Life Embitters

by Josep Pla

  Living so close to such diverse people often made me think about myself and my own make up. After thinking so much about others, it is only reasonable to try to discover how one stands oneself. Whenever I’ve engaged in this exercise – that is often – I’ve found that an impulse has intervened between my mental system and inner self to stop me delving further. When I am observing others, my system performs more or less correctly. When I observe myself, the logic guiding my mechanisms for introspection immediately veer away from central issues to focus on peripheral matters often located far from the center. As soon as I examine, for example, a particular tendency of mine, some rationale will surface to block my self-scrutiny. They are two inseparable, interconnected movements, locked in a devilish game that prevents any kind of enlightenment. These rationales that surface automatically when we attempt to elucidate or clarify any act we commit are always persuasive, plausible, and sufficient unto the day. The logic driving our self-scrutiny, that cold analytical detachment, is immediately erased by the plausibility of these rationales, however vague and symbolic they may be. In the face of this mental turmoil people always appeal to their instinct for self-preservation. The latter is more powerful and efficient in people’s mental lives than in their merely physical activities. Consequently, it is extremely difficult to form a clear idea of oneself. Life unravels in the mental confusion caused by the instinct for self-preservation. Within the natural limits of our imagination and the imperfection that life always brings, we can succeed in getting to know someone else. Self-knowledge is extremely difficult. Analytical detachment is for others. We cannot apply it to ourselves.

  We are hugely susceptible to the opinions of others and they bolster our instinct for self-preservation. When Mlle Georgette said the other day, at an intimate moment – it was summer, the heat was stifling, the barometer in the nearby pharmacy swung low and the first lightning in a dramatic electric storm flashed across the sky – that I seemed to be an upstanding fellow in terms of her experience of life, I immediately thought she was right. Or rather: while Mlle Georgette was delivering her judgment, I was convinced that she was mistaken, that she wasn’t right. However my mental system was immediately swamped by so many arguments and rationales to justify the remark I’d just heard, that within seconds of it being uttered it rang completely true. When one coldly dissects the sentence, its lack of substance, its puerility, hits you between the eyes. To say that someone has a hint of this or that is to say very little. But it makes no difference. Cold detachment is futile, isn’t profitable. We see ourselves enthusiastically, warmly. The rest is of no interest.

  What would have happened if she’d given her words the opposite meaning? If she had formulated her sentence in these terms: “You are a worthless two-timer”? We wouldn’t have believed them, and, if we’d wanted Mlle Georgette to express a more favorable opinion of ourselves, we’d have pleaded, “Mademoiselle, I would really like your opinion of me to be closer to reality. Hear me out, I beg you …” And we would have made our confession. Naturally, many factors would have influenced the authenticity of this piece of rhetoric – the weather and many others. I don’t wish to deny, a priori, that a genuine confession isn’t possible. I am simply saying that every confession also forms part of our instinct for self-preservation – one of the key ingredients of which is self-esteem – and that every confession is shaped by a burden of watertight, plausible excuses. Thus we are very accepting of the opinions of others, provided they are ones we approve of. If they are not, our level of acceptance is nil and we reject them wholesale.

  Our mental confusion is dense and dark. Life is a black hole. To judge by the efforts we make to cling to the wall, we should agree that we find obscurity amusing. Other people are subject to change, but amusing. The distractions one provides oneself are perhaps less interesting, and often of no interest at all. We go through life, not knowing who we are – and that must be why there are so many surprises. Other people, in contrast, are a mine, a mine that proves so inexhaustible we often can’t stand one another. The walls of 145 Boulevard Saint Michel were too thin – thin as a cat’s ear, naturally.

  What You Might Expect: Nothing

  Once we were past Orléans, I went into the corridor. The heat was stifling. What’s more, I’d had to listen to the long story told me by the man opposite. That gentleman had recounted in grisly detail how an excess of caution and fear had led him to lose his fortune. Such tales are quite normal – particularly in France – but most people find them pathetic. I personally dislike the philosophical and moral conclusions that are usually drawn. Nothing could be worse than melancholy generalizations about this world inspired by events on the home front. When I left the compartment, this passenger had just embarked on a series of literary considerations. He would then ride roughshod over the moral or ethical terrain. Then other passengers would say their piece … I stood up, because any conversation in a train will inevitably create a necessary feeling of contempt among fellow travelers.

  The corridor was cloaked in semi-darkness. People were asleep in many compartments and lights had been switched off. There was a dim bluish light in the next-door compartment. I sat on one of those fold-up seats by the window. It was a pitch-black night with not a star in sight. The train was flying along. Every now and then station lights suddenly lit up the coach. Windows would be peopled by fleeting, elongated shapes, brass handrails glinted yellow, luminous pus from the electric glow hurt your eyes, as if the train were crossing a fire.

  I lowered the window – to pass the time. The draught blew under my clothes and I shivered with cold. As I was returning to my place, the door to the compartment with the blue light opened. The door was opposite my seat. I heard a pardon uttered with obvious surprise. I looked round. A youngish-looking lady was standing in front of me, apparently not knowing what to do. She was carrying three or four items. I invited her to step inside. I watched her lean against the glass preparing to inject three or four drops of perfume into a cigarette. The thin, nickel-plated syringe looked like a surgical instrument. The phial of perfume was soft and misshapen and seemed terribly organic. The juddering of the train meant the needle pierced three cigarettes in a row.

  “Do you mind holding this for a moment …?” she asked with a laugh, throwing her head back and handing me a packet of English cigarettes.

  “So you like scented tobacco?” I asked, by way of response.

  “What do you think?” she replied, averting her gaze and inhaling a few drops of perfume. “It’s the fashion …”

  While she injected perfume, I looked at her. She was a twenty-two- or three-year-old woman, and rather tall, blonde, extremely refined, elegant according to the latest taste, and intriguing. She was a woman one imagined had led a full life. Her eyes were green and her nose pert and teasing, a nose that Parisian women have transformed into a divine je ne sais quoi. Moreover, I thought she must surely have a sense of humor. While she was looking me up and down, her eyes quite naturally met mine and I realized that she’d been crying not too long ago. I was fascinated and stared back into her eyes. She noticed and I had no choice but to ask something so as not to seem rude.

  “Aren’t you sleepy?”

  “No, even if I were, I wouldn’t sleep. I get to my station at two.”

  “You’re getting off in Limoges?”

  “That’s right.”

  She smoked with a mixture of nerves and disgust and shreds of tobacco stuck to her tongue and made her grimace. Her eyes stared into the pitch black outside. If a light shone, she followed it with her eyes. Once the train whistled through a station and she instinctively put her hands over her eyes and looked saddened. I saw her as one of those sensitive bundles of nerves that often hide beneath undulating mother-of-pearl flesh in Paris. As I write these lines, I reflect upon how easily she got under my skin. Now, can anyone be more alluring than a woman whose acquaintance you’ve just made? Then more likely than not it all collapses and she doesn’t seem interesting at all.
A first conversation is always delightfully euphoric, and shamelessly oblivious to all else.

  “You’re feeling sad …” I said staring at her. “I noticed you’d been crying …”

  “Oh, no …” she said, sounding surprised, looking at me, and then looking away. She regained her composure and before I could reply said: “So you want to know if I was crying? You don’t seem the nosey kind …”

  “That’s right. I’m not.”

  “Not even in a train?” she asked, flashing her pinkish green eyes.

  “Perhaps a tiny bit in a train. Long journeys are so boring! They ought to install bars in trains, and poker tables.”

  “Or a dance floor.”

  “What can I say? I think not. I’m against any kind of sport. People dance so well it’s difficult to relax when you’re looking at them.”

  “You’re so vain!”

  “Not true. I’m not vain at all, and that’s probably why I’m not interested in women.”

  “I don’t understand …”

  “It’s obvious enough. Don’t you agree it is vanity that leads men to approach women?”

  “So is it vanity that’s making you talk to me now?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And nothing else?”

  When she asked that, I simply stared at the ceiling; I couldn’t think what to say. For a moment I felt like replying: “I’m talking to you in order to kill time …” but I thought that would have seemed far too brutal. Then, I felt like saying, in tremulous tones: “I was fantastically interested in you; if you are prepared to hear a declaration of love …”

  My sense of the ridiculous intervened and swept away my beautiful words. How pitiful and sad.

  She probably took pity on me, because she went on to ask, as if nothing was amiss: “And what might the advantages be?”

  “There’s the huge pride at a done deal. Above all, you mustn’t mistake the smoke for the fire. Think about pure movement, about love. Love is one of the most ingenuous forms of vanity. We bond …”

  “You might just as well say ‘we marry’ …”

  “Are you married?”

  “Imagine that I am. Go on …”

  “Well, we marry to ensure we have a dedicated, understanding, enraptured audience. We always need somebody to listen to us.”

  “This is all very convoluted.”

  “Explanations of such things are always very convoluted. But don’t you think this is crystal-clear? Can you conceive of a theater without an enthusiastic audience?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing much, really … When we meet a woman who will listen to us we say she is in love with us …”

  “Is that all?”

  “Well, that she is listening one-hundred percent. Sometimes, she only appears to be listening. The more compliments we receive, the greater the arguments we provoke, the more loved we feel. Love is never a dialogue …”

  “So it’s a monologue then?” she asked, laughing sadly.

  “True love, absolute love is never anything but an absurdly selfish monologue in the presence of a spectator who takes an interest or who we think takes an interest in the things we are saying …”

  “You reduce everything to a spectacle the audience always approves of … and what happens if the audience answers back and speaks her mind?”

  “Well, I hardly need tell you that nobody finds it pleasant to be contradicted. What do you expect? We don’t like … I’m talking, in general terms, about people in a good state of health. I’ve sometimes felt pleasure at being annoyed. When I’ve felt like that, it’s because I was sick …”

  “And do you think nothing can ever be mutual?”

  “No, it’s a monologue, pure show. The person talking feels pleased that someone is listening. Other people’s sensuality is in the listening. I will go that far. Other people’s vanity is completely out of my control. In any case, it must be like mine: huge!”

  “But isn’t love also about listening a little?”

  “Listening to what?”

  “To what a woman is saying, for example …”

  “But do women ever say anything?”

  “You are so unfair! One of the most astonishing things in this world is the wonderful flexibility of a woman in love …”

  “In novels, for sure …”

  “And in trains sometimes …”

  “But don’t you find,” I replied, not rising to the bait, “that, if they listen to you and at the same time find pleasure in so doing, that the harmony is too great for one to say it is love?”

  “Why do you over-complicate things so? Reciprocity isn’t an unattainable ideal. It exists.”

  “Yes, it exists, but it’s no longer love. It has become a habit, like eating everyday at the same time with the same person …”

  She lowered the window and put her head out, with a cigarette between her lips. The cigarette burst into flame and the sparks flew into her hair. I rushed to put them out with my hand. Her very short hair felt silken. My hand fell slowly from her hair to her neck. She looked at me in distress, but not in anger.

  “Why were you crying?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer. She shut the window and tidied her hair. In the meantime I said rather sarcastically: “Being in love is so sad …”

  “I’m not in love.”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “In what way?”

  “You seem anxious, extremely worried, and are smoking nervously …”

  I stopped, amazed by my ability when it comes to trying my luck. I’d astonished myself, as somebody who is so shy on terra firma and such a chatterbox in a train corridor, and at that time of night. It was obviously the train. Everyone becomes charming and dreamy-eyed on a train, not to say bold and daring. I couldn’t stop looking into her green eyes.

  “Why do you keep looking at me like that?”

  “You’re so interesting. Besides, I think I’ve seen you …”

  “I can’t possibly be of interest to you. Where did you see me?”

  “In Le Jardin du Luxembourg. I live in Montparnasse.”

  “I live quite close. On the Avénue d’Orléans.”

  “You’re very lucky. It’s a delightful place.”

  “Too bourgeois, perhaps; too manicured, and rather exhausting.”

  “Lots of teachers …”

  “Yes, we’re all quite mad. We’re a band of harmless dreamers. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “But it’s so pretty. The trees on the Avénue d’Orléans are such a warm green, I know a restaurant where the food is excellent, the children are so angelic. Do you have any children?”

  “Any children?” she repeated, shocked.

  “You’re married …”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “If you had a child, you’d be asleep in your compartment now …”

  “Maybe. Who can say!”

  “That’s the solution.”

  “The solution to what?”

  “To marriage.”

  She stared at me, after a pause: “Do you think so? Do you speak from experience?”

  “No, not from experience. I simply think …”

  “It’s such fun talking about other people’s problems.”

  “No, I am really interested in these things.”

  “It’s not worth the candle. Life is so fickle. Nothing holds up, or at least very little. If you’re unfortunate enough to harbor expectations …”

  “I want to put on a bold front, at the very least.”

  Suddenly: “Look, the moon is coming out …”

  I opened the window and we both put our heads outside. She pointed to the glow on the horizon. With her arm still reaching into the darkness she asked, “Is it the moon?”

  “I don’t know … If it is, it’s a very strange moon.”

  “Perhaps it’s the glow from Limoges.”

  “No, that’s another hour.”

  “Still!”r />
  “Are you in a hurry?”

  “If only you knew!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing! It’s not worth …”

  I looked insistently at her. I did find that woman interesting. Conversely, I needed to kill time. I didn’t know how. We started to talk about other things. What didn’t we talk about? Our journey went on like that, for ages.

  Where were we when the dramatic moves took place? We can’t have been far from Limoges. All of a sudden she looked at me, and laughed so sadly as she asked: “Where are you going?”

  “To Barcelona.”

  “Why don’t you keep me company in Limoges? I’d really like that.”

  I was dumbfounded and thought I must be hallucinating. Then I replied, “Will you be there long?”

  “Why? Won’t you keep me company if I stay very long?”

  “If one wants to be your friend, one shouldn’t have other commitments, right?”

  “Oh, I see! You’ve lots to do.”

  “I thought I did a few seconds ago.”

  “Thank you so much. I’ll stay in Limoges for a day – in fact, not in Limoges really. Tomorrow I have to go to a nearby town, to Le Dorat. If you like, we can go together.”

  The train was entering the station.

  “Take your luggage. Get off,” she said forcefully. “You’ve time …”

  Half a minute later I was on the platform with my things. I put my cases in the left-luggage and we left the station. It was three A.M.

  The Hôtel du Commerce carriage started off over cobblestones that were extremely worn. We clattered up and down. We were alone. I was young and admit to feeling very excited. We said nothing for a good while. She still seemed to have that sad smile on her lips. I was quietly trying to assume what one could describe as a victory in language that wasn’t at all boastful. That’s to say, I looked quite detached.

  “Can I ask you something?” I queried, given the situation.