Josep Pla - Life Embitters

For the first few months Sra Souza helped her daughter run the boarding house. The truth is she had to teach her very little. The young woman turned out to be active, lively, indeed the perfect mistress of the house. The old lady returned to the provinces convinced the business couldn’t be in better hands. As she gradually turned drowsier and danker in the rainy provincial city in the north of the country, she felt secretly envious of her daughter’s strength and energy.

When I met her, Maria Souza was a pleasant, delightful woman. She was an extraordinarily fine brunette, with large ecstatic pale gray-blue eyes, moist lips, and pink luminous skin. She was tall and buxom. However, what most surprised me about that woman was the absolutely natural way she spoke and walked. Belonging to a country where so many women shout, scream, speak through their noses, continually act up, grumble, make absurd lip movements when they talk, huff and puff, who in the course of a conversation pass from languid mindlessness to hysterical clowning, a woman who behaves naturally is a real find and makes an astonishing impression. Maria Souza was one such woman. She was a woman many men dream of in these latitudes: pleasant but not saccharine, easy-going, ever good-tempered, never trite or affected and always rather distant — even in her most intimate moments.

She managed the boarding house. She saw to the accounts, gave the orders, was in charge. She did it well, succinctly, with great common sense. She did what she could for everyone without making a fuss. She always had an appropriate smile at the ready for her boarders. A lovely collection of smiles! We all became rather childish in her presence and frankly fell languishingly in love with her.

“This young lady could perfectly well raise her prices and not meet a single objection …” I told my friend Pacheco one day, in a lucid moment.

“If she did so, she’d be in her right!” declared Pacheco firmly, his knightly eyes gleaming tenderly.

Pacheco was the boarder who was most sensitive to the young woman’s presence. And that was only natural.

In any case, there was a strange atmosphere in that house, an atmosphere I’d rarely experienced. Boarding houses with a clientele from different countries are cold places. It’s self-evident — and, moreover, understandable. In these temporary households comprising people from such diverse backgrounds and unknown provenance, conversation never breaks through the routine masks people put on. In this house a special sort of coldness existed that was linked to the presence of Maria Souza. She permanently lived in that atmosphere. Yes. She was agreeable, pleasant, most affable, but at the same time was incredibly distant, distinctly remote from her physical presence, mentally and physically separate from her environment: one always felt in the presence of someone who was a complete stranger. She seemed to be a woman obsessed by her own inner life that was totally unknown and secret, at least as far as I was concerned. At times she seemed to be afraid something might happen at any moment, something she clearly dreaded. It was easy to see. You noted her moments of amnesia in the tiniest detail. It was very apparent in conversation. Srta Souza was present, but wasn’t present. Her face sometimes seemed to betray the effort she was being forced to make to shed an abiding obsession and return to the present. It was a huge, very painful effort.

One day Pacheco sidled stealthily over and said, half worried, half astonished, “Sr Souza was here this afternoon …”

“Sr Souza? Who might that be?”

“It’s her father, you know?”

“So what …?”

“His daughter refused to see him. It was all in vain. The wretched man twisted and turned, wept, wrung his hands, and said he was hungry. He was a pitiful sight …”

“What about the young lady?”

“She was most upset. I suspect we won’t be seeing her for a few days.”

In effect three days went by and the young lady didn’t put in an appearance. At dusk on the third day Sr Souza came back. I saw him climbing the garden steps. I looked at him hard. He was tall, stout, and weary, with a salt-and-pepper beard, and large, bulging, olive-colored eyes that were bloodshot and watery. As he started up the steps, he took his hat off and exposed a substantial, pallid baldpate. He struggled up the steps. A metabolism in decline. His manner of dress particularly struck me. He wore a jacket and pants that were too short all round — charitable goods. He wasn’t wearing a waistcoat. A big white shirt fell over his paunch, but it was off-white, a white that had aged. He wore a celluloid collar and tattered tie. His leather sandals were a faded yellow. He walked as if he was afraid of putting his feet on the ground, as if he had grains of sand under the soles of his feet. It is a well-known fact that gamblers have sensitive feet; even so, that man’s way of walking was strangely unnerving. When he reached the boarding house landing he put on a battered bowler that he tilted over one ear, leaving a sliver of baldpate exposed. The moment he disappeared, my thoughts drifted back to his face: the texture of his face was that of a rotting peach, mushy with dark blotches. A film of weariness gave his features a sardonic veneer.

He climbed up to his daughter’s private rooms on the second floor. He wasn’t there for very long: the time necessary to see that the door was locked. We soon saw him come down head bare, his bowler in his left hand and a handkerchief of a nondescript color in the other that he was using to wipe his face. He forced a smile as he walked through the door flashing green, yellowing teeth and with a furrow between his forehead and nose that was the legacy of twenty years unctuously sacrificed to roulette and happenstance. He attempted a cynical smile but it came out as the scowl of a man who is miserably poor.

He confronted the concierge on the ground floor.

“It must very sad being a concierge …” said Sr Souza, winking at him like a fool.

“Being a concierge must be very sad, but finding oneself in the situation of the father of the owner of this establishment must be even more so.”

The concierge yanked him by the arm to the road. When they reached it, Sr Souza looked wanly at the house he’d just left and walked off in the direction of Estoril, despondently, walking in that manner I found so distressing — as if he was frightened to put his feet on the ground …

The opening of the casino in Estoril attracted a good number of individuals living on the fringes of society. Sr Souza was one of them. He’d not lived in Lisbon for many years. His situation had marooned him in various provincial dives. Nevertheless, roulette retains an implacable, fascinating appeal for people driven by a passion for gambling.

The management of the enterprise took the necessary natural steps against this undesirable invasion. Entry to the gaming rooms was denied to most of these people. Sr Souza was one of the first to be denied entry. That annoyed him, of course, and he made every effort imaginable to get the ban revoked. But it never came to anything. You bumped into him idling in the vicinity of the casino looking downcast in defeat.

Sr Souza’s visits to the boarding house led to predictable, unpleasant outcomes. His daughter became more invisible by the day and whenever she did appear she seemed anxious despite her only too obvious efforts to hide the fact. The management of the household suffered and a hint of disorder entered its daily routines. Sr Pacheco was possibly the individual who showed most interest in developments. He even meddled. One of the first things he tried to do was to contact Sr Souza in the hope — I imagined — of finding some solution or other. You wouldn’t have expected Sr Pacheco to react differently, given his deep admiration for the daughter of that human shipwreck.