Life Embitters (14 page)

Perhaps I could shed some fresh light. He had only superficial contact with most people. Two or three knew him intimately. I suspect his family didn’t know him at all. They differed so much in their ideas and tastes! He was prickly, taciturn, and stand-offish and seemed aloof with a fondness for sarcasm he found hard to contain. Nonetheless he had one outstanding gift: he rarely tried to curry favor. In a country where young people make it their business to appear pleasant, as if on demand – and, once they have what they want, generally become eternally unpleasant and irascible – the cold first impression Santaniol gave stood out as unusual.

However, once you got to know him, you soon saw his two weak spots: he hated being by himself and was extremely weak-willed. The level of an individual’s vanity probably depends on the degree to which one of these defects predominates. His own ideas on this matter were quite infantile. In a letter he wrote me from Brindisi he said:
I can’t understand, unless it is out of a sense of charity, why man has been defined as a rational animal. Aristotle and St Thomas … have done so much harm! Man is not rational. Man is an erotic animal, and, hence, a vain animal. In the early evening, when the hot afternoon breeze cools down in Brindisi, I go to a small square with a fountain opposite a baroque church. Children are playing
around the fountain. Nearby, a plaque on a wall says – the street is near the port – that Cicero passed by on his way to exile. There are a group of twelve- to thirteen-year-olds with wonderful, fully-formed bodies, svelte legs, and the cheekiest glint in their eye. If vanity is displayed innocently, it can be a healthy, positive condition that helps calm the nerves and bring on sleep – though very coarse, inasmuch as it encourages envy. Nonetheless, if kept on a tight rein, it can give anyone with an alert mind a complex inner life, full of unexpected potential
.

In another letter from Brindisi, he wrote:
In eras of great passionate intensity, the dominant feeling is self-love. Analysts of such eras study the movements of self-love as if they were made by an insect. When life settles down, calm returns: a monster appears that apparently thinks about others and places them center stage. A sense of the ridiculous now predominates. La Bruyère analyzes the sense of the ridiculous as if it were the only impulse driving human actions. But all this is past history … People in Europe today live, more or less, in a monarchy or restricted republic, with freedom of trade, namely, under a bourgeois regime. The bourgeoisie has created men and women who are driven by vanity. Vanity never has a basis in reality. It is merely a tendency to exaggerate. That was Stendhal’s great discovery. Vanity is the feeling in the genuine era of the bourgeoisie. Man is a vain animal. Stendhal, who was very vain, saw himself in the light of this sentiment
.

I’ve been leading a life
, Santaniol wrote me from Paris in 1920,
for a long time that is exasperating in the extreme. I have wondered why that is and have yet to find a satisfactory explanation. Perhaps I need to flaunt my sense of vanity before a select band of people, which should naturally include two or three young ladies who are physically to my liking. Probably the only thing we really long for is to feel or think that someone is listening to us. However
,
I reckon I’m doomed to be platonically vain, an orator without an audience, an aspiring conversationalist
.

At the moment my life
, he wrote in 1921,
is a sequence of crazy highs followed by descents into hypochondria. When I’m feeling high, I could easily ignore things that people consider unseemly and that I conventionally believe (perhaps mistakenly) to be contemptible. When I’m feeling depressed, I’d happily be thick with thieves … I argue for hours and hours about anything under the sun with anyone in sight until my nerve gives. As a rule I almost always never say what I am thinking – and quite effortlessly. In our country, duplicity – lies – runs in our blood. I like putting up smokescreens. The next day I can’t get out of bed. The day after that, I walk through parks and down streets feeling frail, and if I carried a walking stick, I’d be too weak to turn over the edges of fallen leaves. At dusk, I go into bookshops with a churning stomach and the taste of bitter almonds in my mouth. I’d prefer to forget the influence alcohol can have when one is in such a state of mind. It’s considerable
.

This letter from Berlin is really peculiar:
October was a delightful month. It rained a lot. Small rain drops whose plash-plashing sent you to sleep. The sky was very low and the streetlights melted into gray gauze. After ten o’clock the day began to stir from its torpor but never cleared entirely. It sometimes stopped raining and the weather dried out, seemed to stand still, creating the illusion of vaguely pleasant, tepid warmth. In the afternoon I often strolled in the Tiergarten or went to gawp at the animals in the zoo. I’d sometimes sit down on a bench under bare trees with geometrically straight branches. The park was a yellowish flame color. The boulevards, in the distance, faded into pink mist. The odd leaf still glided down, languidly, charmingly. The sparrows even nibbled the toes of my shoes. When it was dark I’d walk by the cafés on
the Kurfürstendamm that were then filling up with marvelous, bronzed thirty-year-old bourgeois ladies, even if they dressed quirkily, rather too casually. In Rumpelmayer I liked to align the gilt of tea cups with the palest blue eyes. At night, from my hotel window, I’d sometimes observe the German moon – plump, swollen, a pale egg-yolk yellow, and rather foolish
.

Once into the month of November, the weather breaks. Twilights became prolonged and sad. At dusk, the Berlin sky turned tart and cloudy like new wine. Its color made me lose all sense of living in a city. I would think I was living in uncharted territory, full of swamps and sandbanks, of foggy, desolate spaces. I watched twilight through a huge wood of lofty firs, across bare whitish soil, mottled by puddles of water and battered by wet gusts of wind. At that time of day the rain transported me to a silent, primeval lake district. Perhaps, by nightfall, I would be feeling nostalgic. But what I really felt in my inner self, especially when confronted by such a landscape, was that my principles were melting away like a wax candle, signaling that the inner axis of my upbringing was about to yield. However, this regrettable, individual process meant I succumbed to huge mental lethargy that drastically reduced my spirit of inquiry
.

I don’t believe that all these symptoms
, he wrote in the last paragraph of the letter,
are those associated with the Romantic malady that is sparked by the unattainable evanescence of life. Romanticism is a mixture of truth and deceit transformed into something genuine. They are things that belong to my past – up to a point. The knowledge that my feelings are so insecure is what embitters me. You know how sociable and amenable I can be, particularly if my friends show understanding. However, I could never guarantee that my feelings will remain stable. Where does our sincerity begin and our play-acting end? Do we have it in us to draw a line between one and the other? Do I have it in me? Quite frankly, I don’t think I do. Events in life warp us; language betrays
us; feelings deceive us; there are no rigid, one-sided characters: there are multiple truths. This constant instability holds me back, because I experience it in the presence of others and within myself. I am in danger of being sucked into swamps of brazen cynicism or the reverse, of being locked into heartless Puritanism, into the mindless adoration of order. ‘He who would act the angel acts the brute’ – Pascal’s observation is so true. However, I have something on my side: my lack of ambition. If I had any, the horrors aroused in me by ideas in general, the untamed nature of my instincts or my fascination with certain realities, would lead me quite unceremoniously along that path
.

In another letter he wrote:
There are arguments for the right and arguments for the left. On the other hand, not a single argument exists for staying in the center. But everyone, or almost everyone – I mean those who have no arguments at all – remain mired in this area of lukewarm mediocrity. It’s the one that gives the least headaches when times are calm. ‘In your opinion,’ I asked a Japanese man one day in Berlin, ‘what is man’s driving passion?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘My driving passion is breeding little birds in cages.’ I don’t think I’ll ever be that intelligent. I feel passionate about extremes. Gide’s statement. ‘I’m all about extremes,’ could have been mine. When you embrace an extreme you tend to think morality is a rhetorical exercise – however, despite everything, consolation is only to be found in extremes …

In the end Albert Santaniol spent long periods abroad. Here’s a curious confession I found in a letter dated from Prague:
Ideally, I’d like to be a journalist, but not for the totally illusory way that profession confronts you with reality. However, I could never have subjected myself to the pressures of that commercial farce. I’d prefer a journalism that was entertaining, full of blood and guts, and agile enough to imitate reality. I learned a little about life, one summery night in Lyon, watching marionettes in the fair in
Perrache
. A
gentleman in a morning coat, with a large white mustache and bushy, flowing beard – the father – was gazing ecstatically at the sun setting over the waters of the Rhône when his son appeared out of the blue, quietly, on tiptoe, with a wild look in his eyes and a financially desperate appearance, and bludgeoned him on the head with a club. The impact made by that sudden blow … As seen through a journalist’s eye, reality – politics and money are the two sides of reality that most stir their passions and imagination – reads like a train timetable or a minuet directed by a clean-shaven, little old dance teacher who is an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy. We know nothing about anything and yet we remain so stuck in the mud. In order to create good journalism one should be able to draw on the best people in each country – those who have managed to liberate themselves from conventional university thinking or the mediocre ways of the establishment. All journalists do with their apparently precise, restrained, mathematical reporting is to drown everyone in the gluey porridge of drawing-room comedy. The time will come when nobody will have a clear idea of the simplest, most immediate acts. And in a few years, the man who happens to tell it anything like it really is will be condemned out of hand, as if that was the right and proper thing to do. However, I suspect I may be rambling madly. My God, there’s still so much to see, health permitting …

In 1918, we find Santaniol in a pension on Calle Pérez Galdós, previously Colmillo (Tusker) in Madrid. In 1919, he is in Paris; in 1920, in London; in 1921, he’s roaming through the cities of central Europe with lengthy stays in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Prague. He is enchanted by Prague.
In the summer, Prague
, he wrote me on a postcard,
is a golden city against the backdrop of the proudest, most hieratic trees the continental climate can sustain. The old Jewish cemetery is striking in its humble simplicity
. In 1922 and ’23 he’s in
Italy, first as a tourist, then as vice-consul. Those years saw a considerable reduction in the family income. He had no choice but to buckle down and spend a few hours a day pushing a pen. Then he died when a train went off the rails. It’s not easy to paint the usual superficial, clichéd portrait of him. His papers are scattered all over the place.

In my researches into the life of the deceased, I was amazed to find notes for a possible autobiography – notes he’d never sent, which he gave me to read once, but then no doubt forgot entirely because he never mentioned them again.

Weeks after his death, the family sent me an assignment that had been stipulated by Santaniol himself. He asked me to read through his papers and writing. He spells it out very clearly:
If after a reasonable time has elapsed, you think anything could be published, that will depend on you. Personally I would like that to happen but perhaps there is nothing there. I leave it to you as a memento of the friendship we had as students. In the sheaf of drafts they may send you, if I ever disappear, you will find a self-portrait that perhaps corresponds to a particular moment in my existence. Read it. If you think it’s half decent, let it rest for a while – that’s up to you – and if you find any interest out there, then full steam ahead!

All in all, none of these ideas ever went beyond the project stage. I don’t think it has anything to do with a decision taken by his family. I rather believe that things followed the usual pattern: many people in this country attempted in their youth to write, even put their hearts and souls into it and then all of a sudden they dropped it after deciding that their caprice had been a call-to-letters without real substance. A passion for literature often forms part of adolescence and it is generally a phase that’s best forgotten.
As I didn’t find anything structured in terms of the projected self-portrait, I have used his correspondence to put together the short record I’ve outlined. It’s very likely that my friend, if he ever breathed again, would have excluded the odd detail that was, in his view, too childish, because years later with the changes that life brings, such childish pranks don’t even interest those involved at the time who now see them as regrettable hiccups from years they’ve had the good fortune to leave behind.

Nevertheless, I did find in the small bundle I was sent a fragment entitled “My progenitors” that could have been the beginning of the planned autobiography. I thought it peculiar, very emblematic, and extremely human. It goes like this:
My father
, writes Santaniol,
was a shy, sociable, naturally courteous man. He was very introverted, unable to show emotional warmth, devoid of any of my theatrical abilities, but had a sense of humor that was vaguely corseted, of course, within the conventional bounds imposed by the leaden-weight bourgeoisie of his time. His gift for irony blossomed when his radical inability to deal with the circumstances he met in life left him economically bereft. He never allowed anyone to say that this painful process was the result of his own shortcomings. He was convinced he was the victim of situations the people around him had created. He was such a dignified man, had such deeply rooted convictions, that he never came to value in the slightest the possible impact of his own character. He never overcame his shyness. When he was at the height of his physical powers, this shyness probably led him to suffer hard times. It is troubling to miss out on the joys of this life by dint of delicacy, doubt, and double standards
.