Life Embitters (10 page)

“No, definitely not.”

“Then it must be the other fellow … number 59. Stein …” he continued, looking at the papers.

“Exactly. That’s our man.”

“Here’s the paperwork.”

“So, it’s all ready … is it? Is it going to be all right?” gabbled Riera, speaking purely mechanically, a hint of anxiety in his eyes as he took the papers the bearer offered him.

Small smiles brightened the deadpan faces of the funeral professionals, as is the custom with professionals when they are asked something obvious relating to tasks they perform daily. However, after his smile had faded, the workman broke the silence, and piped up in a flat, rather deferential voice: “We had a brand-new niche ready, because they said the deceased was a foreigner. But then we got a last-minute special request, and had to make use of another cavity … Nevertheless, it’s turned out all right in the end.”

But Riera was no longer listening. He’d folded the papers and stuffed them in a pocket. He’d started walking. But he’d barely taken a dozen steps when a gross, loud, and violent swear word stopped him in his tracks and made him look round.

He contemplated this spectacle: the bearer was gripping his top hat tight and his face was a picture of wild, indignant fury. His cheroot quivered between his lips. Moreover, he had lifted his right leg and was about to kick the top of the earth ferociously.

Riera understood at once. He silently retraced his steps and gave the men the tip he’d carelessly forgotten to slip into their palms. The bearer, whose expression had slipped from annoyance to compliance the instant he doffed his hat, took the money and bowed obsequiously. The feel of money brought a bright smile to his face and, meanwhile, on the sly, he gradually lowered his leg. The workman was less obvious and watched the whole scene whistling the sparrow song, a song workmen liked to sing, apparently oblivious and aloof, as if he couldn’t care less.

Riera reached the stairs, sprinted down the steps, and walked along the ground-floor passage before coming out on to the esplanade at the entrance to the cemetery.

On the left of the esplanade a wooden bench was positioned between two round clumps of lordly box. Those of us who’d accompanied the deceased to his last resting-place stood in a circle around the bench, taciturn, subdued, heads bowed. Only Sr Verdaguer had broken rank and was pacing up and down by the wrought-iron entrance gates.

Our vehicle was parked outside, lined up with other carriages. The setting sun brought a tinge of purple to their small windows. Our charabanc’s door was wide open, and the twilight spring breeze gently swelled and deflated the flimsy white curtains: the vehicle seemed to be breathing. The horse, shaggy in its nether parts, stood rather lopsided on the flat ground, an empty bag of straw around its neck, and stood so still it looked like a stuffed animal.

To the right of the esplanade a group in mourning attire buzzed with a vague, constrained patter that seemed to heighten the deep tranquility reigning in that place. From afar, in the background, we could hear the city’s dull hum.

Sr Riera came over to the bench clutching the papers. He greeted us with
that familiar, wry chuckle. With his large, compacted eyebrows, strikingly boney frame, prominent cheeks, beady, deep-set eyes, fleshy lips, large nose, and big, mineral head, Riera dealt with the deceased’s paperwork, as if he were a being who’d just arrived from a remote planet.

When he joined the group, he asked us what we were thinking of doing. Sr Verdaguer also came over. But nobody said a word: everybody stood still and silent. The other group of mourners looked at us, intrigued. A funeral in which no one wore mourning attire was frankly peculiar. As we were in our party clothes, they could have taken us for a gang of people who had decided to visit the cemetery for the pleasure of a stroll. Given the silence and general indecision, Sr Riera didn’t persist. He took off his hat and wiped a handkerchief over his forehead.

A long time went by … We were astonished to find such deep peace, such soothing tranquility on this earth. We breathed in the quiet calm of that afternoon. Finally, Sr Ferrer who was wedged between the Swiss Pickel and Bramson on the bench, leaned his hands on their shoulders, and easing himself up, whispered: “Death, my dear friends, raises problems that are difficult to resolve, that are very complex …”

Up on his feet now, he brushed away specks of ash from a pleat in his waistcoat, took out his cigarette case and invited us to a smoke. Bramson accepted a cigarette. Bramson was a red-cheeked Helvetian colossus, with a large oval-shaped belly and a stolid, drowsily bovine manner. He lit a cigarette with his sausage-like fingers and then produced a green velvet lined case, where he kept a huge, whimsical amber cigarette holder inlaid with mahogany. It was an infamous and impressive holder that weighed next to nothing even though its back displayed an intricate Alpine pastoral scene in the eighteenth-century style. The scene included an exquisitely carved shepherdess and lamb – the work of Saint-Gall. Sr Bramson puffed on his
stupendous work of art and immediately remarked, twisting his head and shutting his left eye that the smoke was irritating: “Well, what now? I assume everything is ready and organized.”

“Yes. I’ve got the papers …” said Sr Riera.

“Sr Riera, I hope they didn’t get the wrong corpse …” muttered Ferrer.

“So that’s us, you know?” interjected a rather muted Sr Verdaguer. “By the Virgin Mary! We are so puny! Here today and gone tomorrow …”

And he added in Castilian, with a Lleida accent: “Our time may soon be up!”

Evening was falling and the occasional damp gust blew in from the sea. A yellowish brushstroke of sun striped the plain of Llobregat that kept settling and evaporating in a green sugary haze. The mountains to the west stood out starkly against the gray pearl sky.

Its sails billowing, a schooner sailed between the pincers of the harbor entrance, infused with straw-colored light. The sea was white, becalmed, and lathery. On the southern horizon, streaks of purple floated between sky and sea. A filthy black steamship was slowly leaving port, spewing a trail of smoke that seemed out of a child’s drawing. In the far distance, one could hear hammers hitting vessels’ iron plating, as if they were echoing memories. The vague noise seemed to float in the air.

We all seemed deeply engrossed, as if unconsciously bewitched by the gently soothing quiet of early evening.

“Where’s the coachman?” Sr Ferrer asked all of a sudden.

“He must be with the others …”

“Sr Verdaguer, please be so good as to summon the coachman,” said Sr Riera. “In the meantime, if you are all agreed, we could start to climb in … Sr Tomeu, in you go, if you don’t mind!

We climbed in, one by one. We raised the windows. Sr Bramson was still
drawing on his monumental, Helvetian cigarette holder. The coachman rushed up like someone who is late. He untied the horse, tidied away the sack, and jumped up on to the driving seat. He grabbed the reins and, before setting off, poked his head through the front window.

“Tell me where, senyors …” he asked in a rather tipsy voice.

“Home!” shouted Riera, reasserting himself as leader.

The charabanc rolled slowly off.

There were eight places and we were nine. The only solution was to be seated by size: the four biggest on one side and the five thinnest on the other. At the last moment, Sr Ferrer declared that if he had to choose between the perils of catching a cold traveling in the open or being sick inside the carriage, he was decidedly in favor of the second option. Ferrer was a gentleman notoriously sensitive to subtle shades. This ensured we were tightly packed.

The bench with the biggest accommodated Bramson, Pickel, Don Manuel Ferrer and a Majorcan who lived on private income, spent the springtime in Barcelona, and whom we called Sr Tomeu. Sr Tomeu was finicky, stiff, and quite miserly, judging by what he owed the landlady. In any case, he was a gentleman who never poked his nose in, always said yes to everyone, and seemed to specialize in clichés and colorful commonplaces worthy of a conservative provincial snob. Helvetian Pickel was a large, stout young man, who wore spectacles with extremely thick lenses and sometimes sank into recalcitrant silence for long periods as if he didn’t care a fig about anything around him. Then, out of the blue, most unexpectedly, he would come out with a scintillating phrase, or make a barbed comment that shocked everyone.

I sat on the other bench with Don Natali Verdaguer, Sr Riera and a dapper old man who had only been lodging with us for a mere four or five
days, one Don Martí Dalmau, and a young pharmaceutical student from Tarragona by the name of Boada. Don Martí Dalmau was a smartly dressed, respectable gentleman; slightly hunchbacked, his skin was so ivory white it seemed bled dry; his skull and features were cold and flat and his impressive teeth, gold-capped. He wore a magnificent blue suit with piping and patent leather shoes. Apparently he had come to the boarding house on the recommendation of Sr Verdaguer, but then gossip suggested he had known Sra Paradís for years.

When a spectral analysis of Sr Dalmau got underway in the boarding house, some lodgers said he passed himself off as a journalist, and others that they’d met him as a croupier in a music hall. All unanimously agreed he was not known to have any trade, source of gain, or substantial income.

There are always two basic groups in lodging houses: the group of those who pay and the group of those who don’t and who never intend to as a matter of principle. In this class of establishment when the payers are generous, easy-going, and unconcerned about the small detail, preferring to nurture the business of living, then peace is guaranteed and a system accepting of parasites develops naturally and successfully. However, sometimes the payers don’t feel like being generous and aspire rather to a situation where everyone keeps to the straight and narrow. In this case the issue of eradicating bugs inevitably generates huge conflicts. Don Martí Dalmau had been a lodger for very few hours and had already signed up – intuitively, we would say – to the free, gratis, and for nothing group. This reinforced the majority view that his arrival would mean the Maggi got Maggier by the day, the hake came even less fresh, and the steak would be even more symbolic. This personage was thus most unwelcome and Don Natali, who had introduced him, fell into bad odor with almost every lodger.

Despite the rumors Sr Verdaguer never attempted to justify himself. In
fact, he became increasingly unpleasant and bad-tempered, a vociferous grumbler. It was curious how Don Natali remained neutral or at least silent when faced by things that truly demanded a response yet, conversely, any trifle that one could swallow with a grain of good will unleashed his fury and he literally lost it. All this coincided with the news that Sr Verdaguer was about to open a shop that promoted typewriters. After the pertinent inquiries had been made, it turned out that this was a simple misunderstanding. He wasn’t going to open a shop or embark on any business involving that type of machine. A lifelong friend had simply set up a small repair shop and had suggested he could work a few hours cleaning the keys of damaged typewriters with special brushes and thus earn a small income. That confusion didn’t help his credit rating. Quite the opposite.

It was dark by this time. The horse dawdled along the Can Tunis road. No one inside seemed in the mood to talk. The atmosphere was dense with smoke. Everyone was staring at the front of the coach and focusing on the broad nape of the coachman’s neck. The spindly, stunted trees along the roadside went by at a frustratingly slow rate. The potholes were hellish and the carriage juddered alarmingly down and up. It creaked and squeaked. If by chance wood and metal were quiet for a moment, the dull, muted rumble of the sea could be heard in the distance. The road was quite elevated and we could see the port and its red and green lights reflecting on the thick, black water. Lights sporadically lined the roadside and seemed to promenade in front of our carriage.

Sr Ferrer rolled another cigarette, lit up, and suddenly spoke to Don Martí Dalmau: “Sr Dalmau, you seem on edge …”

“On edge? I won’t deny it … Death does prompt one to philosophize! Just think how peculiar it is that the first, might we say, official act of mine
in the boarding house has been to go to a colleague’s funeral …” answered Sr Dalmau in a slightly shrill tone, looking indirectly at Sr Ferrer.

“You are quite right, quite right …”

“Anyway, to tell you the truth, I’m rather inured to these mishaps. You know, I’ve been a widower twice … what more could I suffer? I don’t think there is greater misery … Of course, I could die. But don’t I already belong to the living dead …?”

“Come, come, Sr Dalmau, it can’t be that bad, it can’t be …” suggested Sr Ferrer ironically.

“Believe me! It’s true! I have had my share of worries in life. When my second wife died, whom (if you will excuse my being so blunt) I loved most deeply, my head was filled with strange fantasies and nonsense. I even came to think her death was unjust and that a time would come, sooner or later, when my unhappiness would go into reverse. Fully convinced, I told myself, ‘You
will
see your wife again …’ And nobody could gainsay me. I took it absolutely for granted that I would encounter her in the next life more or less exactly as when we lived on the Carrer de Vila i Vilá. Yes, it became an obsession, an idea that lodged right here,” he pointed to his forehead, “and which lodged there for months on end … But a friend finally helped me to dispel those phantoms …”

“Go on, Sr Dalmau, do go on …”

“Well, you know, one day I went to see Gatell who has also passed away. He was a theater impresario on the Paral·lel. Gatell and I were like brothers. I told him what I’ve just told you. When I finished, he guffawed most rudely. ‘You are a widower for a second time,’ he said, ‘if I’m not mistaken.’ ‘That is correct.’ ‘Well, I don’t know what you’re going to do when you meet up with the pair of them in the next life … How will you manage?’ Though it
may be improper for me to say this, I found Gatell’s perspective to be most original. ‘Do you want my advice?’ asked Gatell after laughing for a good long while. ‘Here you have it: Dalmau, don’t be such an idiot and forget this spiritualist stuff. You’ll be a wiser man, if not a richer one.’