Josep Pla - Life Embitters

Sunday, the 3rd, at seven thirty, Dorothea was sitting at the aforementioned table in the Café Mitzel. When it struck eight o’clock, her heart began to thud. A few moments after, a gentleman walked in holding a handkerchief, a standard German gentleman. However, one could see he had just arrived from other climes, because his skin was tanned a bright red and he sported a short, salt-and-pepper beard.

When that man appeared, Dorothea rose from her seat like a jack-in-the-box. She looked at him and her whole body quivered. As he walked towards her, Dorothea wiped a hand over her eyes. Was she dreaming? For his part, the newcomer blanched when he saw her and went visibly weak at the knees. “It’s Dorothea!” he shouted, holding his hands to his head.

“It’s Hermann!” Dorothea cried in a muffled voice.

“Dorothea!”

“Hermann!”

They embraced. She wept. If it hadn’t been for the café and its clientele, he would have wept too. She said, “So, what have you got to say for yourself? This is a dream …”

“I’ll be frank. I thought you were dead,”

“What led you to think such a thing?”

“As a result of the upset …”

She looked at him, at a loss, astonished. They conversed incoherently. She asked him, “And what about the shipwreck? My God, what a shock that was? Why have you grown a beard?”

“It was a horrific shipwreck. There’s no better word: horrific. Don’t make me recall any of that. It’s all in the past, thanks be to God …”

They went to the little Wilmersdorf apartment. Hermann walked straight in, holding his head high, completely sure of himself. They read his postcards together, the old correspondence from South America, with delicious tact. And quite unawares they resumed their life of old.

Herr and Frau Weber introduced us to two splendid friends of theirs: Maties Boca, a great baritone from Tarragona, and Von Berg, the distinguished Hispanophile.

Von Berg was a polite, charming sixty-year-old, of average build, with rather nondescript features, who wore gold-framed spectacles that dangled on a cord. He had a mania for humanism he’d atomized on filing cards. He treated his little annotations with the utmost naïveté. Within the general framework of humanist studies he was a Hispanophile and within the realm of Hispanophilia he had specialized in literary and linguistic issues in our country. He had perhaps traveled to the Peninsula once in the course of his life, but possessed an impressive range of documentation and was familiar with minutiae that left one shell-shocked. He had been working for many a year on a wide-ranging, mind-boggling volume on the symbolism of the sardana as seen from the general perspective of dance in the Mediterranean. However, as with many academics of this ilk, he wallowed in a morass of confusion. By virtue of accumulating thousands of small, meaningless details, by dint of such a depth and wealth of material, the moment came when nobody — including himself — could get their bearings, or understand a thing. He spoke the language with a slurred, nasal accent, thin on verbs though rich in adjectives, and well constructed. “Yours is an admirable country,” he told me that afternoon, “and daily I find evidence to confirm that. Just imagine: I read today that the monks in the monastery in San Cugat have finished translating the Decamerone into Catalan. That, you will agree, is some consolation in the tidal wave of ignorance and incomprehension engulfing us all.”

Another day he summoned me to one side and whispered rather mysteriously: “What era does your great poet Sagarra belong to?”

I replied that the most one could say was that Sagarra belonged to an era of transition, a transition that was edging its way towards popular neo-classicism.

“There are things in your movement that dispirit me somewhat. At the moment people have a lot to say about this poet Sagarra and seemingly, considering the era when he lived, he is a very interesting figure.”

Speaking of Von Berg, Xammar told me: “Believe me and keep your eye on this fellow. He is a man who knows absolutely everything except what is real and genuine. You could help him no end. These fanatics are usually rich. The only energy you’d need to expend would be to lure him away from his filing cards.”

Boca the baritone was a man of proven worth and talented in a way I found appealing. To survive he’d had to use all the tricks in the book; he’d seen the world and had broad experience of life and people. However, he had refined the most difficult talent of all: he thought coldly and impersonally. When he wanted, he could take an immediate stance on an issue and reach a judgment without any sentimental consideration blurring his vision. He was amazingly pragmatic and objective. Superficial contact with him made no impact; when you got to know him a little, he grew in your eyes into a real character. To this day I still remember maxims uttered by Boca the baritone. This one, for example, will never fail to be relevant: “Only one remedy exists to make sure that married women remain faithful to their lovers: make sure their husbands watch over them night and day.”

Nevertheless, when held up against the light, Maites Boca secreted the sad melancholy of a man who has fought hard and achieved nothing. In his forties, he was a white-haired man with powerful eyes, a strong, sensual mouth, and a paunch that rode high. The art of bel canto , and the high notes it requires, had given his body the shape of a mattress spring one often sees in Milà’s gallery. He wore a fur coat he rarely took off in winter, butter-colored gloves, and a shiny hunter’s hat with a feather on the side. I sometimes bumped into him when strolling in the Tiergarten and he’d look crestfallen and gloomy and I would see him wandering at a loss down dubious avenues.

“Baritone Boca, you are so intelligent,” I asked him once, “why aren’t you a millionaire?”

“What can I say, my friend?” he replied. “I’ve a terrible character and this has held me back.”

It was true that it was difficult to tolerate his friendship. He spent his life searching for cast-iron arguments to sink his rivals. His success in debate had earned him a reputation for being vain and boorish. He’d have starved to death more than once, if he’d not put his dialectic to one side. His emotional life had been long and complicated. A singer’s tightrope existence, the inevitable engagements and cherry-plum tours were the backdrop to the romantic havoc in his life. He voiced bitter opinions of his artistic colleagues and respected only La Barrientos, whom he dubbed that Lady Maria on the Carrer d’Aribau. At the time he said he was recording gramophone records for companies in Berlin; in fact he shared his life with a wealthy, dry old stick who had financially supported many artists and actors. The old lady was jealous and difficult and Boca the baritone had his work cut out to ensure his allowance wasn’t whisked away. He had noted that Frau Schoen only liked people who remained aloof. The man from Tarragona acted as coldly and distantly as he could, and was forced to rein in his character considerably. Even so, people said the baritone was far too much of a gentleman for that lady.

On Sunday afternoons Frau Schoen organized teas for her friends who were reputed to be an arty set — they were lively occasions. Sr Boca was always insisting we should go. As he never shut up, and it would have been rude not to gratify him, off we went.

It was a fine house. The apartment was rather high up but had marvelous rooms that overlooked a large, open piece of land where masses of youngsters practiced sport during the holidays. When it rained and the curtain of water and low sky blurred the view from that apartment you felt you were outside Berlin, in the middle of the countryside. The interior, however, was very German and was furnished according to that lady’s taste. One room luxuriated in purple wallpaper with complex Cubist lighting painted in every color imaginable. The walls of another were a dazzling canary yellow, with black, spiraling furniture. A big goldfish bowl, home to two fish, stood in the centre, and the window ledges were filled with a large number of tiny pots of those soft hideous plants that are now so fashionable — cacti. It all made your hair stand on end. You’d often seen the clean, shiny shell of a tortoise emerge from under a sofa or the lady would walk in half naked, displaying her goatish teats, red hair, ravaged face, in purple shoes and stockings, and holding a stuffed bird or cheeky monkey on one hand. Some people reckoned Frau Schoen had a room devoted to snakes. I never saw a snake in her house, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if one had slithered out from under the furniture.