by Josep Pla
An important Catalan lived in Lisbon at the time: Don Plató Peig. Sr Peig was in charge of the Souza-Figueiredo trade name – the Comillas of Portugal – that encompassed a lot of companies. A member of the entourage of Sr Peig introduced me to the Barcelona architect, Sr Ferrés, an excellent individual, tireless worker and highly productive man. Sr Ferrés had already built the Hotel Palace in Madrid, and was giving the final touches to the main buildings in Estoril. Estoril was the first place of any size and quality to be built for tourists on the Peninsula. Sr Ferrés had constructed hotels, a splendid, sumptuous casino, a spa, a large theater, gardens, tennis courts, golf courses, etc. around thermal springs and on the landscape of haughty pines and lofty palm trees to make the most of the sloping plain on the side of Estoril that overlooked the river estuary. It was an ideal spot and looked to have a great future.
Estoril is on the road from Lisbon that goes to Cascais, namely the road that follows the right bank of the river – a word that is quite inappropriate because the river here is a huge estuary that seems completely still except when it rises and ebbs with the tide. It makes for twenty kilometers of magnificent roadway between villas and gardens, pine groves and slender palms. It is especially delightful on sunny days in autumn and winter when a warm breeze blows and a harmless bank of white cloud fills the limpid sky. A voluptuous feel to the air makes life really pleasant. Sunsets over the estuary, river sandbar, and Atlantic are splendid and diverse. Sunsets over the sea usually have a magnificent quality that is hard to find in those over land. That’s why the tramonti in Rome over the Mediterranean and sunsets over the Portuguese Atlantic are so renowned.
On days when the dark, shadowy sea seems ready to pounce on Portugal as if desperate to devour it, the spectacle isn’t so polished. The palm trees shiver with cold. The pine trees act up.
Indeed, I think the pines add greatly to Estoril’s elegance, as least as much as the Gulf Stream temperatures, sulfurous spa waters, sunsets, and pleasures of roulette. They are tall, wild pines with a natural svelte charm. They don’t create a thick mesh of foliage, but high patches of green, a fresh bright green interspersed with red roofs, glaring white-washed walls that on heavy, damp days have the quality of milk sprinkled with cinnamon powder, and the flowers carpeting the land are a lively, elegant presence. The small picturesque fishing port in the estuary by the side of modern Estoril has quickly adapted to the amenities brought by tourist life. Its inhabitants are welcoming and likeable, courteous and understanding; they required few lessons in how to smile when it’s good for business, and although they remain Atlantic fishermen, their fate will be that of the fishermen in Cannes and Nice: to work as hairdressers or waiters or give baths to boys and girls from good families.
So I decided to go and live near Estoril. Before you reach this sophisticated, expanding town, you come to a boarding house with a prestigious reputation. I rented a room there. It had views over the estuary and was surrounded by pots of geraniums. The river passed by the front of the establishment, as did the train and the road, the road to Cascais that is really the road to Sintra. There is in fact a novel by Eça de Queiroz that is called The Mystery on the Road to Sintra. Places that come with a literary halo seem so much prettier.
My bedroom window opened onto a splendid vista. The extensive estuary had no current, and was dead still. All the boats going to and from Lisbon sailed through its waters – from large transatlantic liners to slender schooners and river lighters, with square sales the color of pumpkin or nicotine. It was a continuous spectacle that lasted night and day. On the other side lay a very low, treeless, interminable, toast-colored plain. The river breeze sometimes carried the hubbub from Lisbon to the east; the city was invisible, but you could see its glow: by day, a gray murk and by night, a greenish pink. To the west were views of the sandbar and beyond that the Atlantic Ocean.
Sunsets died opposite my window. The still waters could be orange, the color of new wine, or often a purple hue that was far too ghostly and literary. The sky could be draped in a mass of rich red, a sumptuous curtain, as in Pincio’s gardens.
I found the boarding house to be very comfortable. In the afternoon I’d go for a long stroll and end up in Estoril. I’d converse at length with Ferrés the architect and his partners. Nightfall would often catch us under the pine trees, talking, listening to the crickets, and smoking cigarettes. In bad weather, we’d drink our aperitifs at the casino. It was a very crowded spot and, though only just inaugurated, it was already a legend. Prone to outbursts of patriotism, the Portuguese were extremely proud of it. Eccentric characters abounded. A cosmopolitan atmosphere was beginning to gather over Estoril.
Perfect order reigned in the boarding house. It was very quiet. There were two Scandinavians who worked for export companies in Lisbon, a nice English couple, a Swiss bank clerk, and two or three Portuguese. The Portuguese were, of course, very keen on politics and that meant I avoided them. Nevertheless, one, by the name of Pacheco, became a really good friend. He was definitely a conspirator – of the center-left variety – but he seemed to be in no rush to convert anyone. One day he admitted to me, very sotto voce, that what he most feared was his own party’s victory.
Pacheco had been living in the house for years and seemed to have free run of the place – to the extent that free run was possible there, which wasn’t great. By talking to him – he was idle as I was – I found things out about the boarding house.
It belonged to a Sra Souza who lived far away, in a city in northern Portugal, where she led a nondescript existence. Her marriage to Sr Souza, a rich property owner, had been a disaster. She was an affluent provincial lady, of the house-loving, naïve variety. Her husband seemed fine on the surface, but was in the grip of a passion for gambling. After three or four years of marriage Sra Souza realized her husband was on the point of losing his own wealth and was about to start on her own. Her indignation didn’t lead to loud outbursts. It was a cold rage. No arguments or attempts to reach an agreement could shift her. The marriage was ended and husband and wife lost sight of each other. Sra Souza managed to save the best part of her fortune. Maria, the couple’s daughter, a child at the time of their separation, was brought up by her mother according to the strictest principles.
Several years passed, during which Sra Souza’s income was drastically reduced. Meanwhile Srta Souza grew up, was full of life and seemed fascinated by life’s ways. Above all she found provincial life too sleepy and dull. When she was nineteen, seeing her mother’s financial worries – the Portuguese currency had lost most of its purchasing power as a result of all those revolutions – she suggested setting up a boarding house in Lisbon so she could earn a living. Her usual frosty self, the old lady agreed without comment. She’d have preferred her daughter to make a typical provincial marriage: an exemplary civil servant, ten year’s her daughter’s senior, who’d be on the wane, insipid, and about to wither away. Maria refused point-blank and established their boarding house on the outskirts of Lisbon on the road to Estoril. When they did so, above all they had in mind a summer income. Building developments in Estoril ensured it was permanent.
For the first few months Sra Souza helped her daughter run the boarding house. The truth is she had to teach her very little. The young woman turned out to be active, lively, indeed the perfect mistress of the house. The old lady returned to the provinces convinced the business couldn’t be in better hands. As she gradually turned drowsier and danker in the rainy provincial city in the north of the country, she felt secretly envious of her daughter’s strength and energy.
When I met her, Maria Souza was a pleasant, delightful woman. She was an extraordinarily fine brunette, with large ecstatic pale gray-blue eyes, moist lips, and pink luminous skin. She was tall and buxom. However, what most surprised me about that woman was the absolutely natural way she spoke and walked. Belonging to a country where so many women shout, scream, speak through their noses, continually act up, grumble, make absurd lip movements when they
talk, huff and puff, who in the course of a conversation pass from languid mindlessness to hysterical clowning, a woman who behaves naturally is a real find and makes an astonishing impression. Maria Souza was one such woman. She was a woman many men dream of in these latitudes: pleasant but not saccharine, easy-going, ever good-tempered, never trite or affected and always rather distant – even in her most intimate moments.
She managed the boarding house. She saw to the accounts, gave the orders, was in charge. She did it well, succinctly, with great common sense. She did what she could for everyone without making a fuss. She always had an appropriate smile at the ready for her boarders. A lovely collection of smiles! We all became rather childish in her presence and frankly fell languishingly in love with her.
“This young lady could perfectly well raise her prices and not meet a single objection …” I told my friend Pacheco one day, in a lucid moment.
“If she did so, she’d be in her right!” declared Pacheco firmly, his knightly eyes gleaming tenderly.
Pacheco was the boarder who was most sensitive to the young woman’s presence. And that was only natural.
In any case, there was a strange atmosphere in that house, an atmosphere I’d rarely experienced. Boarding houses with a clientele from different countries are cold places. It’s self-evident – and, moreover, understandable. In these temporary households comprising people from such diverse backgrounds and unknown provenance, conversation never breaks through the routine masks people put on. In this house a special sort of coldness existed that was linked to the presence of Maria Souza. She permanently lived in that atmosphere. Yes. She was agreeable, pleasant, most affable, but at the same time was incredibly distant, distinctly remote from her physical presence, mentally and physically separate from her environment: one always felt in the presence of someone who was a complete stranger. She seemed to be a woman obsessed by her own inner life that was totally unknown and secret, at least as far as I was concerned. At times she seemed to be afraid something might happen at any moment, something she clearly dreaded. It was easy to see. You noted her moments of amnesia in the tiniest detail. It was very apparent in conversation. Srta Souza was present, but wasn’t present. Her face sometimes seemed to betray the effort she was being forced to make to shed an abiding obsession and return to the present. It was a huge, very painful effort.
One day Pacheco sidled stealthily over and said, half worried, half astonished, “Sr Souza was here this afternoon …”
“Sr Souza? Who might that be?”
“It’s her father, you know?”
“So what …?”
“His daughter refused to see him. It was all in vain. The wretched man twisted and turned, wept, wrung his hands, and said he was hungry. He was a pitiful sight …”
“What about the young lady?”
“She was most upset. I suspect we won’t be seeing her for a few days.”
In effect three days went by and the young lady didn’t put in an appearance. At dusk on the third day Sr Souza came back. I saw him climbing the garden steps. I looked at him hard. He was tall, stout, and weary, with a salt-and-pepper beard, and large, bulging, olive-colored eyes that were bloodshot and watery. As he started up the steps, he took his hat off and exposed a substantial, pallid baldpate. He struggled up the steps. A metabolism in decline. His manner of dress particularly struck me. He wore a jacket and pants that were too short all round – charitable goods. He wasn’t wearing a waistcoat. A big white shirt fell over his paunch, but it was off-white, a white that had aged. He wore a celluloid collar and tattered tie. His leather sandals were a faded yellow. He walked as if he was afraid of putting his feet on the ground, as if he had grains of sand under the soles of his feet. It is a well-known fact that gamblers have sensitive feet; even so, that man’s way of walking was strangely unnerving. When he reached the boarding house landing he put on a battered bowler that he tilted over one ear, leaving a sliver of baldpate exposed. The moment he disappeared, my thoughts drifted back to his face: the texture of his face was that of a rotting peach, mushy with dark blotches. A film of weariness gave his features a sardonic veneer.
He climbed up to his daughter’s private rooms on the second floor. He wasn’t there for very long: the time necessary to see that the door was locked. We soon saw him come down head bare, his bowler in his left hand and a handkerchief of a nondescript color in the other that he was using to wipe his face. He forced a smile as he walked through the door flashing green, yellowing teeth and with a furrow between his forehead and nose that was the legacy of twenty years unctuously sacrificed to roulette and happenstance. He attempted a cynical smile but it came out as the scowl of a man who is miserably poor.
He confronted the concierge on the ground floor.
“It must very sad being a concierge …” said Sr Souza, winking at him like a fool.
“Being a concierge must be very sad, but finding oneself in the situation of the father of the owner of this establishment must be even more so.”
The concierge yanked him by the arm to the road. When they reached it, Sr Souza looked wanly at the house he’d just left and walked off in the direction of Estoril, despondently, walking in that manner I found so distressing – as if he was frightened to put his feet on the ground …
The opening of the casino in Estoril attracted a good number of individuals living on the fringes of society. Sr Souza was one of them. He’d not lived in Lisbon for many years. His situation had marooned him in various provincial dives. Nevertheless, roulette retains an implacable, fascinating appeal for people driven by a passion for gambling.
The management of the enterprise took the necessary natural steps against this undesirable invasion. Entry to the gaming rooms was denied to most of these people. Sr Souza was one of the first to be denied entry. That annoyed him, of course, and he made every effort imaginable to get the ban revoked. But it never came to anything. You bumped into him idling in the vicinity of the casino looking downcast in defeat.
Sr Souza’s visits to the boarding house led to predictable, unpleasant outcomes. His daughter became more invisible by the day and whenever she did appear she seemed anxious despite her only too obvious efforts to hide the fact. The management of the household suffered and a hint of disorder entered its daily routines. Sr Pacheco was possibly the individual who showed most interest in developments. He even meddled. One of the first things he tried to do was to contact Sr Souza in the hope – I imagined – of finding some solution or other. You wouldn’t have expected Sr Pacheco to react differently, given his deep admiration for the daughter of that human shipwreck.
It wasn’t easy for him. One evening I bumped into them sitting at a table at the back of a small café in the fishermen’s district in Estoril. Pacheco beckoned to me and I went over. Sr Souza shook my hand without getting up from his chair. I gathered that the relationship between the two men had gone beyond polite niceties and they had embarked on a real heart-to-heart. It even seemed that Souza was in some way grateful to Pacheco and felt a degree of respect for him.
“Sr Pacheco, sir,” Souza said after I’d sat down at their table, “you ask me the strangest of questions. This gentleman will understand straightaway … Yes, of course, I too have often asked myself the same question. Why are there men and women who are so incredibly obsessed by a passion for gambling? Come to think of it, though, it’s rather a childish question. Gambling is obsessive precisely because it is a passion. What sense does it make to speak rationally about movements that are instinctive? None at all, in my opinion. In any case, I’d like to attempt to explain, even if only tentatively, this obsession for gambling. From the outside, looking at things on the surface, it seems that the root of this passion for gambling must be a desire to win money … There is, of course, something in that. Money never does any harm … However, that would only be the right explanation if gamblers acted as bankers and the bank was open. In that case, it would be an excellent business prospect. If they hadn’t banne
d me from entering this casino, I could have immediately shown that was the case. You’d have seen it straightaway … But the fact is that at a baccarat table, in any game with a bank, the gambler is face-to-face with the banker, and consequently, his prospects are practically non-existent … That’s where the problem starts.”
An empty cup of coffee and breadcrumbs lay in front of Sr Souza. Pacheco begged him to order something else. Souza reacted blankly. He was too preoccupied by his confession.
“I was saying,” he went on, “that the problem begins when we have the spectacle of a man who knows only too well that he is going to lose and yet there is no way he can extricate himself from the very mechanisms that will bring his ruin. This is the psychological mystery – if you’ll allow me to put it that way – behind the gambler, the enigma a gambler poses as a human type. Many have attempted to find an explanation. It has been said, for example, that the cause of the obsession, of the fascination the passion provokes, is located in vanity, in an uncontrollable desire for fame. I’ve heard it said that if gamblers wore masks over their faces and went completely incognito to lay their bets, they’d prefer to spend their time doing other things. The suggestion is that a gambler at a gaming table performs and thus satisfies a natural human tendency to be vain and frivolous. Such tendencies satisfy the human metabolism, prompt feelings of pleasure. In a gaming room, a gambler has an audience before which he affirms his own existence. ‘I also exist!’ he seems to say when he lays a bet, when he wins or loses. Now, I’m not implying that this kind of person doesn’t exist, but I think they are slightly out of fashion. This is the gambler one finds in romantic novels, the happy-go-lucky rake, the appealing, headstrong fool and love object of naïve young women. Bah! Real life is more complex. Please let’s be serious …”