Josep Pla - Life Embitters

To be schooled by life means one is excessively obsessed by the present. This is a boon and a tragedy. Happiness belongs to those driven by nostalgia or imagination, those who live in the past or the future. They are havens that offer protection and support. Xammar’s mental processes don’t incline him towards these comfort zones. The lessons of experience or lyrical, random anticipations of the future don’t seem to spur him on. He witnesses a constant present that grates on live flesh and the faculties of the mind like sandpaper. If this painful attachment to the present is balanced by an ostentatious display of vanity, it may become tolerable. However, if the cart has to roll in all weathers, time begins to drag. In this case, to avoid being swallowed up, there is only one cure: reach a decent, functional level of intelligent insight. My colleague seems to manage this; perhaps he followed the routine we have so laboriously described.

Conversations with him made me feel things few people have been able to make me feel: I saw him grow physically and soar when confronted by specific declarations. If his presence is pervasive, he expands in conversation. I sometimes felt like grabbing him by the jacket.

“Some people,” I told him, “go for a walk with their stick and their dog. You should go for a ride in a balloon, or at least stroll with a real lion on a lead …”

But he only had a cat. It was a very strange cat. Its name was Mauzi. We all loved it dearly. It was deserved. Tassin the revolutionary socialist Menshevik possibly had his reservations. Perhaps he thought it was a cat corrupted by excessively bourgeois lethargy, a cat that was too eccentric and not cat enough. On the other hand, it won the hearts of us the household’s more understanding souls.

This cat was as serious as an English gentleman and as clean as a polished plate. It prowled around the house, strolled between chairs and through the library — that was tiny, notoriously tiny — and calmly circled the table at a relaxed, never frantic pace. It would sometimes interrupt these promenades opposite a window and gaze at the sky and the urban scene. The light slightly blurred its eyes but the spectacle of the universe didn’t necessarily fill it with joy. It particularly disliked snow-covered panorama. It kept its tail erect when Berlin suffered heavy snowfalls. If this is an indication of cosmic pessimism in the world of these animals, Mauzi was a total pessimist. When the weather improved, it would simply gawp at the sky, with a quick, rude, unseemly grin. For a moment it seemed the tissues of its stiff lips might tear; then one saw the inside of its mouth and a pale pink tongue … It immediately resumed its walk, oblivious to the urban landscape and the planetary system.

Its favorite bed was its master’s clean shirts. It was particular. If clothes that had just been washed and ironed were carelessly left out of the wardrobe, Mauzi wallowed on their spotlessness like an indulgent sybarite. If it couldn’t find any clothes, it would seek out the highest places in the house and take a sprightly jump on to the huge, white-tiled stove or the wardrobes. From such heights it looked down on us wretched humans with extraordinary indifference.

On the other hand, it had very well-rounded ideas. It couldn’t stand shabbiness. If the electrician, gasman, or coal merchant came, it went wild, meowed like mad, and it was a struggle to stop it scratching their faces. In the midst of these fits, occasioned by the spectacle of the proletariat, Mauzi looked at its master with savage contempt as if to say: “And you actually have dealings with these witless tramps?”

This boundless hatred was balanced by the enthusiasm Mauzi felt in the presence of elegant dressers. When its master returned from a press conference wearing his bowler hat, fur coat, black jacket, and pinstriped trousers, it always rolled over on one or other end of his master. If a distinguished lady or an Italian journalist with a monocle and stiff with cold appeared at teatime, the cat quietly jumped off the cupboard, in the middle of the sitting room, and attempted two or three lethal leaps at them. While it returned to its lookout point, Xammar would explain why the cat welcomed his guests in that way. Visitors were initially taken aback but then couldn’t hide that those expressions of trust flattered their egos.

Mauzi had a pleasant quirk: it hated unpleasant noises. One couldn’t talk loudly, whistle, or break into song in its presence. If anyone did, the cat meowed twice, in ghostly fashion, with a lull in between by way of a warning. If you persisted absentmindedly, it approached you on the sly and sank its teeth into your ankle. And then it returned to its place looking at you askance, with the expression of someone who had just reached a regrettable, if necessary, decision.

Around that time, the great contraction took place: the conversion and stabilizing of the mark. When one needed four billion, two hundred thousand million marks to buy one American dollar, they decided it was high time to create a new currency and stabilize it. Nobody seemed in a rush until the mark hit this startling rate of exchange. The new currency was called the Renten-Mark . If at a given time one needed four billion two hundred thousand million German marks ( Deutsche Mark ), a moment later one needed only four Renten-Marks , twenty Pfennige of Renten-Mark . It was a simple and subtle maneuver.

Given the new situation I asked Xammar: “How do you see things now? What should we do? What opportunities does the new dispensation offer us?”

“The new dispensation offers us very little. I see a country sinking into a sea of margarine and a fantastic accumulation of ersatz products. We shall now see how far Germany can go along the road of glue and plastic.”

“Are you at all inclined to welcome such plastic possibilities?”

“I’d die first! We must rally our forces. We must create a lobby and oppose attempts made by any form of margarine to infiltrate our bodies. We must hoist the anti-margarine flag and strive to keep to butter and the classical conceptions of fat. Now is not the time to slumber. We must work might and main not to doze off on the sack. I don’t know if dawn will smile on us, to use Sr Clavé’s lyrics. As a matter of urgency we must look for work, reduce our expenditure, and start now! You …”

“Please don’t stand on ceremony, fire away …”

“You’ll have to water down your passions a little, and the cat’s way of life could perhaps serve as an example in this respect. It’s an animal with a positive outlook on life. A sophisticated operator. I’ve never known him to have the slightest romantic inclination; I’ve never seen it fascinated by characteristically childish and absurd nighttime adventures on the tiles. On the contrary, it is ready to use every trick in the book to guarantee high-quality nourishment. That’s most impressive. It differentiates between different brands of frankfurters, eats eggs only if fried, likes tea with lemon, like the Slavs, and is dangerously sweet-toothed. It’s a wonderful, exceptional cat and only lacks one talent to be really man-like: the ability to write newspaper articles.”

“I see … That’s clear enough.”

“I think it’s a pattern to follow. It may be that some friends, Tassin in particular, will think we are flippant, superficial guys with little in the way of refinement. Too bad …”

With that we heard the doorbell, and shortly Sr Tassin in person walked in through the office door with a bundle of papers under his arm. He usually resided in Vienna, but frequently came to Berlin, which was the main center for Russian émigrés of every stripe. Politics brought him here, though he also had his own small lines of business. We’d first met him in Madrid where he translated Russian novels for the 30-cent Espasa Calpe series.