Aloja

Beat, beat, beat. On still nights above Sant Iscle de Vallalta the sound came down the stream, and the schoolgirls lay awake because everyone knew what it was. The water-women were at their washing again, striking wet cloth against stone with wooden beetles somewhere up in the dark. Nobody went to look.

Catalonia keeps a great many names for these women, and the names change with the valley. In the eastern Pyrenees they are alojes or goges. Around the Montseny they are paitides or encantades. High in the mountains they are dones de fum, women of smoke, and everywhere in between they are simply dones d’aigua. The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana treats all of it as one being, a local growth of the water-spirit belief that runs through most of Europe, with a family resemblance to the Germanic versions close enough to be worth noting.

They live where the water is cold and half hidden: the tarns of the Pyrenees, torrents and waterfalls, springs under the beeches, the deep green plunge pools the Catalans call gorgs, and the dripping caves where underground streams run out of sight. Beneath those they keep palaces, and the palaces are full of treasure.

Nobody in the old accounts is much interested in describing them precisely, which is its own kind of information. They are beautiful, and that is nearly the whole of it.

A normal night looks like this. The moon comes full over the ridge, they climb out of the gorg onto the flat stones at the margin, and they wash. They spread the linen to dry in the moonlight, comb out their hair while it dries, and sing while they work, and the singing carries a long way down a quiet valley. Any mortal who can get his hands on a single piece of that laundry will never be poor again. That is the entire bargain, and it explains why men went down to the water at midnight instead of staying in their beds.

The belief is older than the parishes that remember it. Behind the alojes sits a pre-Christian habit of treating fresh water as the thing that makes life, the element that fertilises ground and renews a year, and of assuming that the spirit of it is female. Even the word is unsettled. Goja surfaces in writing only in 1889, and the dictionaries cannot agree whether it is a pre-Roman survival or a borrowing of the Hebrew goi by way of the medieval Jewish communities of Occitania, where the feminine goia meant a gentile servant girl before somebody turned it, drily, into a word for a nymph.

The best-preserved telling belongs to Gualba, at the foot of the Montseny. One night of full moon the master of Can Prat walked out late and reached the Gorg Negre around midnight, and while he was resting by the water a woman came up out of the pool. He offered her his house, his land and everything he owned in the district. She asked one thing back: that he swear never, under any circumstance, to remind her where she came from. They married on it.

She turned out to be the better farmer. Under her advice Can Prat grew richer than it had ever been, there were two children, a boy and a girl, and for years nothing went wrong. Then the two of them were out measuring a good field for planting and fell into an argument about what the ground should carry. It escalated the way those arguments do. He told her she could hardly be expected to understand crops, being nothing but a poor woman drawn out of the river.

She was at the bottom of the Gorg Negre before he had finished. He never saw her again. She did come back, though, quietly, at hours when he could not notice, into the house to stroke her children’s faces and kiss them in their sleep, and the tears she left on the dining table were found the next morning as pearls. Can Prat went on prospering for a long time on the strength of them.

Riells de Montseny tells it with the same hinge and a colder ending. There the heir Perarnau surprised a goja at rest, and she dived into a gorg to get away from him, and he came back day after day until she agreed to marry him on the usual terms. They had a daughter. One May, while he was away, she drove the labourers out to cut a field of wheat that was still green; they objected, and she made them cut it anyway. He came home furious and said the thing that must not be said, which was what would you know about harvests, you goges. She dissolved on the spot. Within the hour a storm came over the ridge and flattened every crop in the valley except the one she had already had brought in. She still came back at night to comb and rock the child, and the night he tried to watch her do it, mother and daughter went for good.

In 1927 an eighty-year-old woman of Sant Iscle told the poet Apel·les Mestres what her father had seen, a story she had heard him give a hundred times. He had stood at the stream near Can Vives watching them lay out the washing and could not make himself move. They spotted him and started calling him by his name. He walked towards them against his own will and they took him down into their cave. What happened in there nobody ever learned, because whether they charmed the memory out of him or simply frightened him badly enough, he could not afterwards say one word about it, and he got nothing out of the night at all. A neighbour of his, taken the same way, had the presence of mind to steal a piece of cloth while he was down there. That house never wanted for anything again.

Their generosity has a test built into it. A midwife from Can Caselles was fetched up to deliver an aloja’s baby, and when they asked what she was owed she said nothing at all, so they tipped a handful of something into her apron and told her not to look until she got home. She made it as far as Can Parera before curiosity beat her. It was bran. She swore, threw the lot into the bushes, and walked in her own door to find that the few grains caught in the folds of the cloth had turned to gold. Elsewhere the same gift comes out of the apron as coal, for anyone who could not keep the secret.

Nineteenth-century Catalonia found them irresistible. Jacint Verdaguer took the word goja off the tongues of mountain people and handed it to Flordeneu, the fairy queen who lures the young Gentil in Canigó; Víctor Balaguer put them in his own work; Eugeni d’Ors set Gualba, la de mil veus in the valley of the Gorg Negre; and two separate operas were built on the figure, La fada by Massó i Torrents with music by Enric Morera, and La dona d’aigua by Joan Trias i Fargas with music by Casademont. Joan Amades collected the oral versions into his customaries before the last people who believed them died. At Sant Iscle the water-women now have a pair of festival giants and the village primary school carries their name, which is a strange afterlife for a creature whose whole function was to be seen by accident.

What they can do follows from what they are. Water answers to them and so does the weather that carries it, which is why an aloja knows a season is about to break and can order a green field cut a fortnight early. They hold wealth in forms mortals never quite control: bran into gold, tears into pearls, one stolen shift into a lifetime of plenty. Their singing pulls people off the path, and they can take a man’s name out of the air and use it on him. Some tellings give them a daylight shape too, a water blackbird or a swallow, so they can go about the valley while the sun is up.

Their limits are stranger than their powers. Nothing in the stories can injure an aloja and no mortal ever beats one; what undoes her is a sentence. The marriage holds for precisely as long as her husband keeps her origin unspoken, and it is always the husband who breaks it, always in temper, always over something small. Once the word is out she cannot stay however much she wants to, and the water takes her back the way it takes a dropped stone. The rest of the damage lands on whoever went looking. The man who watched too long lost his memory or his tongue or both. The midwife who opened her apron early lost a fortune, and in some Sant Iscle versions she goes down into the stream after it and does not come out. The aloja loses her children, which is the only thing she ever appears to want, and spends the rest of the tale coming back at night to a house she is no longer allowed to enter by day.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an aloja?

An aloja is a female freshwater spirit of Catalan folklore who lives in mountain pools, springs and waterfalls. She is the same being Catalans elsewhere call a goja, a dona d’aigua, an encantada or a paitida, and she is best known for washing linen by moonlight and for marrying mortal men under a strict condition.

Where do alojes live?

Alojes live in cold fresh water: the tarns of the Pyrenees, torrents, waterfalls, forest springs, the deep pools called gorgs, and damp caves with underground streams. Beneath these waters they are said to keep palaces full of treasure. The Gorg Negre at Gualba, in the Montseny, is the most famous of their homes.

What happens if a man marries an aloja?

He becomes rich and then loses her. An aloja will marry a mortal only on the condition that he never mentions her watery origin, and while he keeps that promise she makes his farm prosper. The moment he says it aloud, usually in the middle of an argument, she vanishes into the water and does not come back.

Are alojes dangerous?

They are more contrary than cruel. Alojes give real wealth, turning bran into gold and their own tears into pearls, but every gift comes with a condition attached, and breaking it costs the mortal rather than the spirit. Men who spied on them at the washing were led into caves and came out with their memories gone.

Can an aloja change shape?

Some tellings say she can. To move about the valley in daylight, when she would otherwise be confined to her pool, an aloja is described as taking the form of a bird, usually a water blackbird or a swallow. The shape is a means of travel rather than a disguise she uses to deceive anyone.

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