Josep Pla - Life Embitters

The good lady undoubtedly dominated the family. Sr Ramon’s life was locked in the manic vice of his business interests — not that he ever jealously defended the territory as exclusively his. If Matilde didn’t interfere, it wasn’t because her husband had barred her, she simply had no interest in that side of life. Matilde proposed and disposed in every other matter without right of appeal. And it was curious that they’d reached that situation — at least on the surface — without it upsetting Sr Ramon one iota. As a husband he did indeed seem rather pleased by the absolute authority wielded by his wife. I didn’t know them well enough to be able to say whether Ramon Fabregat’s stance was simply a case of taking the easy option or a case of resignation before a fateful fact of life. Perhaps it was a bit of both. The truth is that I never heard him try to voice the faintest objection or engage in the slightest criticism of his wife’s opinions or actions. She often made the silliest slips a child would have noticed. Don Ramon never said a word. Silence wasn’t his way of protesting, however. He almost always accompanied his silences with a facial expression or gesture that revealed his total support of her. As far as Don Ramon was concerned, Matilde was always right, everything she did and said was precisely what the occasion demanded. I imagine Matilde found her husband’s monotonous support rather trying. Particularly in the presence of others she must have thought his supine lack of character looked ridiculous, and that she could be blamed. Nonetheless, despite all her efforts, she never succeeded in getting him to pipe up, not even when she made a show of having a tiff with him. Don Ramon didn’t like controversy, and family ones even less so. He accepted marriage to the letter. He was one of those men — who are more common than you would think — who finds freedom to be futile — something that serves absolutely no purpose. Don Ramon indulged any instinctive longing for freedom he had in his business affairs and that probably exhausted his reserves. He didn’t need freedom for anything else.

Their son — Lluís — was a tubby boy who wore a pea jacket and short pants. He was very delicate. He had his father’s face but his mother’s rivers of pallid flesh, his eyes were narrow and swollen with a touch of the Tartar about them. He cut a rather strange figure: round like a little badger, sallow with patches of suntan, with a short neck, gawping mouth, and thin, curly hair. Nevertheless, he’d always received very good marks, was meek and obedient and had an infallible memory. He recited long chunks of poetry without making the tiniest slip.

Lluís did, however, possess one defect that several doctors had examined, though for the moment no clear diagnosis had emerged. He was a child who couldn’t bear to be angry, or upset, or subject to the slightest mishap. If natural precautions taken by the family to avoid that happening failed, he’d have terrible tantrums. It must be difficult to grasp what I am trying to describe, and that is an indication of how strange his malady was. In effect, whenever he was upset, he turned a greenish purple, as if his acids were seeping through his skin, and threw himself on the ground in a bizarre rage and if he’d been contradicted further, would have committed real violence. That meant his every whim had to be indulged: he had to be fed the juiciest chicken, you could say, and constantly supplied with high-quality comic books, sugared almonds, expensive toys, notebooks for sloping writing, and all manner of lovely little treats.

They told me how scared the maids were that he might throw a tantrum when they took him for a walk. The child seemed like a typical case of a spoilt brat brought up too close to his mother’s skirts. I wouldn’t deny there was a hint of that, particularly at the start. However, his condition was much more serious. Lluís was simply a sick child.

The afternoon when the Fabregats told me about this, our conversation drew to a dismal end. Nature is all pervasive: consideration of its monstrous sides produces deep depression. Of course, I did wonder what led these fine folk to reveal such things to a person they’ve only known for a few days and who, in the end, could be of no help. I decided the family must live in a constant state of repressed anguish as a result of their son’s condition. And that perhaps they went out of their heads when they decided so hastily to treat me as a confidant. At the last minute Sra Fabregat informed us that the pimple on the nape of her daughter’s neck had become poisoned and looked nasty. This news rounded off our depression.

Maria Teresa was almost seventeen and her face expressed that Romantic spirituality and vagueness that albuminaria — protein in the blood — sometimes gives youngish people. Yes, she was a very mild case of albuminaria. The insidious pimple and restless nights had in the end given her a divine air. She was in the grips of the first imprecise moments of female change, and was delightful. An almost imperceptible down covered her languid limbs. Gently undermined by an unconscious waywardness and involuntary over-eagerness, her graceful manner was quite charming. When she sat still and glanced at you in that vaguely purposeful way, her body adopted an antique pose that was fantastically elegant. She was tall, full, with a hesitant profile; her flesh was honeyed, tremulous, and a warm pinkish white that was firm and terse. She was auburn haired with heavy blue-gray eyes, delicate features, and lips that were often moist. They still dressed her like a young girl but her curves moved under her tight dress, like a trapped bird that wants to spread its wings. Imagining her knees was an unforgettable experience. I never tired of considering, with philosophic precision, the luscious beauty of young forms that were so eloquent and inspiring.

She was the ideal young lady, but possibly nothing besides. She was a young lady ripe for that moment, because each moment brings a specific kind of young lady. Her main trait was her absolute dearth of interest in anything. She lived a passive life of the purest indolence. She didn’t know how to do anything and never showed any inclinations or feelings of any depth. She possessed that element of envy, greed, vanity, and guile that a human being requires for their presence to be at all perceptible. However, the qualities and defects she might have had were present to such a mediocre, neutral degree, were so supine, that she found everything bland, and anything that wasn’t became a source of annoyance. She liked nothing, but passively, not actively. Her imagination and fantasy were non-existent, she was totally unable to express any emotion. She was sixteen but felt more like forty. Her taste — the only aspect of her personality that stood out at all — combined pretentiousness and reserve, embedded habits and feeble clichés: it was simply other people’s taste. She acted like a picky brat from a well-off family and, quick to scorn the pleasant things life brought her way, would sound off rudely. She was perhaps frustrated by her domineering mother or was the product of a particular kind of upbringing or perhaps didn’t know how to behave any differently. On the other hand, how pretty she was! Her purely passive life increased the charms of her splendid body. That afternoon, Sra Fabregat summoned me by phone. Don Ramon and their son had gone to Brussels to see the changing of the guard in front of the Royal Parliament. Matilde and her daughter were alone in their bedroom. I went there only to find them in a desolate state. The pimple was swelling and the girl was in pain and most distressed. She was lying on her bed: dressed, half laid low, half fretting. She was holding a handkerchief she kept clenching between her teeth and then wiping over her lips. The moment I arrived, her mother blurted out: “My dear!”