Josep Pla - Life Embitters

“Mommy!”

“Show the gentleman your pimple!”

The girl looked scared. I was astounded. However, I immediately saw that Donya Matilde was worried stiff. She whispered, “You never know, do you?”

And energetically to Maria Teresa, “Come, come! Show the gentleman your pimple …”

“But, mommy …”

“You know two pairs of eyes are better than one and that we’re a long way from home. I don’t want to be the only one held responsible.”

I thought her distress was a trifle forced. I tried to tell them, quite unsuccessfully, that Ostend was a city in Belgium, a country that was no savage, remote wilderness. I also informed her that I had no special knowledge of the subject and that I always thought it was best to be patient and let things run their course. In the end, I had to stand my ground.

“Senyora, what you’re asking of me is ridiculous. If you like, we can get a doctor. What’s the point in my looking at that pimple?”

But Sra Fabregat wasn’t used to being contradicted. She gave me an extremely withering look considering we’d only known each other a few days. It was probably years since anyone had rebuffed her. This was as obvious as the fact that, while the girl remained as frightened as ever, her mother had turned a bright red.

There was a moment of hesitation that Matilde abruptly ended. She blurted in my direction: “You keep in that armchair!”

Then she went over to her daughter and caressed her face.

“My dear, don’t you worry. We’re all from our beloved country …!”

Then she took her arm, eased her out of bed and walked her over to me. The girl moved slowly and meekly, keeping her hand over her pimple.

“This gentleman will take a look,” said Sra Fabregat, “and it’s not going to hurt at all …”

I felt delirious. Sra Fabregat, in fully imperious fashion, was acting stupidly once again. What sense did it all make? She carried out her decision to the letter. She placed the nape of her daughter’s neck right before my eyes, separated out her hair and out popped the humble, inoffensive little pimple. I noted that Maria Teresa had the loveliest, beautiful, firm, supple, shimmering neck.

“Well, what do you think?” asked Sra Fabregat a moment later.

“Senyora, what on earth do you expect me to say?”

“She seems to have a slight temperature. Do you think that’s important?”

“Senyora, I know nothing about such matters! Nothing whatsoever!”

However, I soon realized I was on the wrong track. My repeated, most reasonable protestations at my lack of knowledge only prompted an even more unpleasant, withering look. I reflected that she’d conclude that I was refusing to help my compatriots in foreign parts. “In foreign parts, just imagine, in foreign parts!” Sra Fabregat would tell her friends the minute she walked into her flat on the Carrer de Girona. I had no choice but to call on the usual clichés. In any case, it was true that my words had a visibly therapeutic, medical vagueness about them.

“If you want me to speak frankly,” I said solemnly, “this isn’t at all serious. However, we’d lose nothing if we took her to see a doctor.”

“So then … It is really nothing,” said Sra Fabregat rather edgily.

“I have nothing further to add,” I opined blankly.

“Put the thermometer in right! You heard what the gentleman said, it won’t amount to anything.”

The girl withdrew, as meek and passive as ever. A little shamefaced, perhaps.

The following morning, Maria Teresa observed when she woke up that the tiny pimple had burst and barely left a trace. Everyone was rather surprised, including Sra Fabregat, who wasn’t expecting such a swift outcome. In view of this fait accompli , she was rendered speechless. A drop of boric acid was applied to the negligible scar and it was all sorted. When I paid them my usual afternoon visit, the girl reacted shyly, and simpered. Matilde Fabregat seemed in a jolly mood. Sr Ramon and the boy had decided to stay an extra day in Brussels. They had surely been captivated by the changing of the guards.

With that, my holidays had come to an end and it was time to go back to work. We said goodbye. We promised to go on holiday together the following year and to send each other countless postcards.

“And if you ever come to Barcelona,” said Donya Matilde, “you know where … Girona, etc.”

We’ve not seen each other since and happenstance has yet to bring us together. In my heart of hearts, however, I feel that they must be all out there, enjoying the best of health and getting on with life.

Sr Fabregat, richer by the year, must have reread The Three Musketeers three, four — or five times — more. I don’t think his ideas will have changed one iota. Matilde will have put on weight, accrued the odd gray hair, but she won’t have shed her disturbing, domineering manner. Maria Teresa will have married extremely well, a marriage that won’t have turned out for the best, for reasons that everyone will interpret as they think fit. And the boy will be behaving like Sr Fabregat’s son, which, in fact, is exactly who he is.

I found these jottings among the papers belonging to Santaniol, my deceased friend, and I think they are of interest. Santaniol’s family decided to give him an education that would prepare him to join the diplomatic corps. Their aim was met, but my friend’s temperament suffered immensely as a result. We, his university friends, felt he was a ‘ lletraferit ,’ or a man wounded by letters. The word ‘ lletraferit ’ is one of the most distressing in the Catalan language. The idea that someone who likes literature is somehow wounded implies a stock of primitive barbarism that is at once popular and demented. It doesn’t mean that the people actually invented the word. The word was invented by the Cyclopean might of those in this country who have hindered the development of a properly civil, absolutely pagan culture. The people and families have joined forces to give the word its dramatically pejorative weight. And that’s how things were, and how they still are.

Santaniol filled lots of paper. He tried to describe everything he clapped his eyes on in the course of his short life, or at least to create lively vignettes. He injected more curiosity and passion into this activity than into his career as a bureaucrat. He died prematurely, when he was a consul in a city in central Europe. Here are the jottings I just mentioned:

Calais is a city through which an inordinate number of travelers have passed, never stopping more than the seconds required to comply with Customs. It is a city that isn’t like Dunkirk, or even Boulogne, where a traveler feels like staying longer than the time permitted by the departure of the next ferry — despite the somber stonework and gloom of those two northern French cities. Besides, nobody ever stops in Calais. Perhaps it’s because the ferry port is rather a long way from the town, perhaps because it looks so cold and nondescript from the train. Whatever the reason, though hundreds of thousands of people pass through Calais every year, it is most unusual for anyone to linger there: everybody bypasses the place.

The fact that I did become acquainted with the place is easily explained. I was dispatched to London when I was very young. Too young, perhaps, to adapt to the English way of life. I think it’s a mistake for us Latin folk to go to England before we have had a broad experience of life. Or rather: one should go to London as a youngster or adolescent, to study or become passionate about sport or, after one’s first phase of youth, when one has begun to shape a specific vision of life. I went there at the age of twenty-one, which is a critical, incoherent age that can be both painful and unstable. As a result, my first contact wasn’t at all fruitful, in fact I thought everything was inaccessible and off-putting. I thought the lodging houses were dismal, the food tasteless and the streets — apart from the ones in the East End — were icy. London — a haughty city — is an almighty giant determined to kill off all popular wit and transform everyone into respectable bourgeois. I was too young to appreciate the charms of people’s politeness and good manners: I felt that their good manners were their way of being stand-offish, a stiffness designed to avoid being disturbed. I thought that everything was too big compared to the dimensions I was used to. It isn’t that London overwhelmed or humiliated me, in the way I later experienced in New York, a city where human beings are indescribably derisory, insignificant little microbes. London didn’t humiliate me, London froze me. In any case, I don’t think these experiences do any harm, they have to be lived and lived to the full because they help one to become rational and know what one is. They are unpleasant experiences, nonetheless, that in the long term one can overcome. In this world, it is vital to come to terms with reality.