Josep Pla - Life Embitters

Our landlady, however, was not convinced. I had to emphasize that the pressure was really painful for anyone who wasn’t a complete Valencian. But she was in a state of bliss. The presence of so many artists in her house brought her nothing but joy. As far as she was concerned, it was a matter of sensibility, of whether you had any art in your soul. In that light it was a favorable environment. Favorable and fascinating. It was entirely natural that people devoid of sensibility, and dead to art, should feel rather frayed. That was so natural …! We might as well have whistled till the cows came home … So a dividing line was drawn up: on the one hand, dull vulgarity and on the other, the divine flame of art.

When our committee’s visit took this variously unpleasant turn, it was quite impossible to suggest anything in terms of a reduction in helpings of food. If anyone had put forward the ideas, it would have lead to an unpredictable scene with no doubt disastrous consequences. Thus, the musical carnival continued; for days it was impossible to stay in the house: we roamed the streets, went in and out of cafés, like so many souls in limbo.

The giant was a genuine giant: he was very tall and, what’s more, very young, which augured well for future growth. He was a fair-haired lad with bluish eyes that were slightly sunken beneath bushy eyebrows; he seemed at once shy and good-natured. Apparently the idea of a shy giant sounds strange; literature has accustomed us to prickly, powerful giants, able to wreak huge damage at any time. But he wasn’t like that and I was soon convinced of this by my dealings with him.

In any case, he was the best advertising stunt that arty crew possessed. It was his task — apart from beating the big drum in the orchestra — to arrive in towns twenty-four hours before the canary-yellow bus and walk along the streets, hands in his pockets, smoking a cigarette. He’d always been averse to disguises and overkill. He was discreet. He only had to put in an appearance and children flocked around him, people peered out of doors and windows, and his figure became the center of conversation in taverns and cafés and a scrumptious queue lined up at the box office.

“It’s the giant! The giant!” people shouted. The management providentially profited from the curiosity and gawping that individual prompted merely by the fact of his existence.

The first night that gang invaded the lodging house, I chanced to arrive back in the early hours and my feet bumped into a strange object in the ill-lit passage. I first imagined it must be an instrument case they’d not been able to slot into a nearby bedroom. It turned out to be the giant who was sleeping on a couple of mattresses lying in the passageway. I dreaded a violent outburst, because people don’t like being woken up at night even if it’s only by mistake. When I saw that human being lift half his body off the ground and come up to my chest, my blood ran cold.

“I’m really sorry, Mr Giant …” I said as fawningly as I could, hoping to appear as conciliatory as possible.

“El meu nom és Paquito …” answered the giant, rubbing his eyes and tugging the hair around the nape of his neck. He spoke Valencian with a blank, quivering voice, and didn’t seem at all angry.

“Won’t you suffer from draughts in the passageway?” I asked feeling more relaxed.

“I’m used to it. Beds don’t exist for people who are unfortunate to be so lengthy. We don’t fit in normal beds and have to sleep in the largest flat spaces we can find, usually, in dining rooms or in some passageway or other …”

“So, from what I gather, your giant proportions aren’t at all common?”

“Those of us who are thus afflicted shouldn’t budge from home, and that’s all there is to it …” said the young man, reassuming his horizontal position, covering himself with his clothes, with a weary, skeptical gesture.

I thought he seemed overwhelmed and saddened by his giant stature. I pictured him going from town to town, completely oblivious, his bluish eyes focusing on whatever, obsessively wondering why he had turned out so much taller than other people. And always trailing a band of children and bystanders through squares and streets.

One day we chatted for a while. Although he was so young, I spoke to him formally, because it seemed the most appropriate register.

“Well, sir, what is being a giant like yourself all about?”

“It’s simply Nature’s error. One has to carry a useless, spare yard around.”

“But maybe it’s necessary …”

“I don’t think so. It’s totally unnecessary.”

I thought of that useless bathroom. A useless bathroom. A yard of useless human bones. Those absolutely useless, frightful bulls’ heads hanging in the dining room and the passageways.

“Do you have any family?”

“Vaguely. Families don’t like unusual sizes. They want things to be normal. Families reject aberrations and anything that’s too picturesque.”

“Did you know your parents?”

“Hardly. They were poor. When they saw me growing so unusually they took fright and gave me over to the care of an old aunt who was more hardened to the mysteries of nature.”

“Have you studied at school?”

“What do you think? My presence anywhere always aroused people’s curiosity, so the outcome was always the same: I was a distraction to my fellow pupils. So there was only one solution: to get out. People can’t cope with giants, don’t you know?”

“Do your unusual proportions lead you to have parallel, alternative criteria, to see things differently to others?”

“I don’t think so. My ideas about blondes or brunettes are more or less the same as anyone else’s. The impresario pays us the same money as everyone else.”

“When you see a fly or a mosquito, does it seem bigger or smaller than to us normal-sized folk?”

“I shouldn’t think so …”

“Would a world populated by people like you, sir, be different from the world as we know it?”

“Obviously, things would be bigger. Houses, towns, beds would be bigger. Tears too. I don’t know what would happen to thought processes …”

“Don’t worry. Human thought is so trivial, so petty, so surface-scratching that even if it grew a little bigger it would still be almost imperceptible.”

“That’s not up to me …”

“And is it profitable to be a giant? Does it bring in the pennies?”

“You can see for yourself. Enough to go around beating the big drum and sleeping in passageways.”

Three or four days later I popped into the kitchen and came face to face with a dwarf sitting on the landlady’s lap and looking very much at home. I imagined they must be related but it turned out that they weren’t and had never seen each other before the troupe arrived. The reasons behind that scenario weren’t at all out of the ordinary. Everybody found the dwarf so amusing, so hilarious, that our landlady liked daily to hold him on her lap, and show how warmly she felt towards him.

He wasn’t a fledgling dwarf and was reputed to be a nasty piece of work. Like all his peers, he was justifiably suspicious and evil-minded, and was also always on the defensive in case someone wanted to do him down. His face was sallow and smooth-skinned, his nose rather flattened and he sported a small handlebar mustache. He looked the part of a man who has experienced more than one run-in and is always anticipating the next: hard, glassy features unlikely ever to soften. His hair was always beautifully combed, sleek and dyed a terrifying jet-black, and he was a dapper dresser: patent leather shoes, a green hat, and a miniature horseshoe tiepin. But it was his skin color that most struck you: it was a bilious saffron yellow.