Josep Pla - Life Embitters

“Why do you speak of such important questions, Sr Coberta” the two halves of the indignant duo retorted almost simultaneously, “if you are bereft of method or any sense of responsibility? If one wishes to attain a certain level of culture, one must set out on a long, difficult road way beyond the simple possibilities of a petty merchant …”

Sr Coberta heard them out, head down, ironically tapping the leg of the sofa with his shoe. Then he looked up and stared at them as if they were a high mountain peak. Everyone anticipated a brilliant riposte. Coberta shrugged his shoulders and abandoned the field of battle.

Every one of Xammar’s predictions was handsomely fulfilled. Those cups of tea bore rapid fruit. Von Berg asked us to collaborate and on very good terms. Xammar almost allowed himself to be monopolized by the Italians and their highly active press services. We prepared a detailed biography of Boca the baritone that Frau Schoen paid for most generously. The same lady — whose connections were vast — put the translation our way of promotional material for the Hamburg American Line: easy, convenient, well-remunerated work. Sr Coberta opened his arms to us. Apart from the business we knew he was in, he had begun a new initiative: the antique trade. The economic recession was highly favorable for this kind of business. A large part of the merchandise traded during the years of inflation re-entered the market. Coberta was flourishing … Thus, what with one thing and another, we managed to rustle up a substantial income. We could defend the respect due to human dignity in terms of margarine and ersatz products. We could, at the same time, hand the translation of Kropotkin’s Ethics generously sent our way by Tassin over to more expert hands. Xammar would come carrying now this, now that new item. The Kantstrasse apartment became more elegant and stylish by the day.

The time came when we began to wonder how much more of an open house we could sustain. The number of visitors increased weekly and I think that was down to the fact that, unlike what happened in many Berlin get-togethers, our gathering didn’t especially center on culture.

“Our gatherings,” said Xammar, “are too entertaining, people are having too much of a good time. If we want to ensure that our guests don’t come too often, perhaps we need to raise the intellectual level in order to clear the air now and then.”

To achieve this aim, it seemed that the presence of Dr Guerrero would be useful: a Madrid-educated Guatemalan philosopher, he was a small, thin, wan young man who carried a walking stick over his arm and spent his life rubbing his hands together. His skull was long and hard, his complexion, earthy and his nose, aristocratic and imposing. At first sight, he looked like a barber by trade who was a fan of bullfighting. Whenever I saw him, he always wore a small white jacket, carried scissors or a knife, with a yellow cigarette butt tucked behind his ear, and talked bullfight talk using convoluted language and gesturing in a peculiarly clockwork manner. He aspired after a university career but was really suffering from terrible constipation and a dearth of fibrous vegetables. Dr Guerrero was a typical example of the intense intellectual: a confused morass driven by a single desire — to enjoy a fellowship or the status of a fellow; to be a professor or enjoy the status of a professor; to have a foot on the ladder, or merit a place on the ladder. Intellectually speaking, any bubble of words sent his head into a spin. His forte was his almost complete inability to connect with reality, to separate the wheat from the chaff. He constantly oscillated between Byzantine obscurity and a mania for startling shafts of wit and held his ground as long as he could call up an incomprehensible argument or a happy play on words. He was never clear or spontaneous. He brought on that stress engendered by men born to speak without ever knowing what they are saying, men born to pronounce like oracles.

Unfortunately, Dr Guerrero was soon rendered hors de combat . In effect, he came up against a systematic brake on his perorations in the person of Sr Mariano Regulado, from the Portuguese colonies, who’d come to town to give a course of lectures on tropical pathology. In our gatherings, Regulado was the spirit of common sense, balance, and normality. He was a paunchy diabetic, the color of faded liquorice, with long, lank, moist hair, and a face veiled in suffering.

That fine gentleman amused himself by standing opposite the budding professor and listening to him with a smile that was enigmatic, though apparently congenial. He stood there as long as was necessary, never losing his patience, always attentive and intrigued. And it was infallible: after a more or less long spiel, the philosopher would lose his thread and start to stumble. Guerrero always tired of talking before Regulado tired of listening. When he saw he was leaking water, the Portuguese man gently cajoled him. “I can guarantee you one thing, Sr Guerrero. You are a really lovely man, I’d say it was almost a foregone conclusion that you will have a distinguished career.”

Gerdy’s sharp eye often helped Regulado in his efforts to keep him on a rein. Guerrero made the big mistake of saying something silly about French wine in the presence of Gerdy, one of many foolish remarks one heard at the time on things that were fully established and recognized.

“Oh, no!” exclaimed the indignant Pole. “I can’t let that remark go. It’s going too far. And tell me, Professor, what kind of philosophy do you teach if you are ignorant of such basic things? This doesn’t mean,” added Gerdy, laughing contemptuously, “that you will never become a fine university teacher …”

Fortunately, our need to strengthen the cultural gravitas of these get-togethers was bolstered by the figure of Doctor Wiener, Privat-Dozent of Metrics at Hale University. He was in his forties, blonde going on gray, gaunt, passive, and absentminded. He looked very much like Nietzsche in the most common portraits of him, with that air of someone suddenly taken by surprise. He was very odd to observe in action. He asked the strangest questions with a deadpan expression and stopped everyone in their tracks. His curiosity knew no bounds and he poked his nose into everything. He asked equally enthusiastically about artistic matters as about the world of finance, about down-to-earth or lofty subjects. His questions seemed even odder when one noticed that Dr. Wiener never listened to any answers. Indeed, sometimes it even transpired his interlocutor was familiar with the subject his question addressed.

Rarely, to be true: the professor was too self-preoccupied to choose his targets successfully and would often talk to young ladies about philosophy and to highly respected faculty about fashion and contemporary dance. But sometimes he got it right, and when that was the case, his target focused his ideas and would launch into general introductory remarks to what promised to be a brilliant speech. After listening for a few moments, the professor’s mind was already elsewhere. If he was on another wavelength, mid-peroration, he would hum a tune out of key or ask a question on a completely different subject, for no obvious reason. These lapses were the weak point in his strong character, though people could never agree on how to interpret them. Some declared they were clear proof that he was the consummate sage. Others, on the contrary, said he was rude and various levelheaded fellows would have liked to teach him a lesson.

He was no different when he was doing the talking. He would switch tack, race from 3000 BC to Bismarck at a dizzy pace. His conversations were ineffably chaotic. In a nutshell, he saw some things as a function of others. However, this method, that so many people espouse, seemed comical on his lips that had never traveled the world. When he spoke it was impossible not to imagine him, ladle in hand, stirring a pot brimming with the most peculiar ingredients. The ladle brought to the surface Socrates’ broken nose as readily as a broken jaw from the Stone Age, the steeple of a Gothic cathedral as easily as sideburns from forty years ago. Many years ago when I was leafing through Spengler’s book on the crisis in the West — a book that is now completely forgotten — Dr Wiener often came to mind. They were two of a piece. Later, when I began to think of German culture and read about its history, I’ve realized that that Metrics professor was a typical product. German culture is a frantic race through time in a quest for the resolution of the principle of contradiction and the problem of duality. In this race moments of specialization are linked to successive moments of humanism, like the beads of a rosary. Specialization precedes humanism, and the latter then redescends into specialization. Specialization usually coincides with periods of prosperity; it is, we might say, the way prosperity clogs up. Humanism appears in times of decadence, is a loosening of vital energies that are unsure and confused. This pendulum movement never stops in the culture and oscillates from one side to the other to a final conclusion. Dr. Wiener brilliantly represented the humanistic moment.