her in any way. She pointed to the suitcase at her feet. Take it to the Bote, she said in my own language. The Bote is no place for a lady, I said. I’m not a lady, she answered, I’m the new owner.
Next Sunday I went down to town again. In those days the Bote was a strange kind of bar, not exactly a place for fishermen, and I’d only been there once before. I knew there were two private rooms at the back where rumour had it people gambled, and that the bar itself had a low ceiling, a large ornate mirror and tables made out of fig wood. The customers were all foreigners, they looked as though they were on holiday, while the truth was they spent all day spying on each other and pretending to come from countries they didn’t really come from, and when they weren’t spying they played cards. Faial was an incredible place in those days. Behind the bar was a Canadian called Denis, a short man with pointed sideburns who spoke Portuguese like someone from Cape Verde. I knew him because he came to the harbour on Saturdays to buy fish; you could eat at the Bote on Sunday evening. It was Denis who later taught me English.