Josep Pla - Life Embitters

That trio of human beings represented for me the quintessence of boarding house life, of the tragic lives in the places where I have spent so much of my life. I was very young at the time and very impressionable in terms of everything around me. The presence of those three men, however, made me anticipate a possible path of my own similar to those crocks. I didn’t really know why but the thought horrified me. They were like survivors from a shipwreck. The docile way they looked at Donya Emília was almost revolting. Their weary, dog-eyed looks, at once vile and fawning, were perhaps simply an expression of filial tenderness. They smiled inanely when she ran them down. They would have performed any favor for her. They’d have carried her on the palms of their hands. When she finally left the table, making a rather grotesque display of her contempt, their oily, nodding glances pursued her. They were now alone and taciturn: the silence put years on them, quietude overwhelmed them. A canary trilled, plates clattered in the yard, knife-grinders, barrel organs, and pianos made a racket. Captivated by the spectacle of napkins covered in scraps of food, heads bowed, eyes down, now holding their folded napkins, it was as if they dared not leave the table. Now and then one of them cleaned a gap between his teeth, pursing his lips, and sighing deeply. The others stared half reproachfully, half inquisitively: one didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Then, all three simultaneously manipulated their own toothpick in the meticulous, systematic fashion that is so characteristic of boarding houses. Toothpicks in boarding houses are a badge of freedom. In the end, Veciana plucked up the courage to get up. His colleagues followed suit and each shut himself up in his own bedroom.

After lunch, profound calm and dank fresh air filled the boarding house. It was time for the judge’s supposed visit. Flies buzzed near the ceiling, and a strip of sun filtered through the shutter and came to rest on the romantic balcony scene. Distinctly dispirited by the visit, the maid left the dishes half washed and moved to the dining room, where she rocked back and forth, half asleep, arms dangling, mouth gaping, in the rocking chair where Donya Emília usually sat. Stretched out beneath the shutter, the cat acted as if it were dead. Notes from a piano hung in the air. Barcelona hummed drowsily, under a glaring, African light. Things in the house imperceptibly secreted the greasy, animal juices with which they were impregnated. The flies, yet again, now flew drunkenly in and out of the dining room. All of sudden, in that silent fug, the sound of someone trying to turn a bedroom door handle.

Sr Pastells appeared in the shadowy passage, glanced mysteriously around, tiptoed towards the coat rack, used two fingers to extract his walking stick, silently opened the door and disappeared down the stairs like a wraith. Later, the tall figure of Sr Niubó walked down the passage in his slippers, bleary-eyed, feeling his way along the wall, an unlit cigar hanging on his lip, and a newspaper tucked in the pocket of his long, light-colored alpaca jacket. A minute afterwards a loud flush from the lavatory sent tremors through the body of the maid, dozing in the rocking chair, her feet dangling above the floor. At half past four, the judge departed. The maid said that Donya Emília accompanied him to the front door, whispered something cheerful in his ear, perhaps an “I’ll expect you tomorrow!” and the man of the law went downstairs with the gruff, frowning, self-important air those wherefore folk favored.

Shortly, at around ten past five, Veciana the debt collector arrived, after a day on the hoof, breathless, stooping, clutching his empty, sweaty briefcase. He hung this item behind the door and went into his bedroom, his face creased, his teeth gritted, and his hands on his hips. The first cool breeze also wafted in, the glaring light seemed to turn to gold, the sun slid off the romantic balcony, the cat prowled under the table, the maid put the haricots on to boil, and Donya Emília made a sudden appearance in the dining room, seated on her rocking chair, reading El Noticiero Universal .

The calm must have lasted three or four weeks until the rumor began to circulate around the boarding house that Srta Angelina wasn’t at all well, that something shocking had happened, that it was an emergency situation. Srta Angelina was the only daughter of landlady Donya Emília. The maid spread the news to the four winds, after swearing she’d keep it secret, gesticulating wildly to prove her lips were forever sealed. Who had seduced her? Initial comments focused on that. Angelina was twenty-four or — five, a tall, thin, undernourished young woman with nothing to say for herself, who seemed romantic but might have been slightly cross-eyed. She studied the pianoforte and had apparently made excellent progress. She interacted little with the boarders, ate separately, and went in and out with never so much as a “Good day.” Nevertheless, her presence was almost intolerable: her enervating musical exercises were endless. I was only aware of the relationship she had with Ramon Potelles, a pharmacy student from Lleida, who played the violin like an angel, or so they said. Potelles was pointed up as almost the only candidate for authorship of the disaster. He was the only boarder invited to hobnob with the family, as one might put it. People recalled how once during the university year Donya Emília organized a fiesta that was pompously dubbed “a surprise party” because it took place around carnival time. In fact, it was an afternoon snack and those present — barely a dozen all told — were dressed in normal, everyday wear. In the course of that humble gathering, Angelina played various fragments of choice classical pieces for piano and violin, accompanied by Potelles. The concierge’s daughter recited a monologue that was felt to be rather near the bone. Two or three of Angelina’s colleagues added their grain of sand and played lugubrious pieces by Granados and Albéniz. The Supreme Court judge, who came to the party as a friend of the family, wanted everyone to have a memento of the occasion and, after muttering a few words, he gave each person a little work of art. The maid quipped that he’d hardly bankrupted himself. The lad from Lleida received a faded blue print in a gilt mahogany frame.

Apart from Potelles, no lodger went to that small gathering. For non-family, the occasion was hardly welcome: it forced us to have supper just after ten, and almost surreptitiously. But the encounter strengthened Potelles’ friendship with the household. Angelina was seen out on the Rambla walking with the student a few days later, a slow promenade with a languid, playful air.

Nevertheless, right from the start Sr Pastells disagreed. According to him — and the act seemed to chime with his specific kind of insight — the material author of the damage was Ramonet Reynals, from an aristocratic Manresan family that had lost its reputation as a family of standing because it hadn’t gone lightly into decline. Pastells had known his father, Don Josep Maria Reynals, whom he described as a man as tall as Saint Paul, who wore blue spectacles and had a cautious, stately, respectable demeanor. Don Josep Maria had sired fourteen viable children with his wife and an elastic band of natural offspring with other different, gray, hazy individuals. Nobody who had dealings with him, said Pastells solemnly, had ever had the guts to praise him. When he was on form — he added — he could perform miracles. And summing up his thoughts on the subject, he quietly added that some gentlemen need only to wrinkle their noses to create havoc and undermine an orderly society. Pastells had a name for this kind of person: “a loose cannon.”

Pastells spoke in an opaque, elliptic manner, as befitted his profession, but one deduced from what he didn’t say that he thought Reynals possessed a thrust and strength that exceeded the most generous bounds of the imagination.