Life Embitters (16 page)

When our committee’s visit took this variously unpleasant turn, it was quite impossible to suggest anything in terms of a reduction in helpings of food. If anyone had put forward the ideas, it would have lead to an unpredictable scene with no doubt disastrous consequences. Thus, the musical carnival continued; for days it was impossible to stay in the house: we roamed the streets, went in and out of cafés, like so many souls in limbo.

The giant was a genuine giant: he was very tall and, what’s more, very young, which augured well for future growth. He was a fair-haired lad with bluish eyes that were slightly sunken beneath bushy eyebrows; he seemed at once shy and good-natured. Apparently the idea of a shy giant sounds strange; literature has accustomed us to prickly, powerful giants, able to wreak huge damage at any time. But he wasn’t like that and I was soon convinced of this by my dealings with him.

In any case, he was the best advertising stunt that arty crew possessed. It was his task – apart from beating the big drum in the orchestra – to arrive
in towns twenty-four hours before the canary-yellow bus and walk along the streets, hands in his pockets, smoking a cigarette. He’d always been averse to disguises and overkill. He was discreet. He only had to put in an appearance and children flocked around him, people peered out of doors and windows, and his figure became the center of conversation in taverns and cafés and a scrumptious queue lined up at the box office.

“It’s the giant! The giant!” people shouted. The management providentially profited from the curiosity and gawping that individual prompted merely by the fact of his existence.

The first night that gang invaded the lodging house, I chanced to arrive back in the early hours and my feet bumped into a strange object in the ill-lit passage. I first imagined it must be an instrument case they’d not been able to slot into a nearby bedroom. It turned out to be the giant who was sleeping on a couple of mattresses lying in the passageway. I dreaded a violent outburst, because people don’t like being woken up at night even if it’s only by mistake. When I saw that human being lift half his body off the ground and come up to my chest, my blood ran cold.

“I’m really sorry, Mr Giant …” I said as fawningly as I could, hoping to appear as conciliatory as possible.

“El meu nom és Paquito …”
answered the giant, rubbing his eyes and tugging the hair around the nape of his neck. He spoke Valencian with a blank, quivering voice, and didn’t seem at all angry.

“Won’t you suffer from draughts in the passageway?” I asked feeling more relaxed.

“I’m used to it. Beds don’t exist for people who are unfortunate to be so lengthy. We don’t fit in normal beds and have to sleep in the largest flat spaces we can find, usually, in dining rooms or in some passageway or other …”

“So, from what I gather, your giant proportions aren’t at all common?”

“Those of us who are thus afflicted shouldn’t budge from home, and that’s all there is to it …” said the young man, reassuming his horizontal position, covering himself with his clothes, with a weary, skeptical gesture.

I thought he seemed overwhelmed and saddened by his giant stature. I pictured him going from town to town, completely oblivious, his bluish eyes focusing on whatever, obsessively wondering why he had turned out so much taller than other people. And always trailing a band of children and bystanders through squares and streets.

One day we chatted for a while. Although he was so young, I spoke to him formally, because it seemed the most appropriate register.

“Well, sir, what is being a giant like yourself all about?”

“It’s simply Nature’s error. One has to carry a useless, spare yard around.”

“But maybe it’s necessary …”

“I don’t think so. It’s totally unnecessary.”

I thought of that useless bathroom. A useless bathroom. A yard of useless human bones. Those absolutely useless, frightful bulls’ heads hanging in the dining room and the passageways.

“Do you have any family?”

“Vaguely. Families don’t like unusual sizes. They want things to be normal. Families reject aberrations and anything that’s too picturesque.”

“Did you know your parents?”

“Hardly. They were poor. When they saw me growing so unusually they took fright and gave me over to the care of an old aunt who was more hardened to the mysteries of nature.”

“Have you studied at school?”

“What do you think? My presence anywhere always aroused people’s curiosity, so the outcome was always the same: I was a distraction to my
fellow pupils. So there was only one solution: to get out. People can’t cope with giants, don’t you know?”

“Do your unusual proportions lead you to have parallel, alternative criteria, to see things differently to others?”

“I don’t think so. My ideas about blondes or brunettes are more or less the same as anyone else’s. The impresario pays us the same money as everyone else.”

“When you see a fly or a mosquito, does it seem bigger or smaller than to us normal-sized folk?”

“I shouldn’t think so …”

“Would a world populated by people like you, sir, be different from the world as we know it?”

“Obviously, things would be bigger. Houses, towns, beds would be bigger. Tears too. I don’t know what would happen to thought processes …”

“Don’t worry. Human thought is so trivial, so petty, so surface-scratching that even if it grew a little bigger it would still be almost imperceptible.”

“That’s not up to me …”

“And is it profitable to be a giant? Does it bring in the pennies?”

“You can see for yourself. Enough to go around beating the big drum and sleeping in passageways.”

Three or four days later I popped into the kitchen and came face to face with a dwarf sitting on the landlady’s lap and looking very much at home. I imagined they must be related but it turned out that they weren’t and had never seen each other before the troupe arrived. The reasons behind that scenario weren’t at all out of the ordinary. Everybody found the dwarf so amusing, so hilarious, that our landlady liked daily to hold him on her lap, and show how warmly she felt towards him.

He wasn’t a fledgling dwarf and was reputed to be a nasty piece of work. Like all his peers, he was justifiably suspicious and evil-minded, and was also always on the defensive in case someone wanted to do him down. His face was sallow and smooth-skinned, his nose rather flattened and he sported a small handlebar mustache. He looked the part of a man who has experienced more than one run-in and is always anticipating the next: hard, glassy features unlikely ever to soften. His hair was always beautifully combed, sleek and dyed a terrifying jet-black, and he was a dapper dresser: patent leather shoes, a green hat, and a miniature horseshoe tiepin. But it was his skin color that most struck you: it was a bilious saffron yellow.

Naturally, everyone talked about that surprising character, and I heard it said that his inferiority complex expressed itself in a sickly obsessive refusal to be the butt of pranks or be mistreated by anyone, and in the stubborn, fierce defense of his own person. Perhaps he tended to look at the world with deep contempt, yet he never dared provoke anyone. Consequently, he always expected to be treated with respect by others.

His friendship with the landlady was quite exceptional. It was obvious enough that she played with the dwarf as if he were a child: she undid and remade the knot of his tie; she’d take the ends of his mustache and twirl them, as if she were winding a watch up, which everybody found hilarious. The dwarf looked her up and down in a way that would have panicked most people with more mettle. However, for whatever reason – some people said it was because he was extremely well fed – he always let the landlady treat him like her lapdog and they never clashed. I never found out what exactly was the role he played in the troupe or which tasks were assigned to him. As he was a man who liked his home comforts – he only went out for aperitifs – then spent most of the day in the kitchen, saying very little
and always with that vinegary expression. He sometimes took out a mirror and looked at his reflection. Nonetheless, he occupied a higher rung in the troupe’s hierarchy than the giant.

Everything about that fellow intrigued me, but I was extremely shocked one day to go into my bedroom and find the dwarf in my bed enjoying a deeply relaxing siesta.

It turned out, I later discovered, that the giant’s lodging was always a terrible pain to resolve but the reverse was the case with the dwarf: his tiny size meant people said: “He can sleep anywhere … It’s a cinch …

Thus, that man’s resting-place was always in doubt. They shifted him all over the shop depending on where they found space. He never had a set bed and had had to put up with that situation so often that all beds were much of a muchness as far as he was concerned. By night or day you could find him in any of the bedrooms. Right then it was my turn and I found it to be most disagreeable.

In any case I decided to wake him up; however, as I failed using solely verbal means, I decided to remove the blanket that was covering almost all his body. The dwarf was sleeping like a log, wearing ineffably small, laughable T-shirt and pants – a real cutie. I thought his breath stank slightly of cheap wine.

Although I had exposed his body, he didn’t budge. I then tried every means to restore him to the land of the living, but as I didn’t make the slightest headway, I grabbed him and deposited him in the passage along with his clothes that he’d meticulously folded on a bedroom chair. I rang the bell and while I ordered clean sheets terrible howls went up in the passage.

The dwarf had at last woken up and was clamoring loudly. He was shocked to find himself transplanted into the passage. He had come to in
the filthiest of tempers. He let out a stream of swear words and spine-chilling curses. As he was much the worse for drink – as I soon confirmed – I was afraid he might lose his temper and inflict grievous damage. I decided to go into the passage and try to soothe him. I stood up to him and said what had to be said. I told him that I found his intrusion into my bedroom space absolutely unacceptable.

“Do you really think it is right to use someone else’s bed and room?” I asked the dwarf who was struggling to put his feet into his tiny trousers.

“I am not to blame …” he said, in a gloomy, cavernous voice that a bout of whimpering soon interrupted; “it was the landlady who pointed me to your room. She thought you’d be out, like every afternoon.” And then he continued after a pause: “My name is Theodore, at your service … Do please accept my humble …”

His eyes glistened and he almost burst into tears.

I couldn’t say what had caused that transformation. The rabid, bizarre dwarf had turned into a wet rag. Perhaps alcohol had softened him, perhaps he was responding to my reasonable complaint.

The experience led me, personally, to believe that the effect of alcohol can have many sides; sometimes what a drunk thinks is black suddenly turns white. Irony doesn’t exist for a drunk. Everything unravels in dazzling flashes that can create, at any moment, situations that are definitive, rock-hard, set in concrete.

There was a happy ending. When I went into the kitchen, I found the dwarf sitting on the lap of the landlady who was playfully tweaking the ends of his mustache, to everyone’s loud laughter. The moment he saw me, the little monster contracted his body and rebutted her pleasant caresses. His expression became sterner than usual and he seemed really upset by
the situation he reluctantly found himself in. It was a display of respect that compensated for the fact I had found him in my bedroom enjoying an unforgivable snooze.

The presence of the band in the lodging house produced the musical cacophony I’ve tried to describe. That unbearable situation was compounded by a neverending influx of visitors into the flat. The musicians received a countless number, and you know the kind of visits artists get, they came at any hour of the day or night; then the friends returned a second time with
their
friends; the doorbell never stopped ringing; the endless noise of footsteps in the passage … the interminable conversations in bedrooms … There was a time when there was no control over who was coming in and going out; those departing opened up for the newcomers, you could always find complete strangers in the neighborhood, dubious characters that could just as easily have come to steal as to look after someone who was ill. It was a strange situation that bypassed the landlady completely, because she was so sold on the musical arts.

Roundabout that time I became ill. An attack of flu that kept me in bed, a logical consequence of the hours spent out in all weathers, in streets and squares, driven out by the musical din. A friend visited me – a friend of quite some standing, older than myself, with very close, endearing ties to me. I watched him walk in – escorted by a maid – smiling radiantly and ready to help. I had a temperature of 38.5 and felt soporific. When I saw he wasn’t carrying his hat or walking stick, I screamed: “Are you off your rocker?”

“Not yet!” he replied with a grin.

“You usually bring a walking stick, don’t you?”

“That’s right. I take my hat and stick with me everywhere … You know me, don’t you?”

“Where have you left them?”

“In the umbrella stand in the lobby … why get so alarmed about that?”

The way I glanced at the maid was enough to send her running off. By the time she reached the umbrella stand, she registered that the hat and stick had flown.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” I asked in a relatively coherent, though feverish state, and not totally with it.

I don’t remember what he answered.

In fact we didn’t have a minute’s peace in that lodging house until that entire musical troupe, giant and dwarf included, set off on another one of their fabulous tours in their wonderful canary-yellow bus.

My eyes suddenly opened and I was shocked to find myself under that low ceiling in a strange, purple light. It lasted a second: an abrupt jolt of the train cleared my head and woke me up. The first movement I make every day when I come back to life is to stretch out an arm, grab a cigarette and smoke it, stretched out on my back. I mechanically pulled my arm out of the couchette. It fell into the void … While I retrieved my hand and put it in the pocket of my jacket that was hanging over my feet, I thought what a highly uncomfortable place a sleeper is for a man of sedentary ways. Reclining in my bunk, taking my first puff, I looked through the crack between the window and the curtain. Two lights shone outside illuminated by a distant, hazy glow I took to be the moon.