Josep Pla - Life Embitters

Ownership of the Pekingese resulted in the anticipated social and economic outcomes. In the neighborhood generally, but in the grocery store in particular, our credit-worthiness was immediately boosted, which meant that whenever there was a shortfall it was glossed over. “A trifle, considering the spirit of derring-do that imbues this tale …” the odd reader will say. But life is but a collection of trifles. If one fails, they can give rise to genuine headaches, sometimes veritable disasters, that don’t cease to be so because they are private and personal, quite the contrary, in fact. On the other hand, this spirit has no soft spot for derring-do. The protagonists of these stories have always believed that the biggest adventure in life is to be paid and is to pay up on time.

In tandem with economic recognition, that animal and its master enjoyed the inevitable social prestige generated in such circumstances. I won’t dwell on this. This prestige traveled beyond the strict confines of the neighborhood and, in terms of improved status, even reached the offices where my friend worked sporadically. Every objective was met.

A month and a half after the Renten-Mark was established we had yet to eat a gram of margarine or canned goods — always dubious — or any ersatz product. Very few people managed to survive the cutback in the money supply. Berlin had been emptied of foreigners and fly-by-nights, of that slippery cosmopolitan crowd who had eaten and drunk month after month practically for nothing thanks to whatever foreign currency they carried. The German science taught in the universities that foreigners had found excellent as long as restaurants fed them for so little was soon a thing of the past. Berlin became an empty chicken coop. This was the moment when Xammar thought it was vital to extend our social base.

“We’ve got by up to now,” he told me. “But we lead lives that are too solitary. Solitude is sterile, has never generated useful income. The day we have fifty friends coming and going through our door as a matter of course, our affairs will start to prosper. In this country you make friends by giving them a cup of tea when they drop by on a weekly basis. We should try out this approach. I know it is a bind but we have no alternative. We must fling our doors wide open.”

“And when we fling them open wide, do we need to apply any criteria? Do we say: ‘I want this fellow, but not that one.’?”

“Oh, no, not at all. My experience has shown me that anyone whatsoever can give you a helping hand — sometimes, the most unlikely people. On the other hand, our war against margarine compels us to fight by using every weapon we possess. I think we should employ a minimalist criterion: nobody should be admitted who’s not fun in some way, or whose character doesn’t display a degree of liveliness. The vitae of our friends shouldn’t be too gray or wishy-washy.”

The couple who provided us with the Pekingese was one of our first new contacts. As they loved their dog and sold it reluctantly, they often visited us to see it and check on how it was enjoying life. When they realized it was being well treated, they began to take a keen interest in us and then became very friendly. They were Herr and Frau Weber but we dubbed them Hermann and Dorothea, because they seemed just like the couple Goethe’s characters would have turned into, had they lived in a bourgeois, industrial era like our own. As we saw them frequently and as familiarity breeds indiscretions, I feel able to sketch a portrait of their lives.

They married the way people marry everywhere: out of love, self-interest, happenstance, and because it’s what most people do. Hermann worked in the accounts department of an important button manufacturer. He had the ideas and habits of a first-rate employee. He was loyal, well organized, and intelligent with a very specific kind of expertise and greatly admired the firm’s owner and shareholders. He believed they were all highly important people. He sometimes came across a shareholder in the street whom he’d never talked to. That was no reason not to greet him with a deferential doff of his hat. At the time hats were doffed vertically and upwards: the more upwards the hat was swept, the happier the man doffing and the one being so honored.

Dorothea had a story to tell. She came from a village near Danzig. The village had a lake nearby. She lived her first love on the banks of this lake. It was a love that was too tender, playful, and warm to end happily. Her parents, honest Social Democratic workers, with a concern for basic levels of culture, refused to give their consent arguing that the lad hadn’t graduated from high school. He was a truck driver with pink cheeks that inspired love. Dorothea longed for his pinkness, but her parents had a more thought-through view of people and color for them was a secondary consideration.

Her driver lacked drive, she was only waiting for the word to head down whatever road, and she lost heart. She abandoned the family home and traveled to Berlin on a fourth-class ticket. She found work in a ladies’ hairdressers and, being romantic and rather ingenuous, she adapted well to the distinctly provincial atmosphere that floats in the air of most big-city neighborhoods, Berlin included. She liked Wilmersdorf, the area where she settled, but not as much as the Berlin of foreigners and the wealthy. Whenever she walked down the Kurfürstendamm, she felt she was in the presence of something important, nay — sublime. So it was natural enough for her to take a liking to the Romanisches Café, the hub of the city’s cosmopolitan, more or less literary crowd. Dorothea felt them to be riff-raff, perhaps on the crude side, but the company of artists — even if it wasn’t firsthand — made up for the ridiculous pettiness she experienced at the hairdressers. They must say so many fascinating things every day at every single one of these tables , thought Dorothea.

In fact they met at the Romanisches Café. Dorothea asked Hermann for a light. They spoke, though very little, because Hermann was accompanying a Yugoslavian, a Croatian, to be precise, who bought buttons wholesale. However, they agreed a date for a day that same week.

After a frosty beginning, they sensed their conversation was taking off. He rather drawled his words, because he was from Saxony. She spoke with an East Prussian accent. They were accents that complimented each other and were very suited to the creation of proper Berlinese. Hermann declared he would like to be a bohemian and that he really admired the way artists lived. Dorothea had the good sense to respond with an apologia for the life of a clerk and the virtues inherent in rigorous bookkeeping, the keystone of the prosperity of nations and their inhabitants. This to-and-fro arguing for contrary attitudes — she was the one longing for freedom while he was a stickler for order and putting everything in its proper place — produced excellent results. For Hermann Dorothea was essentially a virtuous hairdresser. In the eyes of the young lady, Hermann became a clerk enhanced by a secret, dream life.

“It’s obvious,” said Hermann in their third conversation, “that I would do well to marry. My boss has been advising me to do so for some time … I need to marry someone with a good educational background and decent manners. Unions of people with different sets of manners don’t usually work out …”

Dorothea thought of her family. She had a vision of her father reading Vorwärts in the light of their living room. That was where she had come from.

“Someone without a decent education is of so little value,” said Hermann over his mug of beer.

“Oh, if only I’d been able to study …!” answered Dorothea after a brief pause, as two round, and very genuine tears rolled down her cheeks.