Life Embitters

by Josep Pla

  The building where the lodging house was ensconced was new, or at least restored, and, like all the new houses built in our country at the time, it wasn’t a solid construction. The wooden frames of the doors and windows had shifted unusually and nothing actually closed; the walls were thinner than a cat’s ear and the neighbors were a constant presence in our lives; at night you felt you were sleeping with somebody else, with complete strangers; it was hard to talk since everything could be heard; the shutters were in guillotine mode and very showy, but, because of what botanists call wood fatigue, they guillotined nothing: neither the feeble pink light of dawn, nor the glow of the streetlights. The shutters were stuck in the sides of the windows and wouldn’t budge up or down however much you pulled the cord. They were ruined guillotines, guillotines that had suffered the chop. The bathroom was a total mystery. No doubt out of fear that the building’s hydraulic system might bring on a catastrophe, it had been decided to keep the family treasures there. In the tub, you could find a plaster Venus de Milo covered in yellow dust; the portrait of the landlady’s deceased husband in a solemn, serious frame, pure graveyard baroque; sickly, spindly potted palms; volumes of jurisprudence from the Reus publishing house, that had been discovered in the bedroom of a hapless candidate for the civil service exams who had committed suicide; umbrellas with broken spokes. A useless, forlorn umbrella in a bathtub is a sorry sight. The sink was practically unusable: if you turned the tap you heard a windy noise come out of the hole, like a half-hearted whistle that seemed to be mocking your presence. A dressing gown hung on the hanger behind the door for ages and nobody knew who it belonged to, but it was too shabby for anyone ever to want to claim it. It was a bathroom that brought on the melancholy of things that are ill-conceived and absolutely gratuitous.

  It was a Valencian establishment, and the lady lording over it was proud and had grand ideas. Her menus were based around the inevitable dish of rice: black rice, paella, and rice in succulent sauce. I still remember the filaments of saffron that floated in those yellow juices. It was a perpetual flow of rice that I strained to digest for days on end. The skyscraper took us to New York, the persistent rice to China. Nonetheless, our landlady was an excellent sort; when it was time to pay, I never saw her adopt a truculent stance. I am convinced our imposing matriarch believed that rice was so important she would have cooked it for free for the whole of humanity. Her generous conception of economics meant that the house was always crowded out. Apart from the usual lodgers, the kitchen was always full of citizens from the ancient kingdom of Valencia who were panting for a plate of rice, and you could always find them there from ten A.M. to midnight.

  Apart from this, the place was a great home to bullfighting. Some huge, genuine, terrifying heads of famous, historic, and listed bulls were nailed up in the four corners made by the passages that went round the patio. If you went down one of these corridors, you would see at the end the head of a noble animal, imbued with a frighteningly real, appallingly live presence. Obviously you became inured to the bulls in the end, because life leads one to adapt to the strangest, unsuspected things, but I never met anyone who could hide a feeling of dread before the eyes, horns, snouts, and magnificent necks of those wild beasts. The main wall of the dining room was dominated by another kind of head, above a gilt inscription, the head of a reddish bull that inspired the same fear as the others in the passageways. The pension was overrun, especially in the winter, by people who were renowned in the bullfighting world. The visit by Don Vicenç Barrera was remembered in the pension for years afterwards. The rice that poured out of the kitchen that day was unbelievable. Two hours after Don Vicenç had disappeared, people were still eating rice at one end or the other of the boarding house, and I even saw one gentleman standing in a passageway eating his plateful.

  One day a huge bus pulled up outside the entrance to the house, painted a canary yellow and upholstered in Cubist style. A large number of individuals tumbled out, clad in their respective overalls, weary and downcast as if they had just been released from jail. A large number of instrument cases were hauled down from the bus roof. They were the personnel and artistic tools of the band, the posters for which I’d seen the other day when strolling down the streets of old Girona. The bus attracted a lot of attention and a large number of spectators gathered outside the doorway. The bystanders’ curiosity soared when they saw two extraordinary characters emerge from the artifact: a giant and a dwarf – genuine items. Both managed a warm smile for the crowd, even if it was a rather tired one after their long journey. Then they walked through the door and settled into the lodging house. The landlady was waiting for them when they walked in: she was radiant and her eyes were shining. It was evidently a great day for her.

  A few hours after this invasion, the house throbbed with their musical outpourings. From one room, the notes of an oboe; from another, of a trombone; flutes, violins, and piccolos flooded the passageways; the trumpets were a boisterous presence; string instruments weren’t in great supply, but the few there were charged the sound waves with their melodious tunes. Although they languished rather – it was late spring – the cornets seemed to give the atmosphere a glow with their bolts of lightning.

  That intense musical activity was initially most pleasant, because sensitive people always aspire to have music in their own homes. However, the days went by and the dense manifestations of music, particularly the plethora of variegated, disconnected exercises, started to pall. The artists were almost all, as I’ve said, from the east coast and as such very fond of eating rice in one shape or form. Pale and feeble when they arrived, they quickly bucked up after the array of differently flavored rice that the establishment offered. The color returned to their cheeks and the sparkle to their eyes. I soon registered how their musical enthusiasm rose in parallel with the improvement in their physique.

  I already knew that Valencians were a tenacious crowd: I now discovered that they expressed their tenacity the minute they clutched a trumpet or clarinet. Thus, the establishment was subject to such a musical onslaught, that was so systematic and continuous the air within its walls filled with a gluey syrup of totally jarring musical effluent where the rippling waves from the strings seemed to love to swim. The time came when we lodgers felt that we were living in another dimension: in a heavy, compacted, and rarified dimension where there seemed room for nothing else. It was as if music invaded everywhere and exerted pressure over everything contained within the pension, a pressure that reduced your living space, that invaded you and drove you from your usual life as if you were a mere object and as if you were gradually being displaced.

  It was plain that there was only one path to take: to move out voluntarily and spend the daytime out in the hope that nightfall would bring a more benign environment. And this is what most lodgers did, apart from three or four delicate souls who couldn’t resist the onslaught and left the pension for good.

  I tried to instigate concerted action with those who resisted with a view to setting out the objective situation to our landlady. My initiative aimed to inform her that if she continued serving those huge quantities of rice, life in her establishment would become literally impossible. I joined forces with a captain from the Cavalry Depot, an Arts student and a second tier civil servant surplus to requirements. The formulating of any critical opinion as to the prowess of the band could have backfired on us, because aesthetic issues are always difficult and thorny. After all, it was their livelihood and that always demands respect. The only option was to take the roundabout route and to manage a reduction in their enthusiasm by gradually decreasing the portions of rice that seemed to guarantee such good results.

  Our landlady, however, was not convinced. I had to emphasize that the pressure was really painful for anyone who wasn’t a complete Valencian. But she was in a state of bliss. The presence of so many artists in her house brought her nothing but joy. As far as she was concerned, it was a matter of sensibility, of whether you had any art in your soul. In that l
ight it was a favorable environment. Favorable and fascinating. It was entirely natural that people devoid of sensibility, and dead to art, should feel rather frayed. That was so natural …! We might as well have whistled till the cows came home … So a dividing line was drawn up: on the one hand, dull vulgarity and on the other, the divine flame of art.

  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 peop
le 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.