Life Embitters (69 page)

Serafí had a very shiny coat – somewhere between Spanish chocolate
brown and roasted almonds. He was three and a half hands long, tail not included, but not more than one hand high. His large, drooping ears seemed very mobile and hung loosely down; his snout was long and sensitive. He was, then, an animal that grew horizontally, rather than vertically, like an accordion about to hit a high note. This observation might seem ridiculous but it’s the defining touch for this race of dogs. Its nobility shines through the way it perambulates like a cautious parson. And this might also give you an idea of the way this canine species walks: watch a tiny, tubby, elderly man set off to his café swaying from side to side; put a man of similar proportions some two meters behind, and make them hug the same path. You’ll soon see how this combination replicates the way Serafí’s species likes to move. Now Berlin city regulations insist that dogs are on a lead in the street, but as city folk walk sprightly, this kind of doggy parson’s pace soon breaks into a lively, almost intense
alegretto
canter, which really brightens up street life.

As it was cold, we walked quickly, and Serafí followed in the manner we have just described. From time to time the philologist held out his hand to stroke him, triggering an exchange of bromide postcard glances between those two that betrayed the existence of a permanent dialogue full of warmth and tender feeling.

“Have you had the dog long?” I asked Tintorer.

“Almost a month.”

“I see you speak to him in Catalan. Do you think he understands?”

“He has a great gift for languages. Judging by his receptivity, he would be a polyglot if he could speak. He’s highly intelligent.”

“I suppose that’s only natural. You’re a polyglot as well, aren’t you?”

“What can I say? If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to say I was a minor polyglot.”

“You are so young and modest. It’s not easy to find this virtue in one your
age. Let the years go by. You’ll progress. You’ll make your mark. You
will
be a polyglot. If this Serafí is as intelligent and linguistically endowed as you say, it’s natural he should feel at ease in your company. Polyglots with polyglots, right? Elective affinities. The dog must have scented that from the off.”

“I can never tell whether you speak in jest or are serious …”

“Don’t get me wrong. I have spoken and always do speak seriously; out of politeness, to avoid boring my interlocutor, I try to say things as amusingly as possible. The upshot would be horrendous if we were to use monotones, solemn, gloomy, longwinded language, whenever we spoke to a friend. I am so happy to find you own a dog and are on such good terms, so much so I sometimes think it’s not as cold as it was.”

“I’m not so sure, you know … Serafí’s friendship is perhaps due to the fact that he hopes one day I’ll take him to live out of the city when the weather improves, to a proper environment where he can raid the dens of badgers and every other sort of animal. The specific purpose of this kind of dog is badger killing. If they’re moved to another location and appear to be ready to understand all the languages their masters use it’s in the hope that they’ll soon be rewarded with a badger hunt.”

“Are you suggesting that you suspect the dog is only
pretending
to be friendly?”

“Who doesn’t pretend in this world? Everybody is out for himself and the world is one big show. What I’m saying is while this dog dreams of badgers, I dream of philology. Apart from that, nothing makes any sense …”

I think we walked across the Tiergarten for a while. The large park had soaked up huge quantities of wintry water and was relatively attractive. If the avenue where we were strolling hadn’t had a layer of Portland concrete, we might have imagined we were in inhospitable virgin forest in Scandinavia.
Large patches of frozen snow lay between the trees. You could hear water dripping on to the ground. Icicles hung from branches. The trees had an impressive phantasmagoric presence with the reddish glow emanating from the surrounding urban sprawl. The dull hum of the city droned monotonously over us. The bitterly harsh cold seemed to bite even deeper when passed through the moisture in the air; it was more difficult to fight off, more insidious. In the meantime I was just thinking how I’d come to hear that Tintorer was very sensitive to the cold. Gossip had it that his nose had frozen once, precisely when he was walking through the Tiergarten and that restoring his nose to a proper state had been an onerous business. I looked out of the corner of an eye and concluded that his overcoat was nothing very special. As I seemed to recall he’d had a cold the day his nose froze, I asked, “My dear philologist, I hope you’ve not caught a cold?”

“I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

“For no reason in particular. It can hardly be pleasant to catch a cold in this country …”

“When it’s winter here I’d give a large part of the country’s culture for a decent fur coat … and I beg the cultural folk’s pardon.”

Apparently – at least this was what they said in our conversations in the Romanisches Café – the outside of his nose first turned a blue to mallow hue. Its tissues hardened and the passage of air through the philologist’s nostrils became blocked and extremely painful. They took him to a pharmacy, but the pharmacist alleged his establishment wasn’t the most appropriate, given the specialization in modern life, to deal with the frozen noses of humble strangers. It was decided the experience of Xammar the journalist might come in useful, so they drove the invalid to his flat in a taxi. The journey was disturbing because of the danger that what experts dub “progressive
freezing” might set in. The flat was centrally heated and that immediately aroused our hopes. Nevertheless, after examining the nose’s egg-yoke hues, the journalist didn’t seem wildly optimistic.

“This kind of freezing,” he declared, “can quickly be overcome if tackled from the inside out. A rush of blood or a twist of the neck the patient prompts from deep within his guts can be highly effective. If the philologist had one of those gorgeous romantic girlfriends that are so thick on the ground in this country, the best thing would be to summon her, give them some discreet time alone, and problem solved. What? You say you think he doesn’t have one? Bad news! In that case we must act from the outside in, a method that, apart from being unpleasant, offers no guarantees of success.”

“Excuse me, but what does acting from the outside in actually mean?” inquired the man accompanying the philologist, a brawny, forceful man who sold produce from the peninsula (tomatoes, oranges, etc.) in a working-class district.

“You’ll see what it means soon enough … Do you usually hold up your trousers with a belt? You do? Then unbuckle yours immediately. I’ll be back in a moment.… It’s crucial to deal with this quickly …”

In effect, the journalist re-appeared a few seconds later brandishing an umbrella and looking like a man who wanted immediate action.

They left his office and found the distraught philologist rubbing his nose against the radiator that heated the passage.

“Tintorer, please come over here!” said X, sounding self-important and masterful. “Come, I beg you!” He headed towards the kitchen. “This method is fairly primitive, but it’s all we have for now. Make an effort, be brave and above all don’t scream, because if you do, my wife will turf us out of the house.”

Tintorer was so depressed he didn’t react: he uttered not a single word.

Once the kitchen door was closed, the journalist with his umbrella and fruit merchant with his belt gave the philologist a tremendous drubbing. Initially, no doubt taken by surprise, his eyes bulged out of their sockets and he seemed indignant. But even if he’d reacted, he wouldn’t have had time. X alternated swipes with the umbrella with loud slaps to the back of his neck. When the umbrella took a rest from his back, the muscular merchant belted it. After five or six minutes of that battering, the philologist came out in a sweat, something that made his righteous, redoubtable saviors redouble their efforts.

“Hit him hard, it’s going well!” shouted the fruit seller gleefully. They hopefully watched his nose lose its equivocal bruised purple and recover a pinkish tinge. When they thought it was its normal color, they dropped umbrella and belt, exhausted.

“These are sad, if tried and tested methods …” said X, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

“You must forgive us, philologist, but it was the only way to defrost you. Do you feel better? Drink a shot of cognac, and you can return to the university this afternoon, though it might perhaps be better if you took to your bedroom and looked after that cold. You can’t play with this climate. I imagine that summer philology would suit you better than winter philology – in this country, that is.”

After the first depressing effects of his therapy had passed, Tintorer looked at his friends somewhat suspiciously. A rather mistrusting individual, as evidenced in his fondness for the phrase “It’s one big show!”, he wondered whether the beating he’d just received wasn’t just another tactic his friends had invented to pass the time. At any rate, when he felt the air circulating freely through his nostrils and realized his frozen secretions had melted, he was duty bound to show polite gratitude. Thus, with a small,
not entirely innocent smile, infused with melancholy restraint, he told his friends: “Your application of the theory of the lesser of two evils was harsh but efficient. We’ll make sure it’s the last time …”

I remembered all that as we crossed the icy gloom in the park, worrying that his nose would freeze again. However the truth is we left it with no sign of a relapse and entered a part of the city I think I’d never visited before. They were narrow, deserted streets where blocks of flats alternated with detached residences surrounded by gardens.

We immediately began to walk along the towpath of a stagnant canal which reflected the diluted glare from streetlamps.

“It’s a canal from the Spree,” said the philologist matter-of-factly.

“With these trees it must be pretty in the summer …”

“In the summer all vermin thrives,” he replied, rather wryly, inviting me to pass through the entrance to a house. “Go in, Serafí!” he added immediately, as he shut the front door.

Once in the hallway, we left the main stairs and the philologist opened a side door with a small key. We went down two or three steps into a tiny reception space, with a coatrack, umbrella stand, and glass cabinet, and the small curtains over the two doors leading from it made it look like a puppet theater stage. He pulled back a threadbare curtain over one of the doors to reveal a long, thin passage with a patch of light on white tiles I supposed must the kitchen. We walked silently down the corridor, the only sound being the dog’s nails on the parquet. Tintorer opened the door to a modest, doleful room dimly lit by a flickering bulb. When I went in, I saw a man and woman sitting opposite each other.

I easily recognized Formiguera, even though I’d had little to do with him. I thought he looked quite ill. When he registered my presence, he made an effort to get up, but failed and slumped back on his chair. I saw the philologist
wink at me, suggesting no doubt that I should keep quiet and put on a front. After removing the dog’s collar, he approached the dancer with a rather theatrical show of emotion.

“This will soon pass!” he declared, putting his hand on his shoulder. “He’s weak and the climate is hellish. It’s all about leading an orderly life … They wanted you to go to hospital! But when they said that, a friend appeared to bring you home!”

While Tintorer was talking, Formiguera grinned sadly and enigmatically in my direction. He sat on a chair at the foot of his bed, in his overcoat with collar raised. His face was pallid, his eyes tired, and his large, sad teeth cadaverous. Beads of sweat lined his forehead. A bottle of eau de cologne stood on the table. The bedroom reeked of eau de cologne that was far too pungent to be genuine; it seemed to hover disagreeably around the dancer’s body. Now and then the sick man leant his head on the back of the chair, as if trying to shake off a feeling of oppression. His body bent; his chest and belly seemed hollow. He breathed with difficulty but painlessly. He looked smartly dressed. He wore a fine overcoat over purple silk pajamas. His slippers looked comfortable and his hair had been carefully combed.

The lady seated opposite did the honors. She owned the apartment and thus the room which was sublet to Tintorer that Formiguera was occupying for the moment. She spoke a very basic German intercalated with lots of Italian. The room was quite untidy due to the peculiar situation of the two people now lodging there. Formiguera’s luggage filled part of the floor space – poor quality suitcases that were far too bursting-at-the-seams to encourage ideas of order and repose. The suitcases had yet to be opened and their very visible presence was strangely unnerving.

When the philologist finished his warmhearted monologue, he took my arm and led me to the open window on one side of the room. As the room’s
angle was slightly askew, the window looked to be suspended there. I could see leafless trees in front of a grandiose, rather dreary building. According to the philologist it was the rear of a mansion that was the Italian Embassy.

“I told you,” he added, “that I like to live centrally … Don’t think it was easy to find. The lady, I mean the owner of the house, works at the Italian Embassy.”

“Is she a typist?”

“Much more important than that. She scrubs the floors and helps the cook.”

Tintorer then looked for a chair, and, as they were all occupied, he sat on one of the suitcases. After sidling around those present and greeting them cheerfully, Serafí leapt to the foot of the bed, coiled his tail over his belly, and made himself as round as a cream sponge cake.

We sat there in silence. I looked from the dancer to the lady to the philologist and back. Before falling asleep the dog gave us a supercilious once over. I noticed Formiguera glance out of the corner of his eye at the window-panes: icy water trickled endlessly down the glass. When he showed the whites of his eyes, he looked frightened and dreadfully weak. The dull sound of the rain falling on the mud between the trees reached the room. Occasionally Formiguera strained to stop his teeth chattering. His lips turned purple. Nobody seemed to have anything to say. The silence was depressing. It was like traveling in a small, shabby taxi which had sprung a leak. We couldn’t think what to do. Tintorer reacted by filling his pipe, putting it in his mouth, and lighting a match. The second he struck the match the lady jumped up, looked daggers and bawled:“Don’t smoke! You know only too well that smoking is banned!”