Josep Pla - Life Embitters

The lady seated opposite did the honors. She owned the apartment and thus the room which was sublet to Tintorer that Formiguera was occupying for the moment. She spoke a very basic German intercalated with lots of Italian. The room was quite untidy due to the peculiar situation of the two people now lodging there. Formiguera’s luggage filled part of the floor space — poor quality suitcases that were far too bursting-at-the-seams to encourage ideas of order and repose. The suitcases had yet to be opened and their very visible presence was strangely unnerving.

When the philologist finished his warmhearted monologue, he took my arm and led me to the open window on one side of the room. As the room’s angle was slightly askew, the window looked to be suspended there. I could see leafless trees in front of a grandiose, rather dreary building. According to the philologist it was the rear of a mansion that was the Italian Embassy.

“I told you,” he added, “that I like to live centrally … Don’t think it was easy to find. The lady, I mean the owner of the house, works at the Italian Embassy.”

“Is she a typist?”

“Much more important than that. She scrubs the floors and helps the cook.”

Tintorer then looked for a chair, and, as they were all occupied, he sat on one of the suitcases. After sidling around those present and greeting them cheerfully, Serafí leapt to the foot of the bed, coiled his tail over his belly, and made himself as round as a cream sponge cake.

We sat there in silence. I looked from the dancer to the lady to the philologist and back. Before falling asleep the dog gave us a supercilious once over. I noticed Formiguera glance out of the corner of his eye at the window-panes: icy water trickled endlessly down the glass. When he showed the whites of his eyes, he looked frightened and dreadfully weak. The dull sound of the rain falling on the mud between the trees reached the room. Occasionally Formiguera strained to stop his teeth chattering. His lips turned purple. Nobody seemed to have anything to say. The silence was depressing. It was like traveling in a small, shabby taxi which had sprung a leak. We couldn’t think what to do. Tintorer reacted by filling his pipe, putting it in his mouth, and lighting a match. The second he struck the match the lady jumped up, looked daggers and bawled:“Don’t smoke! You know only too well that smoking is banned!”

The philologist looked at Formiguera who shrugged his shoulders. Then he looked at me. I sat there like a stuffed owl, my face unflinching. When the lady placed her butt back on her chair, she drawled, “ Voglio tanto bene al signor Darsonval! ”

Darsonval was the nom de guerre of the dancer from Granollers, the one he used in the cabarets on Kurfürstendamm and Leipzigstrasse. It was a petulant, rather Gascon name he’d adopted in Montmartre that had shown itself to be useful in a number of different German localities.

The lady, introduced to me as Ada Piccioni, was a tall, mature middle-aged woman with luminous black hair, a dumpy, downbeat face, dark, smoldering eyes, moist lips, warm yellow skin and plump flesh. Her legs were rather the worse for wear, but she was still in good shape in terms of the taste of the day. She had a fluent, engaging way of talking, but — as shown by the scene over the pipe — her temper could get the better of her and then strident fury drove her words.

I was shocked by Tintorer’s obedient, submissive reaction to Sra Piccioni’s silly nonsense. In the course of my life I’ve had the opportunity to meet lots of subtenants, almost all the older ones I’ve known have shocked me with the canine docility they displayed towards their landladies. The philologist was still relatively young — I don’t think he could be over thirty-three — and that led me to grant him a certain independence of spirit as a subtenant. However, when I saw how speedily he extinguished his match and stuffed his pipe in his pocket, I realized he was a typical subtenant. I’ll go further: the ban Sra Piccioni had formulated so crudely would have infuriated most people, but he merely winced and smirked complaisantly in her direction, as if trying to highlight how quickly he had fallen into line.

The philologist was rather small and short in the leg, with an inchoate, egg-shaped paunch and a tiny, vigorous head. His face was almost hairless and his baldpate incipient but inevitable, his yellowish skin veering from mauve to the color of brown stew. His beady eyes sparkled, and his pencil mustache sat above thin lips and a dearth of teeth while his ears flapped like two large vine-leaves. He dressed negligently, in shabby garments that contrasted with the ironed collar he always wore and the tie with a pearl pin. His shoes were big and heavy. His was that mixture of the lurid and eccentric that expressed the general indifference towards dress that set in after the First World War.

Although Tintorer was a man very marked by the studies he’d devoted years to — philological studies in which, as he himself admitted, he’d introduced not a single original idea, but several interesting critical perspectives — he had more or less picturesque, eccentric value. In the first place, he was clever at lots of things: he boasted that he was an excellent photographer despite the poor quality camera he owned. He was able to repair the electrical breakdowns that occasionally took place. He’d been a subtenant for long enough to know how to patch clothing and darn well — the invisible darn. He was generous and well-disposed, with a special talent for doing favors for the person under whose roof he was lodged. It was obvious that Sra Piccioni could get him to do everything she suggested, and that was why his friends from the café had often seen him with a shopping bag, going from the baker’s to the butcher’s or buying canned fish, potatoes, or a bottle of wine. He was reputed to be a good cook, but never of the dishes of the countries where he had lived in turn. His culinary skills were limited to offerings from our country, but, as cuisine isn’t for export and it’s practically impossible to cook good paella in Berlin, whenever he tried to practice them abroad everyone departed waving their hands in the air, feeling deeply skeptical. He was also fond of commonplaces, catchphrases gifted with the power to end an observation or close down a conversation lock, stock, and barrel. The ones he preferred were: it’s one big show; don’t fiddle while Rome burns; once bitten twice shy; less haste, more speed; in for a penny, in for a pound. That meant that for almost instinctive reasons, in every exchange characterized by the philologist’s presence he inevitably had the last word. On first impression, his peculiar strategy seemed effective, suggesting as it did a depth of insight on the part of the person employing the commonplace. But when people saw through bitter experience that it was simply a reflex action, the philologist’s ready-made clichés simply exasperated.

The delight that contrasts always bring meant that the philologist’s phrase ‘Don’t fiddle while Rome burns’ is always linked in my imagination to the remark Sra Piccioni came out with in relation to Formiguera, or Darsonval, if you prefer. If Tintorer knows Italian — I told myself — he should possibly think about that unexpectedly tender ‘ voglio tanto bene …’ she uttered. The possibility always exists (I thought) that Ada Piccioni harbors a soft spot for the infirm, even if she barely knows them, as is the case here. One sees all kinds of behavior under the sun and some (even though it’s one big show) are particularly unpleasant. What did the good lady really mean by that obsequious comment? Could it perhaps mean that she’ll throw out the philologist and replace him with Formiguera, alias Darsonval? I thought it was such an amusing prospect, especially considering my presence there, that if I didn’t burst out laughing, it was only because I didn’t want to risk having to launch into lengthy explanations.