Josep Pla - Life Embitters

Unfortunately I have always been extremely short-sighted, and my dismally myopic vision has never allowed me a clear view of what others contemplated with an enthusiasm they constrained and hid. Additionally, one had to pay over the odds for the bedroom’s prime location, and that led me, for various reasons, to ask for a more out-of-the-way room. To meet my request, they gave me one with no views whatsoever, situated in another wing of the hotel. Thanks to this switch, however, I became acquainted with a family from our country, the Fabregat family, about which the least I can say, now that I have accumulated a number of experiences, is that they were a most typical and representative Catalan family.

Our first contact was the day we went up in the lift together. I was reading a gossipy letter from a friend who was full of promise, the author of a book with a markedly art-for-art’s-sake flavor, entitled The Roast Almond Lesson and Other Prose Pieces . While I read his engaging news, slowly, I gripped the envelope and Sra Fabregat obligingly read on the sly the blurred details of the post mark. The word Barcelona must have made an immediate, unexpected impact, because she suddenly interrupted her husband who was telling her, if I’m not mistaken, about a lady by the name of Antonieta, planted herself in front of me, and with a pretentious flourish of her head and instant blushes she said: “So, senyor, you too are Catalan?”

“Yes, senyora …”

“How nice! Who’d have thought it! Allow me to introduce you to …”

Initially I was rather taken aback, but I then decided the scene was the expression of natural outpourings that were pleasing up to a point. Wherever we go, as people have noted, we are the most open-minded and astonishingly spontaneous of folk. We almost always believe that we have a pressing need to inform others about the trivial ins and outs of our lives — which we inevitably believe to be of paramount importance — never forgetting what goes by the name of ideas, ideas that usually voice our most elemental, highly personal preferences. This often means that, however amenable we try to be, we create a state of reticence and weariness in others.

By the time we had reached the door to the room — or rooms — of the Fabregats, they had already brought me up-to-date with myriad aspects of their lives: they’d told me that they possessed substantial wealth and enjoyed a fine reputation with their vast range of connections, both with friends and acquaintances. At the same time they peppered me with a series of futile, indiscreet questions that I answered as vaguely as I could. When we were saying our goodbyes, the wife informed me, as she shook my hand, that their young daughter was quite poorly because a pimple had appeared on the nape of her neck that had kept her awake all night. I took advantage of that revelation to declare reasonably emphatically that I was there to help in any way I could and that they had in me a true friend who was entirely at their disposition. I also offered a range of advice in terms of hydrotherapy and heliotherapy — sciences that were in their formative stage — and even ventured that the best thing for pimples on the nape of the neck remained a generous application of tincture of iodine. They seemed wholeheartedly grateful for these learned gems and we went our separate ways, after declaring it would be a real pleasure to meet up that afternoon.

After lunch we spoke of vital issues as we strolled along streets and through squares, listening, with due reverence, to a selection of pieces from “Lilies under the Snow,” one of the masterpieces from the Belgian repertoire the town band was playing in the park. We then drank fresh lemonade in the casino.

The family comprised four people: Sr Ramon Fabregat and his wife, a sixteen-year old girl, Maria Teresa, and a thirteen-year-old boy, Lluís. They were the salt of the earth, and, as I hardly need to say, the excellent impression they had made in the morning was confirmed in the afternoon. Unfortunately, however, their initial inclinations strengthened as our relationship shed the stiffness that comes with novelty. They were rather too open and forced you to enter their innermost life willy-nilly. Naturally, I thought, it doesn’t really matter because the signs are that they’ll ditch you the day after tomorrow as easily as they’d previously welcomed you inside. They told me lots, all connected to their family, the foibles of their grandparents, conflicts over money and maladies on the home front. They were two thousand kilometers from their country and acted as if they had never left. They inhabited a bubble that was completely impermeable to everything around them.

Aunt Antonieta, a distant aunt of Sra Fabregat, was one of the people who most cropped up in conversation. They described her as an extremely eccentric lady with lots of manias, and spoke of her warmly or extremely tight-lipped, depending on their mood. If I understood correctly, Aunt Antonieta was an aged — seventy-five-year-old? — spinster who lived in Sant Gervasi devoted to her religion and regular coffee mornings. Despite her advanced years, while the danger existed that the good lady might embrace the state of matrimony, the Fabregats lived on a knife-edge. Sra Fabregat was the one who waxed most pessimistic in relation to that possibility. “Who doesn’t do it as a chick does it as an old hen,” she had maintained for twenty years. When people pointed out that this was a saying that could apply to every potential act of human folly, rather than solely to changes in status, she stuck to her guns.

As far as she was concerned, either outcome would be equally catastrophic. In any event Aunt Antonieta hadn’t married, so the Fabregats’ fears eventually evaporated. Nevertheless, as the old lady aged, they were beset by a different, much greater kind of worry judging by the obsessive way it informed their panic-stricken conversations. They didn’t know for sure whether she had or hadn’t drawn up her last will and testament, and, if she had, to whom she’d bequeathed her considerable fortune. They had subjected the problem to a process of elimination, but had finally hit against an unknown factor they could not eliminate: the Curia. The problem of not knowing whether the Curia or Sra Fabregat (as the closest niece) would inherit kept them in a permanent state of deep anxiety.

During our lengthy promenade around Ostend I managed to extract from the family this minute drop of illumination, which wasn’t at all easy, because the nub of the matter was cloaked by exclamations the family kept making about how hallowed they thought respect for the freedom to write one’s own will was. It was right at the end of the stroll, after a statement of that nature made by Donya Matilde Fabregat and accompanied by peremptory, emphatic gestures that the good lady told me that the pimple on the nape of their daughter’s neck had turned yellowish but seemed stable. I then had the pleasure of equitably rehearsing my offers of help to the best of my ability and they were equally pleased to give their thanks and in turn offer me their own services quite unreservedly. The conversation ended, as usual, in a jolly round of mutual backslapping, in the course of which every face beamed with the greatest self-satisfaction.

After a few days of meeting and conversing, the family bloomed like a spring rose and I felt as if I had known them forever. They were intending to spend a month in Ostend. It was their first visit. They had spent previous summers in Caldes. An unpleasant incident had brought about this change. As a result of his renown, Sr Fabregat was years ago appointed honorary president of The Maize, an amateur choral society that was founded in Caldes to combat tedium in the locality. Everything in the group went as smoothly as silk until the day when a Sr Canadell ran off with their savings and a goodly amount of the furniture from the performance hall. Sr Fabregat reacted manfully to this extraordinary act and said in private conversation that he’d be happy to make up the losses. His interlocutor, a fanatical member of the choir, spread the word around town. Don Ramon was held to his word and had to pay out, under protest, to cover the damage wrought by the secretary. He was incensed, came to hate the area, and decided to shift his family to more reasonable, pleasant climes. Years ago — a very few years ago — such a decision would have been unthinkable, but there had been a war, people had made lots of money, and the situation had greatly improved.