By Bryan Hemming
Published: May 8, 2009
Updated: May 8, 2009 PrintEmail
While little changes in Santa Catalina, big changes to the world outside don’t go unnoticed.
Earlier this week, Antolin, Pedro and I were discussing why ants are in such a hurry all the time, over a drink outside Juani’s Bar. As the sun began to set our conversation briefly skirted the global economic crisis. I’d hardly started complaining how was it possible for anyone to wake up forgetting where he’d put hundreds of thousands of billions of dollars the night before, when Pedro intervened to tell me everyone was allowed to make one mistake in life. Before I could protest that should depend on the enormity of the mistake, he was into a tale about an ancient relative who once made a mistake. A simple mistake, which brought financial ruin to a whole community.
Throughout her life Pedro’s great aunt never strayed far from the isolated Republican pueblo where she was born. Tucked away in a valley in the mountains, it was so remote hardly a traveller set foot there. Using a combination of peasant shrewdness and instinctive thrift the entire population survived thirty years of Franco’s dictatorship living on twenty centimos without being noticed. The same twenty centimos.
A typical week went something like this. On Monday, his great aunt took in the baker’s washing, for which she received a twenty centimo coin. If there were vegetables in the house she went to the butcher, if there was meat, she went to the greengrocer. Depending on which, she would buy twenty centimos worth of vegetables or meat. On receiving twenty centimos, the butcher, or greengrocer, would spend it with the fishmonger, who would go to the grocery shop to stock up on coffee or flour. On Tuesday, the grocer had his delivery bike repaired at the blacksmiths and the blacksmith paid the farmer for some wood. In the evening the farmer’s wife nipped up to the chandler for candles. Next day, the chandler sent his son out for twenty centimo’s worth of cloth from the drapery for his wife to run up some curtains for the teacher. The draper used the money to pay his rent, and his landlord drank it away at the village taverna. Thursday, the barmaid at the taverna spent her wages on ointment from the chemist. And the chemist went to the market on Friday to buy cheese. The rest of the day the twenty centimos passed from stall to stall before ending up in the purse of the shepherd’s daughter. Each Saturday she went up to the baker for a loaf of bread. Saturday night, Pedro’s great aunt mopped out the bakery, for which the baker gave her the twenty centimo coin again. On Sunday morning she popped the money into the church collection. By this method the villagers catered for all their needs.
The precarious economic structure collapsed the day his great aunt blew the lot on a lucky brass horseshoe from a wandering pedlar. Turned out it wasn’t so lucky, after all.
How much easier life would if we arrived in this world with a set of instructions, so we knew exactly what to do in any given situation. Instead we have to listen to people giving advice. Mostly, unasked for, and nearly always unaccompanied by knowledge or experience of the subject in question. I do the same. There are few pleasures left in life to match standing next to someone bent over a car engine asking if they’ve checked the alternator, whatever that is.
Pedro had hardly finished his tale when a motorbike drew up in front of us. A tall man clad entirely in black leather dismounted. We paused to take note. A black helmet with a dark visor covered his head and face. He might have arrived from a distant part of the universe so alien was his aspect in contrast to his surroundings. We watched him remove his helmet to unfold a map onto the bike’s fuel tank and examine it carefully. His frustration mounting before our eyes, eventually he thought to ask us where he was. Pedro’s immediate answer was to tell him he was over there.
When Antolin told him he was in Santa Catalina he insisted he couldn’t be, as it wasn’t on his map. Pedro went to take a look. After gazing blankly at the coast of the province of Cádiz, for some moments, he finally pointed triumphantly to an empty spot on the map between Conil de la Frontera and Zahara de los Atunes announcing it was there. The biker stared closely before stroking his chin. Finally, he told the fisherman there was nothing to say there was anything on the spot he was indicating, and neither was he persuaded they were there. Pedro admitted he had a point. Nevertheless, Santa Catalina had to exist, he told him, otherwise the man, and the rest of us, wouldn’t be here. The biker remained unconvinced.
Antolin suggested the omission might be due to an oversight his grandfather once told him about that occurred in the eighteenth century. The motorcyclist raised his head. A cartographer, commissioned to survey and map all the cities and pueblos of Andalucia, turned up in Santa Catalina tight as a newt at a brewer’s wedding, one afternoon. No sooner did he locate a hostelry than he set about drinking some more. Continuing through the night, by morning he’d drank himself into a stupor, whereupon the townsfolk loaded him onto a horse-drawn haywain bound for nearby Vejer de la Frontera. Antolin felt a need to explain the ancient tradition whereby Santa Catalina used to send all its itinerant drunks to Vejer, while the villagers of Vejer send theirs in the opposite direction. The horse taking several hours to complete the journey, they usually arrived at their destination asleep and almost sober.
On waking in Vejer next morning, the cartographer naturally assumed it to be the same town in which he’d fallen asleep. Thereby, Santa Catalina never appeared on the subsequent map he drew. The unnoticed slip-up became enshrined in law when a Napoleonic decree went out saying, as all existing towns were deemed to have been included on maps, only new towns could be considered for admission after 1815. According to Antolin’s grandfather, it has never been amended. That accounts for the omission from almost all maps ever since.
The motorcyclist was unimpressed; saying it was the biggest load of nonsense he’d ever heard. He insisted his map was correct, as it was German, so therefore the rest of us had to be wrong. It was we who didn’t know where we were. At that point his map lifted into the air, carried on a sudden gust, it flew off in the direction of the sea. The chance event seemed to spook him. Without so much as a by your leave, he remounted his machine and roared off leaving a cloud of dust, giving clear sign he wanted to get out of somewhere that didn’t exist as quickly as possible.
At such points as these I question my own existence. Do I exist, or am I a figment of your imagination? Taking no notice of my philosophical musings, Pedro and Antolin renewed our discussion on the impatience of ants.
