Josep Pla - Life Embitters

Predictably, the catastrophic damage made the count panicky, a panic the arrival of firemen only increased. However, when he realized he’d not been injured he took refuge in philosophy and attributed the disaster to the generally adverse forces of nature. Less steeped in metaphysics, the countess had experienced such a shock they had to call a doctor. Moreover, it soon transpired that pieces of plaster had fallen on her legs. This put her in a lot of pain and she was driven to hospital in an ambulance they urgently summoned.

In those very same ominous early hours, while the firemen were clearing debris out of the bedroom, the count meditated at length on the misfortune he’d just suffered. He made his own analysis and considered the situation from all angles. When the first light of dawn glimmered, he looked elated and his blue eyes sparkled mischievously. They weren’t the eyes of a man who’d been stunned by the sight of seven hundred and fifty kilos of plaster ceiling falling next to his body.

He rang an architect’s office at nine and had a document drawn up to the effect that the house he inhabited had been threatening to collapse. An hour later, at ten, he walked into Prince Colonna’s administrative offices and half an hour later came out beaming. The count had just earned three thousand lire, the first tangible fruit of the catastrophe to which he almost fell victim. With that first tranche he began to feel free of immediate stress, and devoted most of his time to public libraries researching the jurisprudence related to his case from the Twelve Tables onwards. His wife had the good sense to understand her husband’s thinking and didn’t rush to leave hospital. There’s nothing like good character and pleasant manners to help prolong one’s stay in a charitable institution. The countess was endowed with these virtues and her totally imaginary ills were respected most benignly. Colonna’s administrator, terrified by the possibility of litigation, paid out a decent amount of lire every month. Don Antoni increased his intake of croquettes and small glasses of wine. He added in slices of pink mortadella, small plates of fresh cucumber and Russian salad, palpable throwbacks to his old life in Ostend. The catastrophe did him proud: he recovered; his ears lost their transparency. In the meantime, plaster from jurisprudence increased daily. But as that pile expanded, the jurisprudence thinned out and began to roam off beam. But that didn’t matter. Good will has always counted more when applying jurisprudence than strict analogies. Most sensibly Count Logotete foresaw that Prince Colonna’s administrator would wake up in a bad temper one day and decide he’d exhausted his humanitarian sentiments. In effect, that was what happened: the administrator called it a day at thirty thousand lire, saying the disaster had been paid for, was over. However, by then Don Antoni had amassed an impressive stack of material. These papers were given over to a lawyer, an enemy of the Colonna household, who possessed dazzling verbal skills. The case began on an impressively combative note.

“Onto the Supreme Court!” bleated Don Antoni.

“Yes! Onto the Supreme Court!” repeated his lawyer in that baritone bass he made his very own.

They embraced tenderly and embarked on their journey to the highest realms of justice.

Thus began a phase of relative prosperity in the life of Don Antoni Logotete — I don’t think I need underline how relative it was — a phase that was very helpful for my own cultural enrichment. If the catastrophe of the plaster slabs and the surprising aftermath hadn’t happened, Don Antoni would never have decided to visit the antiquities of Rome and I would never have had the opportunity to benefit from them. Happenstance rules even our moments of leisure and relaxation.

The past of cities like Rome that have a great future before them doesn’t usually interest the people who are rooted there. Beauty and history, museums and archaeology represent an element of routine in the life of these individuals, a subject that holds no surprises or interest, mere local news that boosts the self-esteem of the citizenry, but that newspapers only air when there is nothing more lucrative to vent. They are things they leave to foreigners, occasional visitors, and tourists. So many, many people live round the corner from dazzling collections of art, great museums, and have never thought of paying them a visit! The inhabitants of Rome react like that on the grand scale, probably because of the remarkable wealth of the city’s possessions. Notoriously, they have other business on their minds. Foreigners experience something similar: they are extremely curious on the first few days and want to see the lot, then a similar indifference sets in. Nevertheless, blissful are those in Rome or Italy who manage to keep their minds open, their curiosity alert, and their spirits as buoyant as a tourist’s!

Once the court case was begun and begun in a powerful fighting spirit, Don Antoni was swept along by a wave of tourist fancies. After so many months of inner drought, of disasters and calamities when curiosity had to focus on the demands of daily life, this new period opened with great élan and expectations. I don’t know if this was driven by spiritual impulses or the absolutely visible increase in his food supply. It hardly matters. The truth is Don Antoni was in a bountiful mood and suggested we should devote our spare time to a spot of relaxing archaeology. He knew Rome very well, and the archaeological part he preferred was in the center, and that was exactly what I preferred. The Eternal City’s past is so vast and complex that, if you don’t want to lose your way, you must of necessity curb your curiosity. Even so, the possibilities are enormous.

I liked all that part of the city located on the left of the Piazza Venezia when one is looking directly at the monument to Vittorio Emmanuele; from the Piazza to the Coliseum and the entire area dominated by that imposing mass. At the time the area I’m referring to was one immense pile of ruins where arches in a good state of conservation, like Titus’s, for example, stood out as if it was a real effort. The entire zone was exactly as it was in Goethe’s times, perhaps even in a worse state, because the best preserved monuments had been fenced off with diverse shapes and sizes of wrought iron. Nobody ever painted these fences, the iron had rusted giving the ruins they were protecting a gloomy air — like funereal pantheons bourgeois taste has erected in cemeteries. Natural deterioration and crumbling stone contrasted with the tedious, mass-produced railings. However, that was the only way they had found to ensure the stones were left in peace.

In winter Rome is a colorful city of delicate shades and aromas but in summer, during the day, there is an explosion of grayish white light that is an implacable, monotonous glare. The light seems to suck the color from the venerable stones that are covered with a luminous crust that has the texture of fine sand. It is a sad, dazzling, and explosive light the very whiteness of which induces melancholy. Even on days when a southerly wind blows, the sky is a wan blue diluting into incandescent white. The solitude, the emptiness of the sky, is a constant: any attempt at cloud is reabsorbed in the vast white vault that, dotted with metallic pinpoints of light, shimmers like glistening mica.

That summer, Don Antoni and I strolled through that shapeless agglomeration that would later be crossed by the Passegiata Archeologica: one of the most striking streets in Europe, that most vibrates with intimations of the eternal. We strolled there in the blistering sun and in white, muted moonlight. If it was interesting by day, it was even more so by night. Even a naturalist would have found it interesting.