Josep Pla - Life Embitters

It wasn’t easy for him. One evening I bumped into them sitting at a table at the back of a small café in the fishermen’s district in Estoril. Pacheco beckoned to me and I went over. Sr Souza shook my hand without getting up from his chair. I gathered that the relationship between the two men had gone beyond polite niceties and they had embarked on a real heart-to-heart. It even seemed that Souza was in some way grateful to Pacheco and felt a degree of respect for him.

“Sr Pacheco, sir,” Souza said after I’d sat down at their table, “you ask me the strangest of questions. This gentleman will understand straightaway … Yes, of course, I too have often asked myself the same question. Why are there men and women who are so incredibly obsessed by a passion for gambling? Come to think of it, though, it’s rather a childish question. Gambling is obsessive precisely because it is a passion. What sense does it make to speak rationally about movements that are instinctive? None at all, in my opinion. In any case, I’d like to attempt to explain, even if only tentatively, this obsession for gambling. From the outside, looking at things on the surface, it seems that the root of this passion for gambling must be a desire to win money … There is, of course, something in that. Money never does any harm … However, that would only be the right explanation if gamblers acted as bankers and the bank was open. In that case, it would be an excellent business prospect. If they hadn’t banned me from entering this casino, I could have immediately shown that was the case. You’d have seen it straightaway … But the fact is that at a baccarat table, in any game with a bank, the gambler is face-to-face with the banker, and consequently, his prospects are practically non-existent … That’s where the problem starts.”

An empty cup of coffee and breadcrumbs lay in front of Sr Souza. Pacheco begged him to order something else. Souza reacted blankly. He was too preoccupied by his confession.

“I was saying,” he went on, “that the problem begins when we have the spectacle of a man who knows only too well that he is going to lose and yet there is no way he can extricate himself from the very mechanisms that will bring his ruin. This is the psychological mystery — if you’ll allow me to put it that way — behind the gambler, the enigma a gambler poses as a human type. Many have attempted to find an explanation. It has been said, for example, that the cause of the obsession, of the fascination the passion provokes, is located in vanity, in an uncontrollable desire for fame. I’ve heard it said that if gamblers wore masks over their faces and went completely incognito to lay their bets, they’d prefer to spend their time doing other things. The suggestion is that a gambler at a gaming table performs and thus satisfies a natural human tendency to be vain and frivolous. Such tendencies satisfy the human metabolism, prompt feelings of pleasure. In a gaming room, a gambler has an audience before which he affirms his own existence. ‘I also exist!’ he seems to say when he lays a bet, when he wins or loses. Now, I’m not implying that this kind of person doesn’t exist, but I think they are slightly out of fashion. This is the gambler one finds in romantic novels, the happy-go-lucky rake, the appealing, headstrong fool and love object of naïve young women. Bah! Real life is more complex. Please let’s be serious …”

When he reached this point in his monologue, Sr Souza ordered a coffee and seemed to loosen up. Then he continued: “Years ago, when I still lived in the provinces, I had terrible toothache one day. A confirmed gambler came over and said I looked very depressed. He asked me what I was taking for my toothache. I mentioned some sedative or other … He burst out laughing and said: ‘Why don’t you try something that’s infallible?’

“ ‘I beg your pardon, is there really something infallible?’

“ ‘Yes, sir: gambling. Have a go. Try it. Play … I assure you that you won’t feel any pain as long as you sit at that table. It is the only solution I know that’s infallible.’

“ ‘The truth is I’m a very bad gambler …’

“ ‘That doesn’t matter. I don’t mean you should play to win. I mean you should just play, foster the obsession: gamble to win or lose. I repeat: you’ll be quite astounded.’

“Despite that gentleman’s assurances and the increasing pain from that tooth, I couldn’t make up my mind. In fact, at the time I’d yet to start gambling, shall we say, systematically . However, I did notice something strange: the mere thought of the ridiculous figure I’d cut at the gaming table seemed to reduce the pain slightly … Now, years after that peculiar conversation took place, I can tell you one thing: I now believe that man was right. By exercising a passion for gambling one is relieved of the burden of moral and physical misery. When you begin to bet, memory disappears, and so does imagination. Every tension vanishes. That bet is pure present, an absolute fascination with the present. The only pity is that gambling is a medicine that does more damage than the original sickness …”

Sr Souza paused to sip his coffee. Then he hoarsely resumed his monologue.

“And now I will tell Sr Pacheco and you, sir,” he adding turning to me, “why I was and still am a gambler. I think you’ll soon understand. Like other gamblers, I’m suffering from hypothesis mania. I’ll be brief because it’s late and we’d never get to the end of this. I’m obsessed by what might happen to me at any moment. It is literally a horrible feeling. When I walk down the street and see a lame man, a blind man, a beggar, when a funeral crosses my path, when I read that this person or that has committed suicide or is in the middle of great crisis, when a disaster or catastrophe takes place, I tell myself, almost routinely: That could so easily have been you, you know. There are equal possibilities for or against it happening to you. Consequently, there is no absolute reason why you aren’t lame, blind, crippled, or a corpse, like the corpse in the hearse you just watched go by . In other words, I am permanently obsessed by the idea that my physical, moral, spiritual, economic, and social state hangs by a thread, and that my existence teeters on a tightrope that is completely insecure. Now you will say: ‘Sr Souza, sir, you are a man without a scrap of deep biological confidence in yourself.’ I couldn’t say … I understand nothing. I don’t know what lies behind these obsessions. I only know that they are intolerable and horrible. That’s why I’ve gambled and would gamble, if I could, Sr Pacheco: to rid myself of these obsessions that continually depress me, to escape from their suffocating effect.”

After a brief pause, Sr Souza laughed stupidly — his lip sagged and his eyes bulged — and he got wearily up from his chair.

“That’s enough for now …” he said, “these personal things make hardly any sense …”

We said our goodbyes in the café doorway. Sr Souza walked in the direction of the casino. Pacheco and I walked to the main road and headed towards the boarding house. A bright moon splashed golden light over the pine trees. Lit up by the pale glare, the river seemed to flow mysteriously by, which I found rather disturbing after the scenes in the café. I would have preferred total darkness.

It seemed that that was the end of that, but a few days later we witnessed scenes that revealed how the efforts being made by Sr Pacheco hadn’t borne the slightest fruit. Indeed, two or three days later, Sr Souza appeared outside the boarding house’s front gate accompanied on this occasion by a man and a woman. Souza was carrying a large cardboard suitcase.

These two crossed the garden unchallenged — the concierge must have been away — climbed the steps, opened the main door, and walked down the passage. The first person they met was Pacheco, who was about to go out.