Josep Pla - Life Embitters

That sociologist was a source of argument and several people were visibly repelled by him. Nobody knew what he did or what he lived on. Some said he translated sociology books from German to Russian, but nobody could vouchsafe such serious endeavors. Others maintained that his wife, who was a dentist, ran a renowned practice in a working-class area and that allowed him to lead a somewhat idle, whimsical life. Malicious gossips pointed to him being a wily, undercover agent for police of every kind. Others, on the contrary, reckoned he was a sad maniac on the loose. I heard people say strange things about him: they said you could find him in the oddest of places and that when you were least expecting it, he’d tap you on the back in that oblique, elusive way he had. I experienced that myself and was really shocked. One morning I had to pay a business call on a gentleman who lived in a distant neighborhood and I passed the émigré Russian sociologist on the stairs. Another day, when waiting for lady friend in an out-of-the-way corner of an empty park, I saw him walk by under the trees, holding a newspaper; he showily doffed his hat at me. If I’d been at all superstitious, that fellow would have had me worried.

A Catalan led the field against Tomski, a Sr Coberta, a cultured merchant and semi-artist, the son of the distinguished Sr Coberta from the Ampurdan who went bankrupt a few years ago, as is well known, trying to make a quick buck. Sr Coberta was voluble and shameless, prone to astonishing bursts of heart-on-sleeve sincerity. He was a warmhearted fellow easily swept along by an endless flow of words and the pleasure of chatter for chatter’s sake. He’d say of himself that his heart was “open like a barn door.” I can testify to seeing him wipe away tears in the cinema during a scene when children made it up with their father. He was a man of average build, with a freckled face, reddish hair, and rather coarse features behind large American-style spectacles. He was a partner in a large Berlin fruit store and owned a suburban movie theater.

Coberta never argued in an ad hominem , specific way against the Russian. Nevertheless, he had a mania: a boundless hatred of Russia and all things Russian. He couldn’t bear the slightest mention of the place.

“The Slavic soul!” he’d snort with a snarl. “You can speak as much as you like about the Slavic soul, its profound mysteries and ethereal charms … Stuff and nonsense! There are no such mysteries, ethereal delights, or depths. They are fantastically brutish and that’s all there is to it.”

One wanted to ask him what devious paths he’d taken to reach such a conclusion. You’d feel that for a second and then you’d look at him and find him to be so full of life and so typical of our country that you understood him perfectly. The most extreme opinions seemed perfectly natural coming from his lips. One can always rely on a Catalan to come out with the most extraordinary, flabbergasting ideas.

Coberta holding forth on Russia and the Russians always reminded me of Disraeli’s dictum on the same topic: “The Russians will always be first-rate as long as they wear their shirts outside their trousers. However, the day they look more civilized, they won’t be nearly so likeable.”

When the conversation turned to Russia, Tomski slipped off and disappeared out of sight. Gerdy backed Sr Coberta, and Ragutini also seemed to rally to the same cry, despite his taciturn silence.

“They are so brutish!” said Gerdy, incensed. “What really riles them most is not being able to pick their noses with their fingers or drink their tea from their saucers …”

“Absolutely!” chimed Coberta, brandishing his fists and launching off. “They are barbarians. Go into a Russian restaurant and see for yourselves. Look at the way they eat. They mix everything up: fruit with meat and coffee, fish with dessert and cheese; milk with vegetables and 70° proof alcohol. Their combinations make no sense, are straight out of the lunatic asylum. We invented rice and chicken, they invented steak with sugar. They are polar opposites. And what about Russian women? Have you ever seen the like? The most aristocratic among them act as if they were chamber maids only yesterday. Snobs will say that sensually they are complex, literary and fascinating. Wrong. They only seem complex because to a woman they wave a fishtail behind and are all glitter and no gold …”

“You’re right!” agreed Gerdy passionately. “We Polish women …”

Sabatini managed to stifle a laugh and Ragutini had enough sangfroid to introduce a diverse, calming note while glancing at her as if mildly bewitched.

“What can one expect from savages?” asked Coberta histrionically. “They are stubborn, inflexible, brutal, and of a piece. They never change, are never wrong, never waver, never give. That’s why they are so cold, objective, and implacable and totally inflexible. They are wedded to a single idea and soon become blindly fanatical. If it suits, they behead and kill coldly, routinely. These people frighten and horrify me and the eternal victim’s pose they’ve turned into the true base of social life fills me with nostalgia for the warmth of the corrupt, sentimental folk of yore. I prefer life to be sociable, though things may be more precarious, than to exist as a cog in a machine that is perfect, just, and brutal. It’s better, if at all possible, for people to wear grimy shirts and be less ruthless. It’s better to be reasonable and tolerant and act against simplistic, brutal, bloodthirsty savagery. There’s something else about these Russians: they are obsessed by history, they aspire to leave their mark on history and thus be perpetuated. To ensure that happens, they are ready to commit the most bloodcurdling feats, to ride roughshod over everything in their path, to execute their mothers and their fathers. They maintain that before their revolution — that simply brought chaos to large swaths of this planet — that men and women’s lives simply erred, were a whimper, and that truth only appeared on the planet when they appeared. They are capable of anything, are amazingly arrogant. They don’t possess the slightest veneer of wit, sense of the ridiculous, or humane, generous understanding. They are intolerable pedants, and irremediably infantile …”

Coberta’s outburst prompted several protests. The most vociferous came from Herr and Frau Mulhens, a German couple from Breslau. They were a remarkable pair. They had lived as man and wife until the age of thirty in a state of lukewarm marital bliss. He was a bank clerk and she did the books for a restaurant. One day, however, they met a psychiatric doctor with a great future behind him who was moreover an expert practitioner of the occult sciences and so-called manifestations of vital energies. I’m not exactly sure what these highly respectable mental disciplines amounted to. Nevertheless, the fact is that the good doctor hooked up the married couple and the Mulhens suddenly moved on from their previously dull gray existence to a life of violent disarray. He left his bank and she abandoned her restaurant to join the way-out bohemian crowd. Germans bring to everything they do, whether normal or not, the same nervous energy and the same desire for total possession. One saw them attend the soirées of the most radical avant-garde, half-hidden clubs, and other clandestine sensual-cum-scientific dives. Initially, it was a great effort to acclimatize but, instructed by their well-qualified guide they soon saw the light. They explored all the medieval byways that, so they say, have resurfaced in recent years: black magic, the occult, theosophy, spiritualism, expressionism, experiences of rejuvenation and euphoria, not to mention different manifestations of transcendental pornography. At that precise moment they were cresting the wave of psychoanalysis and wallowing in the symbolism of the senses and the unconscious. They heroically survived that tortuous path, but their determination was astounding: they were two scraps of humanity in the grips of new knowledge. They happily clung to the tightrope of their lunatic obsessions. Frau Mulhens was a small, plump, oily, unattractive, repugnant woman, awash with furs and diamonds. She acted as a medium and read the cards. He was a chlorinated ivory white, medium-built fellow, with a face like a fetus and a big, protruding butt: ravaged, putrefied, and pockmarked. He was an art critic and music-hall songster.