Life Embitters (8 page)

The life of Don Natali would have been a real mystery if he hadn’t helped throw light on it with that lapidary phrase: “Young man, a boarding house is a way of working …”

He had no known trade or source of income. He got up late. If it was sunny, he picked up his silver-topped, high quality, shiny black walking stick, shouted
Murillo
and, if the dog was feeling energetic, he’d join him for the walk that Don Natali called a “victory march.” This involved walking two or three times round the Plaça de Catalunya, gaping for a while at the buildings being constructed or demolished and then sitting on a bench – after he’d spread a clean handkerchief over the stone – to observe people feeding the local pigeons. Don Natali scrutinized these birds with loving tenderness. One day when I found him sitting on his bench, I tried to probe which of their features he preferred. I said, “Don Natali, these pigeons would
be excellent stewed, with mixed herbs and three strong-smelling spring onions …”

“No, sir!” he replied, leaping off his handkerchief. “In my opinion, young man, the pigeon is a symbolic bird, a symbol of love. I find it pitiful, if not intolerable, for humans to devour these noble, innocent creatures. Those of us who are at all sensitive find the way pigeons dribble, their mysterious billing and cooing, to evoke ineffable feelings and things … do you follow me, young man?”

Rather brazen like most young people I diagnosed that Don Natali liked to wallow in syrupy sentimentality. I deduced he was a man whose success was guaranteed among
femmes fatales
.

At lunchtime, Sr Verdaguer sat with the rest of us boarders, then put an apple or orange to his mouth and transferred to the gallery where he drank coffee with Sra Paradís, in private! He rarely went out in the afternoon and spent the time reading old newspapers and out-of-date page-turners:
The Wandering Jew
,
The Slave’s Surrender
, and
An Unhappy Family
. In the evening he went to the movie-houses on Carrer d’Aribau and their notorious late matinées. At night he ate spicy food, particularly shellfish he bought in the street and carried home in a sugar-paper cornet. Then, as was common knowledge, he donned his purple, tasseled dressing gown when his more or less Provençal nuptial moment was at hand.

At the time lodgers said that Sr Ferrer – Don Manuel Ferrer – really envied Don Natali. Don Manuel was an insignificant scrap of a man, fair and freckled, with light-green eyes and a gooseberry jam complexion. He looked to be in his forties, was smooth-cheeked, and a great dearth of hair led him to nurture the ones that grew on the nape of his neck, that he combed back over his convex baldpate in a series of undulating waves. What’s more, he sported a moist, twirled mustache – the kind that was the rage when I was
an adolescent and that looked as if it should be used for winding something up. One grasped from the efforts Sr Ferrer dedicated to capillary issues that he was embittered by the paucity of hair Providence had bequeathed him. His head’s extraordinary paneled ceiling and mustache’s mathematical lines were ample enough proof.

The contrast between Don Natali and Sr Ferrer made up a chiaroscuro interplay replete with intriguing hidden agendas.

Sr Ferrer was a first-rate assistant in a shop on Portaferrissa: he was orderly, punctual, and exceptionally polite and serious. He’d entered that establishment fifteen years ago, the day he left his village, and had never worked anywhere else: he enjoyed the highest levels of trust. He had imposed an ice-cold order in his boarding house bedroom. His books were beautifully arranged according to size. Pencils and other items were perfectly lined up on the table from small to big. He hung his carefully preserved clothes up in his wardrobe as if to recall the symmetry of a high-class shop window. Nevertheless, that man was secretly envious of Sr Verdaguer, whom – so they said in the house – he was trying to dislodge from the niche the latter occupied in Sra Paradís’s heart. And he deployed a most original tactic to achieve his aim: he became a public apologist for broadmindedness and seemed to suggest that immorality was the best option, as far as he was concerned. This lead people who didn’t know him to think he was devious and capable of all manner of sly maneuvers. The opinions that he expressed forcefully meant he was reputed to be a fellow who lived beyond good and evil.

At moments when he could most benefit from Sra Paradís’s emotional frailty, Sr Verdaguer, on the other hand, enjoyed playing the role of the warm-hearted, propitiatory victim and spoke of his situation with subtle hypocrisy and perfectly premeditated guile. He described his condition as
being without cure, as if he had fallen victim to uncontrollable passion, his will destroyed by the surge of feelings her presence provoked.

Donya Esperança put Sr Verdaguer in charge of what we might call the house’s administrative business. When it was time to be litigious, to talk of rents with a lawyer or resolve a matter at the Town Hall, Sr Verdaguer would see to it. Don Natali took on these tasks willingly and acted conscientiously, but, later, when Sra Paradís wasn’t around, he would complain indignantly to other lodgers. He said it was impossible to live in this country: “What kind of country is this!” That was one of his favorite phrases when he was being indignant; he’d claim he was a dogsbody and the unhappiest man on the planet. When it was suppertime, from his place at the table, Don Natali would contemplate Sra Paradís with tender longing and lead her to anticipate, via his rather bovine gaze, the joys she could expect from his person. After a whole meal he’d spent defending his doctrine of maximum laxity and radiant, luminous freedom, Sr Ferrer was out-boxed, sat there as stiff as cardboard, like a stuffed owl.

Two or three Swiss also lodged there: they were assistants in watch shops or represented firms from their country. They were well-disciplined, led exemplary lives, and were fond of music. On Saturday evenings they would meet with other friends to play together – every one of them played an instrument. They created a hellish din, but enjoyed themselves immensely. They drank beer and in the early morning struggled to stifle their Germanic guffaws.

April twenty-fifth. Seven
P.M.
Strolling down the Rambla de Catalunya. The lime-trees are turning green above their black trunks. It is drizzling. Everything drips and floats in bluish gauze the light infuses with a pinkish glow. The air stinks of unripe almonds. The earth reeks of rotting things, an
insistent stench of decomposition. Spring is here: the drains. Big drops of water drip off the balconies and pop like bubbles on the pavement; the air is full of liquid dots that glitter – for a second – like tiny diamonds. Distant buildings loom against a low sky that’s like a thick cobweb of grayish lead. It is such a joy to see the pallid light enlivened by the fresh, new green of the trees.

The Plaça de Catalunya – soaking wet at twilight – stands out in the wan moonless night. Covered in great pools of water, the earth seems burnished. A pane of glass, a wet palm frond, an electricity cable fleetingly glimmer bluish white. People come and go under umbrellas that leap and jump in step. A girl holding a pitcher runs across the square in a skimpy bell-like skirt. Another girl, without an umbrella, stoops to straighten her stockings under a palm-tree. Then stands up, raises her arm, and wriggles like a snake so her clothes fall comfortably back on her body. In that delicate drizzle transformed into vaporous white tulle by the tepid light, the girl looks as if she is putting her blouse on …

Canaletes. The black of umbrellas, the black of people’s clothes is distinctly funereal. We all look like drenched hens. Barcelonans can’t help it: a few drops of rain and they scowl. The horse-drawn carriages give off a dull glow. The coachmen, ears tucked inside their caps, squeezed into short, absurd cloaks, feet in sacks of wet straw, look ridiculous. Their horses drip and steam. I walk down the Rambla. The rain falls harder. A downpour. Slanting gusts of rain spool off the asphalt. Iridescent drops spatter. The lit windows, shop windows, streetlights are enveloped by an orange-juice-tinted haze. Automobiles leave a gleaming red trail in their wake on the mud. The center of the Rambla is deserted. Newspapers in the kiosks droop: sopping wet, limp and dismal. People stand under balconies, on pavements, in entranceways, gaping at the sheets of rain. Some look askance at their toe
caps. The tiny spring buds on the tree branches bring a soft downy touch to the steamy atmosphere suffused by the dense light from the street. I seek shelter under the arches on the Plaça Reial. A large group of people is waiting under the cold, elegant arches, noses in air, looking silently up at the reddish sky where the highest palm fronds describe languid curves. I join them and, nose in air, I too contemplate the spectacle for a while. Then I slowly walk round the square.

I stop, all of a sudden. I see a man behind a rectangular column, peering round the edge as if he were scrutinizing or spying on something. I’m intrigued and stop to take a look. Can he be a policeman? Or a criminal? Is some evil deed about to be carried out right here? I position myself behind the man on the look-out and observe him for a second … Then all at once, in a rapid sequence of images, I see that it’s Sr Ferrer. The fact he was wearing his hat slightly skewed over the back of his neck made me doubt for a moment … But no doubt about it! It
is
Sr Ferrer. The light-colored striped suit, the tight, bulging jacket that’s slightly short all the way round, the orangey shoes, the milk coffee hat with a blue band … It’s clearly Sr Ferrer!

But
, I wonder,
what on earth is Sr Ferrer keeping an eye on, oblivious to how stupid he looks?
He looks like a man with a mission and cuts such a grotesque figure peering round the edge of the column, as if nothing else around him exists.

The situation is intriguing … Besides, it’s still pouring down, people are dashing on to trams; it is very early … I stand behind Sr Ferrer and try to follow his line of vision round the edge of the column. I can see his nervous beady eye focusing on a doorway at the back of the square. From afar, the doorway seems immersed in a poor yellowish light, but if you watch carefully, you can vaguely glimpse the silhouettes of two people: a man and a woman talking. Or rather: he is talking excitedly and she is motionless,
head bowed, apparently attentive … In any case, they make few gestures. I wonder:
Who are these people Sr Ferrer finds so fascinating?
Unconsciously, or almost, I wonder:
Could it be Sra Paradís? If it is,
I think,
Sr Ferrer is in a really bad way … And who can he be?

Back in the shelter of the arches, I slowly roll a cigarette, light up, and decide to walk past the doorway like a casual passer by. As I draw nearer, I notice a diffuse light floating inside the half dark that’s coming from an oil lamp burning behind the thin curtains of a concierge’s cubbyhole. The woman had her back to the square. However, I easily identified her. It
was
Sra Esperança Paradís. She was wearing her large black velvet hat with a white feather that fell over her back – as was fashionable then – her rabbit-skin boa, brown made-to-measure two-piece, its skirt clinging to her tight butt, black stockings (the ones Don Natali found the most decent and becoming) and shiny gilt shoes. Sra Paradís stood stock still, and was not her usual talkative self: the slope of her shoulders betrayed her deep anxiety. Soon after, when I was opposite the doorway and casually looking in, I recognized the man talking to Sra Paradis. It was Don Joaquim Riera, the man we lodgers called the Neurotic. I was astounded. What were Sra Paradís and Don Joaquim Riera discussing at such an hour, in that gloomy, dubious doorway?

Sr Riera hailed from Castelló de la Plana, where he had once run a successful tobacconist’s shop. In the meantime, he’d won a prize in the lottery, and that coincided with the death of the wife he so adored (his very word). Sr Riera’s wife hadn’t borne him any children but she did own orange groves that were highly productive. As he was forty-eight and alone in that crossfire of misfortune and consolation, he decided to sell up and come to live in Barcelona. He loved the theater and assumed he would find plenty of scope there to satisfy his rabid curiosity.

Riera was a tall, bony, and rather round-shouldered man, with fair to white hair, thick eyebrows, a big, fleshy, red mouth, and somber, deep-set eyes. His prominent forehead created, to the right and left of his parietal bones, snow-white, receding hairlines. He was a forthright fellow, inclined to be sententious, and this seemed linked to his appearance by a broad black sash he wore over his belly – to avoid cold draughts getting to his kidneys, he would say – and a cap the size of a cloud, a smart, wily gypsy’s hat.

From the outside at least, Riera seemed to live untouched by human passions and his only known interest was the pursuit of the country’s theatrical fashions from the gods. I was curious to know why my fellow lodgers had dubbed him the Neurotic, as this name contrasted starkly with the evidence: Riera as an individual gave no grounds for such psychological speculation. I found the name positively strange because one day I spotted him by a fruit stall in the Plaça del Bonsuccés eating a whole huge pink watermelon with great relish. In my psychological researches I have never come across a neurotic keen on eating watermelons whole … Apparently, however, one day in the lodging house Don Natali Verdaguer, seated at the dining table – in the absence of Sr Riera – looked into Sra Paradís’s eyes and made this pronouncement: “Sr Riera?” he queried. “Sr Riera is a neurotic, there is no doubt about that … you just wait and see!”

And from then on everyone called Sr Riera the Neurotic. One assumed that the way Don Natali looked at Sra Paradís when he uttered that judgment indicated he knew “something or other” and wasn’t speaking simply because he liked the sound of his own voice.

The rain finally eased off and I went home.

Supper on that twenty-fifth of April was a supper like so many one has had to ingest. We were served Maggi broth, a round coil of hake and a derisory steak and chips. Followed by a banana or orange – a choice. Sr Ferrer
seemed extremely downcast during the whole of supper and hardly said a word. He ate very little, unenthusiastically.