Life Embitters

by Josep Pla

  Various tensions immediately surfaced. A number of respectable traits lurked under Olga’s rampant, often silly sentimentality. My hardened cynicism hid an appalling void. Olga was very familiar with my character, but she believed she could turn me into a proper, decent person by dint of her warmth and charm. I had entered matrimony with a clear head and didn’t expect it held anything special for me: at most I hoped to find the orderly pleasure, the benign sense of luxuriousness that Olga created. And that happened: Olga revealed a capacity for amazing self-denial in the smallest things. I lived two months of unforgettable delights.

  However, Olga fell seriously ill and the doctors diagnosed an extremely severe attack of typhoid fever. So now is the time when I must speak loud and clear and tell the whole truth. My character reacted dreadfully to the wretched state Olga Johansen found herself in. I saw her as she was – a monstrous being. Her illness repelled me. I couldn’t jettison my lucidity. My withered, barren heart beat not once in sympathy for her. I was altogether horrified by her illness and my own appalling reaction and, overwhelmed by agonizing sorrow, I abandoned her. I hate to tell you that I decided to do so relatively naturally. It’s the truth and I’m spelling it out so you have an idea of what I’m really like.

  Later, of course … I was obviously stricken with regret, but it was impossible to turn back. It was too late. We’ve not seen each other for fourteen years and I don’t know where she has ended up. And I am now a wandering dreamer, beset by perverse horrors, who would give his life to grasp a moment of tenderness, warmth, and peace of mind.”

  Un Homme Fatal

  In the years I’m talking about – after the ’14 war – well-off people from our country liked to stay in Paris for a while.

  They’d made money from the war and no doubt that’s why people of a certain social standing started to be very curious about things foreign. I don’t think so many people have ever crossed the frontier. Taste – especially the taste of the ladies – improved considerably: these were years when Europe was very influential, especially France.

  Sr Albert Mascarell, a property owner, an affable young gentleman with a decent fortune, decked out in a way that was vaguely reminiscent of country folk, was one of those who “liked to stay in Paris for a while.” However, the motive behind Sr Mascarell’s trip wasn’t any specific hobbyhorse or the need to give rein to a particular mania. His pretext was disappointment in love.

  Mascarell was thirty-four at the time. He had fallen in love with a young lady – with an angel – of nineteen. The initial phase of that business proceeded completely normally. However, she broke off the relationship all of a sudden. She said no in word and deed. Friends on both sides believed that the young lady’s no had been forced upon her. Her father – a gentleman who wore blue spectacles – was a character driven by clear-cut ideas. He was vigorously opposed to his sweet child marrying a recalcitrant bachelor. Every effort was made to persuade him that the difference in years was a secondary matter when the loving couple had reached the age they had; it was argued that in such a situation prophesying always fails and that earthy empiricism yields much better results in issues of love than any general law, however convincing the latter might seem. It was to no avail. He wouldn’t budge.

  People were amazed how easily Mascarell threw in the towel. He had been put to the test, and one naturally imagined he would raise the stakes correspondingly. However, it didn’t happen, and, if I’m not mistaken, the reason was a tiny, almost grotesque incident that seems laughable when spelled out.

  One day the young lady resident in Mascarell’s imagination received a delightful present from a girlfriend: a kitten. A lovely black kitten, a cute kitten. It knew how to play with the shadow of its tail and did so somersaulting in a way that made you split your sides.

  “What will you call it?” asked the friend.

  “I’ll call it Albert …” she answered immediately.

  And, mentally, she told herself: That way I’ll think about him more: whenever I see the cat I’ll think of him; whenever I call it, etc.

  It was an amusing, delightful idea. Except that Mascarell thought it showed a deplorable lack of respect.

  As this episode coincided with her father’s first attempts to create difficulties for their relationship, the two circumstances amounted to a considerable obstacle. However, the detail of the cat never became public knowledge. Most people believed that the only cause of the break had been her father’s opposition. “Mascarell,” said his friends, “couldn’t marry because he’d been a bachelor for so long.” On hearing that opinion voiced, a senior gentleman said one day, “In this world, the further you go, the more you lose.”

  It was after these little upsets that Mascarell decided to spend a while in Paris.

  In Paris, he thought, I will surely find a few distractions …

  On a friend’s recommendation, he lodged in a small hotel on the Boulevard de Montparnasse, on the Avenue de l’Observatoire side. He immediately felt at ease. Everyone reacts differently to experiences, especially to great cities. Mascarell’s reaction to Paris was very sui generis. What impressed him most, to the point of becoming an obsession, were the huge dimensions of the city. Sometimes the bigger a thing is, the more it arouses our curiosity: the more work you have, the more you carve out for yourself. In his The Century of Louis XIV, Voltaire recounts how Minister Colbert would enter his office to find a table strewn with heaps of paper and would rub his hands together, his eyes sparkling brightly; when there were few papers, he would look limp and downcast. The huge dimensions of Paris caused a completely different reaction in Mascarell. Perhaps the city was too much for him, perhaps he didn’t know where to start, perhaps the vastness of the spectacle reduced his curiosity in diametrically reverse proportions. On the other hand, I’ve already mentioned how Mascarell’s presence in Paris didn’t have any specific point to it. I don’t think a visit to the Louvre figured in his plans. A visit to Versailles did; the Louvre, on the other hand, remained regrettably absent from his itinerary.

  The fact is that a week after his arrival in Paris Mascarell had become a man content to be in his quartier. He had trimmed his sails and decided that the district where he lived had everything he needed. A typical man of his kind, he instinctively curbed his excursions. These self-imposed limits came to be quite precise. Whenever he had to go to the great boulevards to carry out a routine bank transaction, he felt he was journeying to the back of beyond. Conversely, it was winter – the end of winter – and it was great fun to be in bed watching the rain or gazing at the faint pink haze that made Paris so lovely. He enjoyed some wonderful mornings. One day he lit a cigarette in bed, something he’d never done before. On another occasion he started reading a book, something he’d only ever done on the rare occasions when convalescing. In any case, he had nothing pressing to do. The two or three visits he’d intended making on acquaintances in Paris – visits he’d been planning to make the second he arrived – were postponed. It would have been difficult to pinpoint the reasons for these deferrals.

  One could possibly sum up the situation like this: after a few days in Paris he felt the atmosphere acted like a ready-made effective tranquillizer, rather than raising his spirits and making him euphoric. This completely unanticipated outcome was a huge shock. When he’d been there two weeks and realized that he still hadn’t been to a night club or boîte de nuit – not even in his own quartier – he was astounded and scratched the back of his neck. He quickly put this down to the natural sense of bewilderment he’d experienced in those first few days. Soon after, when he realized he’d still not entered any such establishment, and didn’t feel the slightest curiosity or desire to cross their thresholds, he started to feel worried. A cursory investigation of this peculiar situation might lead one to conclude that it was caused by sentimental reminiscences afloat in Mascarell’s memory, ones related to the young lady with the kitten. This would be completely unfounded. If any wound opened by that young lady remained unh
ealed it was precisely the humiliation he had suffered – that he described in such terms – when she had been so frivolous as to christen the cat with his name. In other words, that situation was as absurd as ever and, consequently, deteriorated by the day.

  Even so Mascarell didn’t feel out of touch with his new surroundings. He had a decent knowledge of French and expressed himself well enough. Of course, he spoke in a grating, awkward manner and his silent s’s lacked feathery warmth; he spoke French without a twang, without the bass twang of a cello. Naturally, it was also phonetically on the thin side. Nonetheless, everything else was splendid: the shape of his sentences, his vocabulary and their relevance. Like anyone who has studied a language through books, he excelled more in literary turns of phrase than common usage. When he was in a restaurant one day and a gentleman ordered an omelette baveuse he was quite shaken. He thought he knew everything about omelets in French that a foreigner could know. When he realized that an omelette baveuse was an underdone omelet, he was genuinely disgusted. But I think that his disgust was misplaced. One never finds everyday colloquial language in books – that comes with direct contact. At any rate, Mascarell didn’t live incommunicado, that’s for sure.

  How then does one explain the peculiar way he mentally adapted to Paris, his tendency to stay put, his really strange withdrawal, one might almost say, his indifference? I think not even he could shed any light. It was a situation that worried him, the roots of which he couldn’t have explained at all coherently. And now he was in that frame of mind, his mood simply deepened as the days passed. Mascarell befriended the hotel owner. This gentleman soon noticed that this client was relaxed, peaceful, and not at all tapageur, and considered him to be a model customer. When he went in or out, retrieved or deposited his key in his pigeon hole, they exchanged pleasantries. Then one day they started to talk and at length. They finally became good friends. When Mascarell couldn’t think what to do – that was almost all the time – and he felt it wasn’t inopportune, he spent time in the hotel reception area. He sat in the comfy chair and when he wasn’t talking to Monsieur Paul – that being the owner’s name – he was distracted by movements in and out of the door.

  Monsieur Paul was a tall, stout man with splendid bones, aged by arthritis and the sedentary life, just like his establishment. The Hotel Niort, however, was a small furnished hotel like hundreds more in Paris, and Monsieur Paul’s corpulent frame was too much for the modest size of the establishment. He’d have been better off in the generous spaces of a large hotel than in the minute area of his own tiny reception where he hardly fit. Blue-eyed and ashen-haired with a sulfur-colored mustache, he dressed like an hotelier – black jacket and pin-striped trousers. He was very given to outbursts of patriotic sentiment and speechifying, his fulsome eloquence flowed easily.

  He was a man who lived in a constant bad temper. He had already once retired from business – retired to Normandy – but the war had shot down all his projects: his lack of sufficient funds had forced him to resume work for a second time, something that visibly made him indignant. He let off steam denigrating the government of the Republic and, generally, politics throughout the world. At first Mascarell listened with interest and then, as he began to grasp the drift of his sarcastic remarks, he became enthralled.

  In a private, completely hidden way, Mascarell reveled in the harangues of Monsieur Paul. This gentleman was forever complaining: poor business, the growing demands of the taxman, lack of activity, and wretched profits. Monsieur Paul talked about this obsessive situation in a monotonous, bitter tone. In fact, it was precisely this pessimistic litany that most pleased Mascarell – he received a physical boost because it so contrasted with his own individual fortunes. He had come to Paris, having done his sums, that is, he knew he could spend a (considerable) amount weekly, an amount he intended to withdraw in successive tranches from the big bank on the boulevard. In fact, his sums hadn’t worked out in a quite admirable way. Mascarell spent, had spent much less – less than half – what he had budgeted for. This filled him with ineffable joy that he kept under wraps. He was in Paris and was saving money! It was an impressive outcome. He would sometimes while away his time wondering whether this astonishing situation had entailed sacrifices, hardships, or the curbing of one desire or another and was forced to admit that the life he was leading was exactly the one he liked. He wouldn’t have aspired to anything else or wanted it otherwise. So, Monsieur Paul’s somber, funereal harangues delighted him because they made him realize the excellent, positive path his own private affairs had taken. The longer Monsieur Paul’s face, the greater was Mascarell’s secret delight. One of the most naked sides to cruelty in this world is the value things assume only by virtue of such contrasts. Mascarell summed up his state of mind with a line that barely did him any credit: “I’d never have thought that I was so intelligent …”

  Fortunately, his observation never reached the outside world.

  It was Monsieur Paul who introduced him to Fanny.

  Fanny was Catalan. She lived in the hotel by herself and had been in Paris for many years. Monsieur Paul thought Mascarell would like to meet a compatriot, who was a good customer and someone else who barely made any tapage. Mascarell was intrigued by Fanny. Via a strange process, the fact she was a compatriot led him to think that Fanny, like himself, belonged to the quartier. Fanny was in her early thirties – maybe thirty-three – short, plump, with black hair, bright eyes, a pale complexion and a freckle on her left cheek, and perhaps an overly showy sense of dress. She gave off a wonderful smell of scented soap and was good company. Fanny worked in an office on the Rue Richelieu, but Monsieur Paul told Mascarell that her earnings had been running her short for months.

  In Paris romances of the time, Fanny’s physical type was much in demand. Years later, taller, willowy women, with more elongated behinds, were in vogue. Fanny’s name was really Eulàlia. She had made the switch to make pronunciation easier. And this was one of the first things she confessed to Mascarell. Her confession led Mascarell to raise an eyebrow: he thought it was her way of opening the path to friendship, even to intimacy.

  What most struck him was the way she acted like young girls in his country fifteen years ago: she could play the piano just a little, excelled at sewing and knitting, particularly in the use of sequins; she spoke lovingly about her mother, was fond of things fried in bread crumbs with the white of an egg, and enthused about cheap prints; her handwriting was full of curlicues and she could quote two dozen pretty little poems. On the other hand, she hated anything connected with cooking. As far as she was concerned, cooking was a most vulgar occupation. She believed that the French obsession with cooking was vulgar.

  Mascarell found Eulàlia’s company very agreeable. He made the most of every opportunity to accost her. Fresh information about her way of life didn’t make him at all critical. Quite the opposite. The moment came – very soon – when he decided that she was totally good news.

  Eulàlia could be very up and down. She sometimes seemed tired and despondent and then her attitude might be rather curt and off-putting. On the other hand, she had days when she was wonderfully animated, with a frivolous allure. Mascarell preferred her when he could see she was depressed and tense – even though he had to suffer the consequences – to when she was smiling and laughing. Like all serious people – and Mascarell was a terribly serious fellow – he believed that other people should be equally serious.

  “Do you see this?” Eulàlia laughed, with a sparkle in her eyes and moist lips, pointing to the freckle on her left cheek.

  “Yes.”

  “It brings bad luck.”

  “Why so?”

  “Because it just does.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The cards.”

  “But do you read the cards?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “My lord!”

  “Don’t be so solemn, you boor!”

  And she burst out laughing, and that prevented Mas
carell from putting his foot into it a second time. He had been about to spell out the reasons why one shouldn’t read the cards, or believe in them. If he’d done that, he’d only have proved that this world is a vale of tears. That would have pleased Mascarell much more than seeing Eulàlia look happy and vivacious.

  That day they’d met by the hotel entrance when the streetlights were being switched on. It had been a warm, silken April day. The early blossom on the trees augured delicious bliss.

  “Mascarell,” said the young lady. “You should invite me to dinner …”

  “What do you mean?” replied an astonished Mascarell, sounding unfortunately tetchy.

  Eulàlia was taken aback. Mascarell immediately corrected his inexplicable faux pas.

  “Of course, I should invite you to dinner. But are you sure you’re not joking?”

  “Not likely! I’m hungry and could do with a good dinner.”

  “What time suits you?”

  “How about half past seven here?”

  “Fine.”

  They met at the agreed time. They reached the Boulevard Saint-Michel via the Avenue de l’Observatoire, scented by the fluff drifting down from the magnificent chestnut-trees, and along the wrought iron fence around the Luxembourg – the gardens were closed. They went into the brasserie that was so renowned for its cuisine, opposite the Fontaine Médicis.

  On that long walk Mascarell showed himself to be a gallant man, but one who said little. He was a man of few words – and even more so when accompanied by a woman. Eulàlia – who was having a good day – began two or three frankly flippant conversations with a spontaneity that was frankly delightful. One couldn’t have imagined a better aperitif than those conversations. The effect on Mascarell was counter-productive. He became quieter and more withdrawn than usual.