Josep Pla - Life Embitters

Our friendship with the correspondents of Italian daily newspapers in Berlin meant that two in particular often visited our apartment on Kantstrasse.

Ragutini was from Naples, and one of the saddest men I have ever met. In his mid-thirties, he was short, with a toupee, a nose like a billiard ball, round, with shifty eyes, broad, red cardboard cheeks, and a tiny, trimmed mustache. He acted like a dejected clown and seemed eternally sorrowful. He usually wore light-colored clothes and Xammar argued that the sadness emanating from him came precisely from his light-colored attire.

Sabatini worked for an important Turin daily, was from the Mantuan nobility. His freedom of movement in high society was astounding. He was a thin, dark, curly-haired person whose svelte body shimmied sinuously. He had a penchant for rather effeminate black and white check three-piece suits. He wore a monocle he constantly fiddled with, because he was always fidgety. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, he’d get up from his chair, leave his interlocutor in mid-sentence and stand in front of the first mirror he could find.

Then he tightened the knot of his tie and started singing a fragment from an opera or a ballad.

He had a soft spot for the immortal:

Si piange

Ma le lacrime

Si asciugan

doppo un di .

La vita va costi …

that he rendered with arms outstretched, elongating his words as if they were made of rubber, with a half cynical, half sentimental glint in his hypnotic eyes. He could also deliver a patriotic song and many others in the genre, whether rousing or lyrical, mournful or amorous, accompanied or solo.

When his colleague was singing, Ragutini blushed, smoked compulsively, opened his eyes and mouth as if he’d realized he’d just blundered badly, and then, when the song was sung, he would snigger on the sly. Sabatini took note.

“ Sei un infarinato, tu, Ragutini …! Non ti piace l’Italia …! ” he’d say, giving the final touch to the knot of his tie.

One immediately noticed how Sabatini stirred up the ladies. His eyes devoured them and he lapped up their patter like manna from heaven. He treated them with Olympian contempt and told them of his affairs, never sparing a detail. He did it so calmly that he often seemed to be speaking quite spontaneously.

When one heard them for the first time, Sabatini’s amorous feats were amusing enough. He was so fluent and voluble you’d have thought a brightly colored streamer was ticker-taping from his mouth. Subsequently, one tended to glaze over and drowse off.

While he was speaking, Ragutini tried to position himself conspicuously. He’d follow his spiel and back it up with incredulous little chuckles. The two men were complete opposites. Ragutini was the intelligent fellow out on a limb, shunting his melancholy rancor about the world like a suitcase. Sabatini, on the other hand, was the born idiot for whom life was an open-doored Paradise, ever new and ever renewable. So discreet and always striving to understand things, Ragutini never made any headway. Sabatini would make a stupid remark, fall head over heels and doors opened wide for him.

A young Polish woman sailed with the Italians. She had some post or other in her country’s telegram agency. She was Gerdy, or at least that was the rather un-Polish name she went by, was petite, lively, and cheerful: a glittering jewel. Gerdy must have been in her early twenties. Her fine brown hair gleamed voluptuously and she wore it cut very short; she had a vivacious expression and her skin was firm and pale. She was the kind of person who brings movement and freshness to everything she touches, and she made a big impact in that world of decomposing marooned monsters. She was always smoking Russian cigarettes in a white holder. She dressed in a wonderful, unfussy style and, in the leather raincoat she wore, was quite delightful.

Ragutini was in love with her. Sabatini treated her any old how. Ragutini tracked her with his sad clownish eyes, his mouth dried up when he spoke to her, leaving him tongue-tied. His attitude showed he was prepared to make whatever sacrifice that woman demanded of him. Sabatini often shrugged his shoulders most rudely when Gerdy asked him a question. Moments later, nevertheless, he’d give her an ever-so-knowing wink on the sly, in a well-rehearsed gesture that had the Polish lady hooting like a lunatic for five minutes.

One day I quizzed her about the Italians.

“Sabatini is a perfect fool, but I find him hugely entertaining,” said Gerdy pensively, exhaling a wisp of smoke through a crack in her lips. “Ragutini is more intelligent and safer, but I find him a boor and wearingly sentimental. You feel as if you are wasting your time when you speak to him.”

“Would you marry Sabatini?”

“Why not?”

“Even though he’s so stupid?”

“So what? You need so little to get married … Perhaps you need just a little wit and nous not to marry.”

“Come, come! If you don’t want to marry, you simply need to be a touch more naïve.”

“I don’t agree. You could never see things through my eyes and I could never share your ideas, however hard we tried. Everyone see things from their point of view, especially women. In any case, we do almost see eye to eye on this.”

I looked at her quizzically.

“Don’t you like women who are ever so slightly foolish, rather than complete fools? If you don’t,” rasped Gerdy, lifting her hand to head off my reply, “you don’t have much in the way of taste.”

Gerdy spoke nonstop. She would almost always stay in the center of the room, a cup of tea in one hand and a slice of thinly buttered toast in the other. Conversations and huddles came and went around her. She circulated. She had a word for everyone and laughed tirelessly, saying whatever she felt like to whomever. Sometimes general hilarity or a real din struck up around her that turned every head at the party. It was precisely on one afternoon when Boca the baritone had bought Frau Schoen to the house — it was her first time — that Gerdy sparked one of those tremendous hullabaloos she was famed for. Frau Schoen blanched and we were afraid there’d be a violent scene. We were greatly surprised when she countered in a distraught, though almost familiar, tone of voice. Standing straight-backed in a corner of the room, she grimaced and replied loftily: “You know, Gerdy, I’ve a terrible headache. I simply must take an aspirin this very minute.”

The Pole would then take a rest, what Maties Boca, called her feline interlude. She asked the maid to bring her the cat of the house and lay beside it on a sofa. She opened its mouth with great difficulty and fed it a few drops of lemon tea. The animal bristled, performed extraordinary routines, looked to be in a rage, sneezed, wiped its whiskers with a paw, and capered over the carpet. Gerdy found all that most entertaining, and it would climax with the cat scratching her face.

Gerdy had a soft spot for a life of glitter and her dream would have been to be filthy rich and live in Paris.

“If Ragutini promised to take you there, would you marry him?” I asked her jokingly.

“Quite possibly … I would so love to be in Paris!”

“Why do you say that?” Gregori Tomski the Russian sociologist and moralist would then ask. “You are so gracious, why would you want to experience firsthand the vile madness of the Western world? Gerdy, why does it appeal to you? Isn’t Germany bad enough?”

Gregori Tomski was a chronic Russian émigré who maintained that everything outside the frontiers of the Slav world was perverse, sinful and anti-human. Tiny and bald, he looked perpetually crestfallen with his huge mouth, protruding pale ivory cheeks and glassy, almost green eyes. He always wore a bowler hat with a broad mourning band and dark shabby suits with shiny, baggy knees. His angelical, tender-hearted demeanor came as a real surprise. He spoke in soft, elusive tones, and silently came and went, like a weightless shadow, as if floating imperceptibly through the air. It wasn’t at all hard to imagine him traveling the world, mouth agape, arms open to welcome someone, his cheeks ever expecting a slap and his heart permanently on his sleeve. Later, his politeness, sinuous charms and all-around lightweight presence seemed rather disturbing. You realized that his angelic ways were different from what you’d observed in other men. You found a subtle undercurrent, an almost invisible thread of sarcasm, a tiny, chill tremor, a hidden, slippery je ne sais quoi that alerted you to a psyche one couldn’t quite fathom. The deadpan mask of his face was disconcerting, but even in his warmer moments, you felt you could see a tail waving like a miniature snake’s, its triangular head erect, in his glassy eyes. Who was he really? A hapless wretch? An impostor with a dark, tragic history? Who knows?