by Josep Pla
“Ask away …”
“Can you tell me why you asked me to get off in this town?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Naturally.”
“You’re so childish … Why do you want to know?”
“Maybe I am, but please tell me why you made me get off …”
“You really want me to?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll tell you in brief. You guessed that I am married. It’s true. This is my first journey anywhere since I married. And, you know, I’m convinced that my husband will deceive me today. I asked you to accompany me … in case you want to deceive him …”
“That’s odd …” I replied after a short pause, turning bright red and quivering.
“Do you really think so?” she asked with a glint in her eyes. “I feel it’s altogether natural.”
“You may be right. It’s not surprising, however, if I fell bemused. It’s hardly an everyday occurrence.”
“I’ll be even more precise,” she said, getting up and sitting next to me. “I can tell you that I know the person with whom my husband is going to deceive me: she’s a very close friend of mine … And you asked me whether I’d been crying. For God’s sake!”
I felt very uneasy and quite at a loss. On the one hand, I was intrigued by the situation, it seemed a delightful adventure, and I felt thrilled to be involved. On the other, I felt very sorry for that woman. By virtue of a perfectly understandable atavistic instinct we find it particularly repellent when horrible things happen to people who are physically attractive. I could so easily have condemned the arrant frivolity of her unfaithful husband. Conversely, I was rather upset that she’d revealed her hand. I was to blame. I felt as if I’d acted like a complete animal. Familiarity with the elements that lay behind this adventure considerably diminished my victory airs. I no longer looked detached. I looked angry.
With that, the carriage stopped outside the entrance to the hotel.
I asked for two rooms. They didn’t have two next door to each other. They were all a distance away. They gave us two on the same floor.
“Is any food available?” she asked.
“I’ll have a look,” said the concierge, leaving his desk.
He brought us bread and chocolate.
“That’s all there is …” he commented, as if to pre-empt any complaints, as he climbed upstairs. We ate while we followed him. He showed us first my room and then hers.
“Is there a bathroom?” she asked offhandedly.
“Of course, it’s that door there.”
When the concierge left, we were alone again. She took off her gloves, coat, and hat and continued eating her chocolate, seated on the side of the bed. I sat on a chair near the door. We began a rather icy exchange. Then she suddenly exclaimed: “I’m so upset to be here …!”
“What are you thinking?”
“It’s horrible …” she answered, misty-eyed.
“What’s so upsetting?”
“I’m thinking about my husband … It’s so shaming!”
“I must say I don’t really understand your husband,” I said, looking the other way.
“What do you expect? That’s life. I didn’t have any great hopes when I married him, but all the same … So soon! Though I saw it coming … It was inevitable. My husband is a man. It was so easy to have my friend. I’m sure …”
“Please allow me to make an observation …” I said, unable to restrain myself any longer. “I’d simply like to say that you seem to attach a lot of importance to your husband. I’m surprised …”
“I don’t understand …”
“Do you love him?”
“A lot.”
“Have you always loved him?”
“Right now I think I love him more than ever.”
“I wouldn’t like to contradict you, but what you’re saying strikes me as ridiculous.”
She blanched, seemed taken aback, and stared vaguely in my direction. Silence. We both looked at the floor. A long time went by. Finally I stood up.
“Would you excuse me for a second? I’d like to sort my things out.”
I left her bedroom.
I cursed myself as I washed my hands. This completely unexpected conversation had thrown me back into my previous unpleasant state of confusion. I’d been terribly annoyed by what she’d said about her husband. How could you square what she’d just said with what she’d said before? Unfortunately, the tendency to see things in their most favorable light tends to win out, and guile even more so. For a moment I even concluded she might think her words were a kind of aphrodisiac. However, the nagging doubt remained: what if she had spoken the truth? What exactly was my role? I decided that my shyness made me look quite stupid. Why – I wondered – didn’t you throw yourself at her? Her willingness is quite apparent. She is emphatic on that front. She won’t resist. She doesn’t want anything else, probably … We’re all made of the same clay and know how appallingly cynical the human imagination can be. On the other hand, I didn’t like the idea that I was playing a merely instrumental role in all that. My vanity was up in arms. Today, if it were to happen again, I’d probably not be so vain. Experience has since taught me that the best tactic when offered fruit from the tree of life is to dive straight in and not stand on ceremony. Caution often creates unpleasant situations one later regrets. When I think back to the outcome of this episode, I feel sad, even today.
So then: I left my bedroom, ready for action, even if I felt totally at a loss. I remember taking my watch out in the passage, as I tiptoed along, and saying like Stendhal’s Sorel: “This woman must be mine in the next three minutes.”
I came to a halt in front of her door, and while I listened I put my hand on the key that was in the key-hole. It was on the outside. She’d left it there. So, the door was open. All I had to do was turn the key and walk in. I heard a soft sound inside. The moment was ripe. A small push …
I went so far as to wrap my fingers round the key. Perhaps I even made the effort to turn it. Perhaps I just thought I did. My heart thudded. My wide-open eyes almost touched the wood as a thousand things flashed through my head. I’d been upset by what she said about her husband and it was paralyzing me. The fact I was standing there for exactly the same reasons anyone else might have stood there stopped me in my tracks. I was tortured by vanity. Only fear of acting the fool led me on. However, unfortunately, on that occasion, it wasn’t strong enough to induce a state of semi-consciousness and drive me on. I didn’t turn the key. I looked at my watch. I heard her getting into bed. Five minutes passed. I took my hand away from the keyhole and wiped my forehead. Then returned to my bedroom with a parched mouth.
The following morning we met in the hotel restaurant. When I appeared, I thought she gave me look of surprise.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked with a smile.
“Very well, and how about yourself?”
“I slept very little. I wrote a letter to my husband.”
“A long one?”
“A very long one.”
“A love letter?”
“A bit of everything.”
“Are you happy? Have you seen how wonderful the weather is?”
“Very.”
“If only we could have this weather in Paris!”
We caught the local train to Le Dorat at two o’clock. We were alone in the compartment. Leaning back on my shoulder, smoking her scented cigarettes, she recounted her life story. I don’t remember the detail. It was a warm, bright, beautiful day. I listened to her in a state of wonder. I alighted at one station and made a bouquet with roses that were growing on a border and gave it to her. The whole journey was enchanting. When she laughed, I laughed. When she told me of her sorrows, my eyes moistened – genuinely.
I have a very vague memory of Le Dorat. When we reached the town, we went our different ways. She said she had two hour’s business at the notary’s. She mentioned a restaurant on a square that I have forgotten. We agr
eed we’d meet at seven for supper. I wandered through the town at random. I’d lost my taste for the peace and tranquility of the countryside and felt overjoyed. The fresh air stung my face. The town seemed almost dead. I skirted round the church, walked down three or four deserted streets, then stopped to breathe in the smell of the hayricks, of lucerne, and hay in the stables. A dark, gloomy building stood outside the town: it was an abandoned monastery. A low, long wall enclosed a meadow with short grass behind the monastery. Ten or twelve mares, horses, and colts were grazing there. The colts were jumping, running, and pointing their noses at the sky and then cavorting on the ground. One mare had a bell around her neck that rang sweetly. Glistening dark green giant chestnut trees towered over the far end of the meadow. I leaned on the wall and contemplated the enclosure for a long time, amazed by the beauty of the land I seemed to be rediscovering and by the ineffable sounds of twilight.
The restaurant was a real find. I was so hungry! We ate an omelet, chicken legs, and a slice of ripe Brie. We downed a bottle of Burgundy – the best in the world. Then we drank the restaurant’s own cognac, with chasers.
A poorly lit train that took us back to Limoges. The movement of our carriage was lulling us to sleep. For one last time she placed her head on my chest.
“This is really nice …” she said, her eyes half-closed.
“Are you sleepy?”
“I feel really wonderful …”
A moment later I could hear her breathing deeply and see her chest swelling like the belly of a bird. She had dozed off.
We had to dash out of the waiting room in Limoges. The Paris train had just arrived.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her by the door. “I didn’t find the time to ask you your name …”
“Don’t worry. Just forget me.”
“Why?”
“We’ve spent a pleasant day together. What else do you want?”
“You’re selfish …”
“Why try to complicate life? Do you really think it’s worth it?”
“Won’t we see each other ever again?”
“Who can know?”
“Bon voyage.”
“You too …”
I stayed in love with that woman for over a year. Then, everything gradually faded and her memory disappeared in the gray mists of weeks, months, and years.
A Case Study
It must be some fifteen years since I lost touch with my friend, Romaní, I mean my writer friend Romaní, who once had quite a reputation in Barcelona, a reputation that has been completely lost today. But lo and behold I discovered not long ago that he was a consul living far from the high life in a town in a South American republic. I wrote to him recalling our old friendship and the hours we spent in Paris, dreaming, chatting, being foreign correspondents, and engaging in other notional employment. I even asked him to tell me about his wife, the divine Olga Johansen of my youth, and her love for Romaní that I had the pleasure of witnessing in that now remote era. Romaní’s reply was both lengthy and disturbing. Here you have it:
“My dear, long-forgotten friend, I received your kind letter. I thank you for your good wishes and invitation to tell you about aspects of my life. On various occasions I’ve felt tempted to commit to paper the ins and outs of my dreadful dramas if only to clear my own mind. I’ve tried a hundred and one times and never succeeded. I don’t know if this fresh attempt will be more fortunate. I’m not optimistic. You should know from the outset that my marriage to Olga Johansen lasted barely three months; we’ve not seen each other for fourteen years and I don’t know where she is now.
I was thirty when I first met Olga. By then the whole panoply of feelings and inhibitions, vanity and fear, deceit and truth that make up what is called character had crystallized into a definitive shape. I was a man of unmistakable, clearly delineated traits. Previous years had nurtured this process of personal development, and one could say that everything had conspired over time to make me a man who was allergic to social life, without a scrap of bonhomie.
By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, first constantly, then sporadically, I began to experience the pressurized though highly fragile nature of family life in our country.
My father was a trader. He was totally obsessed with making money. The only thing that really made him happy – the one and only thing! – was buying and selling. Speculation, in a word. He himself would say that nothing else existed in the world worth wasting his time on. As he was investing in turbulent times – the years of the First World War – he was affected by the considerable ups and downs in the situation. When things were wonderful, he became eloquent, chatty, was cocksure as a rooster on a haystack and ingratiatingly pleasant. Money flowed through our home like water, and we spent with never a thought for tomorrow. It was obnoxious.
When, for reasons I could never quite fathom, there was a sudden downturn, he’d become sarcastic, violent, insecure, and indescribably devious. Our life changed.
I never saw my father speak seriously to my mother about anything. They were always locked in intricate, allusive exchanges, full of icy reticence, endless deferrals, and constant ambiguities – symptoms of a broken, irreparable situation that nevertheless remained stable.
Given all that, I don’t think you’ll be surprised if I tell you that my respect for my father rapidly plummeted. Indeed, I came to suspect he was one of the silliest, most frivolous men ever. The drama of adolescence derives from the stubborn degree of seriousness that comes with awareness of the onset of full manhood. I was irritated by my mother’s passivity. I couldn’t understand her. I made her cry so often! I made her cry for the pure fun of it, out of an almost intellectual pleasure, out of my complete ignorance of a situation I couldn’t grasp and that was highly complex. I thought I was right! I was a real brute! When I later reflected on these futile acts of cruelty, I decided they must be the root of my present skepticism. I made my mother suffer far too much with my atrociously simple-minded comments, I then thought I was duty-bound to ignore other people’s points of view.
Life in our family thus lacked any sense of mutual support, and that’s so common in our country I’ve sometimes wondered whether our people, who at street-level seem just like any other, aren’t a primitive tribe in disguise at home.
By the age of ten I’d left home to study for my high-school diploma. If you asked me why I started to study for this diploma, I’d be in a quandary. I can only confess that I was one of those designated by Divine Providence to pursue such esoteric studies. I became familiar with life as a boarder at a religious school. Like almost the whole country, we abided by the official state religion, which brought certain social commitments one had inevitably to fulfill. There was more leeway with regards to others. But that was the least of it. Children are annoying and if one wants a quiet life, better keep them at a distance when the time comes. We were all sent away to school, so my father could devote himself wholeheartedly to his fascinating, passionate life as primitive man. He became involved in a frantic round of activity and apparently experienced an excellent, most worthwhile phase. He earned lots of money. It was such a good period we were able to travel with my mother and a maid on long spells of holidays. That must have been the best part of their lives.
I became a solitary soul. At boarding school I learned a few things that gave the final touches to my character. I learned to be self-reliant, to make my bed and not trust other people. Whenever I became involved in other people’s business or offered to help strangers, I came off badly. Everybody plowed his own furrow and did so with lucid single-mindedness.
When I was ill, I made every effort to stop them from telling anyone. I thought they’d pay me a dutiful visit, and their polite smiles would hardly hide the annoyance the journey and visit had caused. If my mother had come – and she most certainly would have – she’d have been deplorably upset when I started to argue the moment my temperature went down. My liking for loutish behavior is beyond words. Nonetheless, at the age of sixteen, m
y solitude led me to believe wholeheartedly that it was a grave error to fall ill and that physical pain is an outrage.
In the meantime, things led me naturally to find pleasure in a detached life of contemplation and the spectacle of the countryside. That coincided with the crisis of adolescence that was dramatic, if short-lived. I remember how when I was at boarding school, during a trip to the mountains, three friends and I escaped and ran for three hours in order to beat the others to the scary scenario of the sleazy walls of a filthy brothel. The inevitable upshot soon came, and I was expelled at the age of fifteen for various reasons, for being irreligious and other less acceptable attitudes. At any rate I have to say that three-hour chase was the pinnacle of my sporting life.
I started university in Barcelona, amid frightful chaos and uproar. I chose one degree rather than another, because I thought it would give me more time to do whatever I felt like doing. You need to idle a lot to acquire a proper level of sensitivity. I must say that I guessed right. I turned into a Lord Nelson of lethargy. The enormous freedom I enjoyed at the time so went to my head it prevented me from making the most of it. I met no obstacles and nobody crossed my path able to interest me in anything in particular with convincingly clear arguments. I let myself go and spread myself around – without provoking dramatic crises – as if I’d been living through a shipwreck. I hardened into a young man who couldn’t think what to do with himself. I became a kind of orchestrated fool.
At the time I read somewhere – perhaps it was Stendhal – that vanity was a powerful fillip, a kind of universally valued corset for people with a bad stoop. I tried it but the ridiculous figure I cut made me a laughing-stock, and I doubt anyone could have laughed so much at himself as I did. Meanwhile, I saw so many women, heard so much money chinking about, and watched so much mediocrity pass by, that I came to feel that social life wasn’t at all important. I’d sometimes hear someone talk, their pockets brimful of books and papers, about taking over society and I’d laugh in their faces. Others told me – guffawing or in tears – of their spectacular entrances or shameful retreats in society at large. What nonsense! They all seemed the same, all wore the same expressions. I gave them a wide berth and kept my lips sealed. Vice couldn’t budge me, nor could much-praised virtue. My state of mind might have led me to try out firsthand the life of a Franciscan, concretely, by dispatching me to a seminary. I lacked various qualities: imagination, faith in culture and systems, and perhaps my health wouldn’t have survived such an orderly life. I lived like a saint, and if I occasionally kicked at the traces, it was because I was afraid of being too Spartan: I was too fond of all that. My spirit craved the rigorous exercise of returning home exhausted, indignant, and ashamed, after a night’s debauchery. But for that, it was as if I lived outside society and couldn’t have cared less what other men got up to.