Josep Pla - Life Embitters

Sr Riera hailed from Castelló de la Plana, where he had once run a successful tobacconist’s shop. In the meantime, he’d won a prize in the lottery, and that coincided with the death of the wife he so adored (his very word). Sr Riera’s wife hadn’t borne him any children but she did own orange groves that were highly productive. As he was forty-eight and alone in that crossfire of misfortune and consolation, he decided to sell up and come to live in Barcelona. He loved the theater and assumed he would find plenty of scope there to satisfy his rabid curiosity.

Riera was a tall, bony, and rather round-shouldered man, with fair to white hair, thick eyebrows, a big, fleshy, red mouth, and somber, deep-set eyes. His prominent forehead created, to the right and left of his parietal bones, snow-white, receding hairlines. He was a forthright fellow, inclined to be sententious, and this seemed linked to his appearance by a broad black sash he wore over his belly — to avoid cold draughts getting to his kidneys, he would say — and a cap the size of a cloud, a smart, wily gypsy’s hat.

From the outside at least, Riera seemed to live untouched by human passions and his only known interest was the pursuit of the country’s theatrical fashions from the gods. I was curious to know why my fellow lodgers had dubbed him the Neurotic, as this name contrasted starkly with the evidence: Riera as an individual gave no grounds for such psychological speculation. I found the name positively strange because one day I spotted him by a fruit stall in the Plaça del Bonsuccés eating a whole huge pink watermelon with great relish. In my psychological researches I have never come across a neurotic keen on eating watermelons whole … Apparently, however, one day in the lodging house Don Natali Verdaguer, seated at the dining table — in the absence of Sr Riera — looked into Sra Paradís’s eyes and made this pronouncement: “Sr Riera?” he queried. “Sr Riera is a neurotic, there is no doubt about that … you just wait and see!”

And from then on everyone called Sr Riera the Neurotic. One assumed that the way Don Natali looked at Sra Paradís when he uttered that judgment indicated he knew “something or other” and wasn’t speaking simply because he liked the sound of his own voice.

The rain finally eased off and I went home.

Supper on that twenty-fifth of April was a supper like so many one has had to ingest. We were served Maggi broth, a round coil of hake and a derisory steak and chips. Followed by a banana or orange — a choice. Sr Ferrer seemed extremely downcast during the whole of supper and hardly said a word. He ate very little, unenthusiastically.

“Sr Ferrer,” I asked, “what’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?”

“I find these heavy downpours depressing, do you know?” he wheezed, and visibly wilted.

One of the more musical Swiss citizens in the boarding house, Oswald Stein — a tall, robust, blond lad, with enormous feet, worthy of an Alpine shepherd — caught typhoid and died two weeks after the infection was diagnosed.

“This is a terrible black mark for the house,” Sra Paradís told her lodgers, “a huge disaster … We didn’t have time to do a thing, not even to take him to a hospital or clinic; in fact, we didn’t have the slightest inkling … We turned a blind eye, to tell the truth, and now the headaches will all land on my plate! Boarding houses are places to live, not to die!”

We lodgers looked at her as if to say: “Senyora, what on earth could we do?”

The very second the doctor walked out of the door, after he’d signed the death certificate, a small, fair, nervy young man walked in; bumptious and bespectacled, he was dressed like a commercial traveler and looked the meticulous sort. He was a funeral parlor employee and carried a large catalogue under his arm. As he walked in, he glanced round the house, no doubt assessing in advance the establishment’s economic potential.

Sra Paradís and the deceased’s Swiss friends spoke to the funeral parlor employee in the dining room. Sr Verdaguer was present during the visit, hovering in the doorway, wrapped in his purple dressing-gown and wearing his checkered slippers. A deep silence had descended over the boarding house.

“Are these gentlemen family?” the employee asked Sra Paradís, pointing at the Swiss men.

“No, sir. They are friends. The deceased had no family. He was a foreigner.”

“Very good! Here is what my firm can modestly offer you in terms of a funeral,” stated the employee, placing the open catalogue on the table.

And he began to turn over pages illustrated with a large array of photos.

Pride of place in the first pages was given to the large, first-class, extra special de luxe mortuary carriage — known as the stove hearse — with a large bell jar surrounding the casket, a monumental cart with Solomonic columns that supported the canopy and swayed in the air, complete with the symbolic appendages necessary to accompany such artifact: horses shrouded in black cloth down to their hoofs, coachmen, flunkeys, and footmen. It was grandiose, solemn, splendid; it seemed the genuine item, with the horses’ plumes, the jet-black metal adornments encrusted with tinny gilt, the coachman wearing a wig tied with a bow on the nape of his neck and a three-cornered hat, like an Imperial maréschal . The long team of horses occupied a double spread and seemed worthy of Versailles.

“It may not be ne-cess-ary to take such ex-cess-ive trou-ble …” said Pickel, a friend of Stein’s, his Germanic drawl emphasizing each syllable.

And he gestured to the parlor’s rep to quickly turn the pages, before adding: “That would be so expensive, we’d be sad for the rest of our lives.”

Sra Paradís was of the opinion that this shaft of Swiss wit was in flagrant bad taste. She glanced at the man from the funeral parlor as if to say: “Ignore them, they’re only foreigners …”

“I should point out,” said the parlor’s rep as he turned the pages in his meticulous manner, “I should point out that the number of priests present at the funeral depends on the class of hearse that you select …”

“I am very grateful to you, sir …” responded Pickel, nodding deferentially.

As the pages turned, one observed a gradual decrease in funeral pomp and circumstance: the hearses diminished in style and status, reduced in size, the columns shrank, and the horses even appeared smaller and scabbier. The group was still undecided. Sra Paradís suddenly asked Pickel: “Why don’t we consult the family in Switzerland?”

“Senyora,” replied Pickel, bowing his head again, with the hint of a smile, “I do not think Stein had any family.”

After various silent, anguished lulls they agreed the funeral should be a good fourth grade.

“Absolutely fine! That’s settled then …!” said the rep shutting the catalogue with a thud. “That’s all fixed then … You should know that a decent fourth grade funeral is like a humble third. It’s the most common, our standard job. You’ll be pleased with …”

Don Natali, who seemed more dead than alive as he witnessed that scene — at the time he often said that any reference to death gave him the shivers — accompanied the funeral parlor employee to the door. Two or three lodgers stood silently in the small, dingy hallway that was almost entirely occupied by a voluminous umbrella stand: they seemed to be expecting some news. Before he left, the employee surveyed the scene one last time and said, with a self-congratulatory nod of the head: “Just what I’d thought … it was clear from the start …”

Don Natali shut the door carefully, on tip-toe, making no noise at all. Sr Riera then came over to me — one of those apparently expecting some news — and whispered mysteriously in my ear: “What can that gentleman have meant when he said: ‘Just what I’d thought …’?”